multicast

The IFT/AFT Local 6300 AFL-CIO is on strike as of 8:00 a.m.  Picket lines run 8-5 today.  The union voted 92% yes for a strike.  Visit a strike coordinator in the University YMCA to find out where to go.

The Campus Faculty Association stands in support of the GEO.  The CFA has asked faculty to cancel classes and not to cross picket lines.  Faculty “We Support the GEO” picket signs are available at the picket lines.

Catherine Predergast (Professor of English) has this to say about the situation:

As it stands, TAs in many departments here are already drastically underpaid compared with what other schools in the CIC offer.  For example, one course in freshman composition is calculated to consume 17 hours of a TAs time per week at the University of Wisconsin. At the University of Illinois, that same course, which I direct, is only calculated to consume 13 hours. The real losers here are our undergraduate students. Why should they accept four hours less per week of instructional time than they would get at Wisconsin? If the University were to tinker with tuition waivers, whether in-state, or out-of-state, thus even further down-grading its support to graduate students, you might as well rename this  East Central University of Illinois, so shattering would be the consequence to the UofI’s R1 status. I think the GEO’s version of the language on tuition waivers is by far clearer than what the university has proposed, and should be accepted.   Please invest in this university:  Approve the GEO contract.

Many graduate students receive free tuition (called a tuition waiver) as part of their compensation.  This strike comes about after the administration failed to guarantee the security of these waivers in the future.  TAs rightfully have the jitters on that topic: rumors have been circulating about an impending overhaul in the tuition waiver system.  Undergraduate TAs in Chemistry recently had their teaching waivers revoked as a cost saving measure.  (One of them is our babysitter.)

EO facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/GEO/171984109397

You can help!  Phone numbers and script for calls for support:
http://funferal.org/blog/2009/11/15/geo-strikes-and-seeks-help-from-you/

Longer blog post summarizing the situation and the strike:
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/the_education_of_oronte_churm/strike_at_illinois (This post also points out that the last time Grad Students were on strike the results were disastrous for adjunct faculty on our campus.)

For the class “Communication Technology and Society” I asked some of my students to drive to Illinois Amish country (about 40 minutes) and investigate communication technology among the Amish there.  All sorts of gripping things have been written about the Amish and communication technology (like Howard Rheingold’s short thing a few years back Look Who’s Talking about Amish cell phone users).

Interestingly, if you want to contact the Amish in my area you can call 1-800-45-AMISH.  Note that I did assignment with the full cooperation of the Amish hosts.

Here’s an Amish telephone box.  They historically didn’t allow landline phones in their house (low-tech) but check out that awesome solar panel (high-tech).

My students learned facts:  the telephone was adopted in Arcola, Illinois in 1994.  Lots of facts.  Students took some very creative approaches to their questions, too.  One tried to figure out how the Amish in Arcola figured out about the 9/11 attacks without direct access to the media.  (It took them about 1 day to hear the news via word-of-mouth).

One student asked a lot of questions about rumspringa and I gather this really pissed off his host.

They also uncovered some Amish technofetishists.  They found a really tricked out horse-drawn carriage.  Instead of Tuner Cars or Low Riders I guess you could call them Hay Rockets? (groan. sorry.)  This WSJ article reports dark-velvet lined carriages equipped with showy LED lights tooling through rural Pennsylvania, so maybe this is not so unusual.

The best part of the assignment for me, though, was the student writing about awkward conversations and the feelings that this encounter provoked.  It was a very popular assignment but in the description there was a lot of fascination, shame and embarassment. One student wrote that she desperately wanted to ask her Amish host questions about which celebrities she knew but became paralyzingly embarrassed and could not do so. It wasn’t, I think, that the students saw the Amish as deprived or pitiful.  Not at all!  If anything they were very impressed.  I think what embarassed them were the incredible efforts that the Amish have taken to organize their lives around ideas that they thought were important.  Most college students don’t have something quite so forceful to work with or push against.  Maybe they should.

Here is the assignment I wrote.  Here’s a nice response: You Can’t Even Imagine the Evil Things That Are Done With Cell Phones.