Well, *that* was a long and pedagogically interesting day!

After a weekend spent mostly inside and under the weather, with my car in the shop (due, it must be said, to a bad distributor, and apparently not to a computer…), I lugged myself to campus today, where I taught rhet, and then conferenced with my fiction students all afternoon.  So I’m predictably exhausted, and I’m quite sure that my final few students were inwardly gaping in horror at the ill-considered and misformed sentences that plopped from my mouth in the late afternoon.

In any case however, these conferences were still pretty great, due to a slacktivist accident.  I’d wanted to return their papers to them a few days ago, in accordance with the usual rule of thumb that you should hand back papers and give students a “cooling down” period before discussing their work with them.  But my slowness in grading these led me to return them today, in conferences, where my students had come to discuss their *next* paper.  Maybe I’m just strange, but I *loved* this returning papers in conference thing.  It was really great.  Grading bad papers always nearly kills me.  One feels (I feel, anyhow…) as if the badness of the paper is assaulting me in some way.  It bewilders me.  I wonder what kind of person could produce an artifact of such badness.  And I then returns papers with a sense of guilt and bad faith for having had those feelings, and for writing disingenuously mild (or, rarely, sort of nasty) remarks on the things I’ve graded. 

But with the author *there,* one can talk the paper over, and usually find all sorts of very good ideas that just didn’t find expression.  Or the person acknowledges that they just threw the thing together.  One can feel so much better about assigning a grade to and commenting on a paper, if it can be returned and discussed right away, face-to-face.  One student complained about a (generous) A-, but pretty much all the other interactions were better than I’d expected.   

Additionally…

I wait in great anticipation for some cable tv person to come to my house tomorrow to install cable broadband.  Insight now lets you buy cable broadband for just $44/mo., and does not require you to buy even basic cable television.  This, plus their new 256k upstream data rate, means that it will be a good move to get broadband, and add a voip phone service for $20/mo.  Thus I’ll get broadband data *and* phone service for less than my old phone bill, and I’ll escape the fees I often accumulate when I exceed the alloted hours The University rations to dial-up users.  And I’ll get to catch all the phone calls I usually miss while on-line.  It’s a sweet forking-type move I’m glad to have spotted.

Most importantly I’ll have cable-modem access to EEBO, the only really notable technological achievement of the last 30 years.  Who would not be giddy with expectation?

Anyhow, we’ll see how it works out.  Insight Cable will install tomorrow between 1-5, and once it’s up, I’ll be contacting Lingo, which is an upstart crow of a voip company, but unlike Vonage it offers numbers in the 217 area code, and unlike Packet8, it doesn’t require 11-number dialing, or charge a $59 disconnect fee.  I’ll then have unlimited phone time to anyone in the US for $20/mo, and virtually free connections everywhere else.  If the sound quality is ok (yes, this is a big if)  and Insight’s cable connection doesn’t constantly cut-out on me, this should be a neat deal. 

If voip turns out to be problematic, I may have to give in and join the cellphone wielding multitudes.  But I’ll resist this if possible, to save cash, and to keep my phone on my end table where God put the thing in the first place.

A further note: I see that you can now get wifi phones that work via voice over ip.  So, if you go to a coffee shop or library, you can talk over wifi for free, with no cellular plan.  Or, if you are lucky enough to live in certain futuristic utopias, you could buy one of these things and have a non-cellular mobile connection all around town, without paying any fees to a cellular company for the minutes used.

It’s all quite interesting — and it makes you wonder why you’d even need a telephone company, once you have a broadband connection.  If you are willing to do without a traditional phone number, it turns out, you probably don’t.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2004 at 7:45 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.