Well, true to my word, I did indeed take things slowly this morning. I took Em to school still in my jammies - big mistake, because she's got her learner's permit now and wanted to drive, so I actually had to get out of the car when she got to school. But then again, my jammies are really sweatpants and a fleece shirt, so it's not like it was obvious.

I came back home and crawled back into bed. I didn't get a whole lot more sleep - just about an hour - but it made a difference. And I spent a long time sitting in the sunroom, drinking coffee. I did think wistfully back to the UM-D days, when I had at least two entire days a week to wake up slowly . . . but alas. I never did want to do research very much and I'm making more money now, so there it is.

My happy discovery for the day was that there's a chance we won't have to assign a "reader" (for you non-Yanks: a textbook with articles culled from various sources and usually organized thematically) in the FY writing class next semester. I would be ecstatic if this were the case. My usual modus operandi is to create a process whereby the students find the readings - everything goes MUCH better when that happens. They start out more invested in what they're doing, for one thing, and for another, their use of outside sources for their papers is much more natural. Not to mention that the whole issue of what sources you can trust takes up waaaa-aaaaay more time to cover than we usually have if "outside sources" are tacked on to the course instead of the meat and salad (low-carb version of old saw) of it.

That's a wonderfully complicated issue, and it's getting more complex by the moment, I note gleefully. My class had a library orientation today with a fairly "old school" librarian, who wanted students to search for information on hybrid cars . . . she wanted to make the point that the refereed sources available in the library were much better than what you can find on the open web . . . but she couldn't make it, because the students found really high-quality information using Google. And increasingly, there are times when information is just positively moldy by the time it hits print, as in the case of the Kryptonite U-Lock debacle. (I saw that video from a link posted to one of my bike forums at least five days before the NY Times picked it up, and six or seven before Kryptonite issued the recall.) Or there's the whole controversy about whether Bush was wired during the first debate.

I have to say, a large part of my enjoyment of this sea change has to do with the fact that I think of academic publishers as complete Fat Cats. My students pay $50 for the reader I assigned. There's no way they're getting their money's worth; they'll sell the book back for a quarter of that, and it'll be sold used for 3/4 the original price. And even academic articles are atrociously expensive - I remember in the early 90s when someone (was it Russ?) reported that he was asked for a copy of an article he'd written (it was published in a National Council of Teachers of English journal), but of course he didn't hold the copyright, the journal did - and a copy of the article would cost $60 in copyright permissions if it were included in a course pack. Or, there's the fact that people who publish in the sciences are routinely charged subvention fees in the thousands of dollars, and asked to assume the costs of color reproduction of figures and illustrations. To my mind, this is travesty. This is scandal. The people who do the work don't see any of that money; and the people who do the work, hired as they are by institutions of higher learning (whose purpose ought to be to increase everyone's knowledge) ought to be in a position to give it away for free, since their jobs pay them a livable salary.

So I would be inordinately happy if academic publishers dried up and blew away, and the sooner the better, in my view. Any little action I can take to hasten the day is well worth it, in my view.

Well, that was quite a soapbox tirade! So good to be back on it again!! :)