Employee Free Choice Act 1, Walmart 0

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Wal-Mart’s worries center on a piece of legislation known as the Employee Free Choice Act, which companies say would enable unions to quickly add millions of new members. “We believe EFCA is a bad bill and we have been on record as opposing it for some time,” Mr. Tovar said. “We feel educating our associates about the bill is the right thing to do.”

Other companies and groups are also making a case against the legislation to workers. Laundry company Cintas Corp., which has been fighting a multiyear organizing campaign by Unite Here, relaunched a Web site July 14 called CintasVotes. The site instructs visitors to take action by telling members of Congress to oppose the legislation.

Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win – WSJ.com

It sounds bad, but this is actually very good news, in that it indicates that our corporate pals, who do read the fine print, seem certain that the Employee Free Choice Act will pass very soon in an Obama administration. Among other things, the EFCA would put some teeth in the protections for unionizing workers and greatly simplify the union ratification process.

A quick search on the act yields links to every right-wing site Orwellian mishmash on the web; another good sign for the efficacy of the bill. The AFL-CIO site is the best place to vaccinate yourself with the facts and the basic ideas before you take a dip in la la land.

The reason for all of this below-the-radar fuss is that if the obstacles to union membership were reduced, there might be a huge swell in organizing. One Gallup poll done a few years ago suggested that 58% of Americans would join a union if they could. That would be change well beyond Obama.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Union, Writing

You’re Never Alone in Second Life

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A glimpse into the world of the N-Gen’s texts seems to indicate that these learners have grown up doing the very things that traditional pedagogy discourages. When viewed in this context, the N-Gen student may appear deficient, lacking the skills necessary to succeed in the academic world. Texts that do not look like books or essays and that are structured in unfamiliar ways may leave educators with the perception that the authors of these texts lack necessary literacy skills. Are these students missing something, or are they coming to us with skills as researchers, readers, writers, and critical thinkers that have been developed in a context that faculty members may not understand and appreciate? The striking differences between the linear, print-based texts of instructors and the interactive, fluctuating, hyperlinked texts of the N-Gen student may keep instructors from fully appreciating the thought processes behind these texts. Learning how to teach the wired student requires a two-pronged effort: to understand how N-Gen student understand and process texts and to create a pedagogy that leverages the learning skills of this type of learner.

Innovate: Why Professor Johnny Can’t Read: Understanding the Net Generation’s Texts -Mark Mabrito and Rebecca Medley, Innovate, August/September, 2008.

This is one of those solid, common-sense articles that appear now and again, reminding teachers that their students are different and pedagogy must adapt, etc. It’s probably more true at this moment in history– given the flood of technological change– than it’s been since the 1960s.

It’s a helpful reminder, especially for those teachers who continue to bemoan the ill effects of the computer on writing, or who resist it’s introduction into the classroom. On the other hand, all of the efforts to teach to the “first generation of kids raised on television” did not really come to much.

It seems reasonable, then, to be skeptical, at least until the economics behind these phenomena play themselves out a bit longer. Right now it seems faddish at best when schools set up Second Life campuses; maybe in a decade or more it will seem evolutionary.

What I look for, too, is some sense that the teachers are pushing back against the market in a productive way. This article has little of that, I’m afraid. The market wants constant change, movement, obsolescence; we need to offer contemplation, reflection, even solitude.

I’m not sure how we go about doing that, given that the culture of education seems so polarized between a kind of willful anarchism and a willy-nilly embrace of each and every new product that comes along. My guess is that good sense is out there somewhere, uncelebrated but productive.

Posted in: Language, Online Places, Professional, Writing

The Dream of (Canadian) Centralization

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A Gartner analyst thinks Canada’s natural resources and cooler temperature can help it take advantage of the growing cloud computing trend to provide services and Web applications.

The country has an estimated server installed base of more than one million units, and in the next five years, the market will demonstrate incremental growth typical of a mature market, said Jeffrey Hewitt, vice-president of research with Stamford, Conneticut-based Gartner Inc.

“But is there a way in Canada for that to be boosted beyond that standard incremental projection?” asked Hewitt.

He thinks the country’s years of investment in hydro electric power facilities and ambient temperatures will enable data centres to be powered and subsequently cooled. And, he said, the concerns around power and cooling are only getting bigger as Web content grows with video sharing sites like YouTube. Therefore, the country can take its hydro electric infrastructure to “another level” and extend it to the Web, said Hewitt.

Canada primed for cloud computing: Gartner | The Industry Standard, Kathleen Lau, ComputerWorld Canada.

I used to work at a school that dreamed the dream of centralization and not surprisingly, it was a disaster. This dream is a variant of the automated factory dream; the idea that one day we can get rid of all of those pesky, complaining, expensive workers.

I’m no Luddite. This dream has to do with the idea of a pure profit, divorced from human labor, not with technology. Technology is simply the dominant strategy of the dream in our time. In universities, the dream is as strong as anywhere else, maybe stronger.

Imagine a school without teachers and their pesky unions! Actually, though, the dream as I experienced it had to do with the expense of support people. We had a nightmare of a classroom computer system that needed to be updated. That was clear.

It was also clear that the reason the system was a nightmare was that there was not enough support personnel. Somehow, someone heard about “thin clients”– computers that were, in effect, nothing but a monitor and a box with some flash memory. The software lives on a central server.

It sounds so great. Obviously, the real problem isn’t a lack of support personnel, it’s those wacky students and teachers who keep messing up the system. The “thin clients” made sure that no one could change anything important. It made support almost unnecessary!

The dream was, of course, utterly wrong. In fact the new system was even more of a nightmare than the old, outdated computers. If one thing went wrong somewhere on the network, none of the computers would work. Another dream come true.

The idea of putting the servers in cold places is a good one, but I think it’s also important to think very carefully about cloud computing as the latest instance of the dream of centralization. It’s fine to put all our You-Tube videos in the same place. I’m not sure the same holds true for much else.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Composition, Economics, Professional, Union, Writing