I spend a lot of time reading and posting (on Twitter and elsewhere) about the politics of the Internet, particularly issues regarding online speech and the open architecture of the web. I am vocal about my positions on many “offline” political matters as well, and try to back them up with action, but there’s something about advocating for the web that feels more communal, more urgent, and maybe ultimately, more effective. I don’t mean this in the illusory quasi-utopian sense put forward by techno-activists in the early days of the web (not that the days aren’t still early), but rather in the very concrete sense that the web’s history, technology and body of stakeholders are unusually harmonious.

Everyone has something at stake

One important (and practically cliche) characteristic of the Internet, as it has evolved in recent years, is that regular users have increasingly become content producers. They have a real ownership stake in the way the web works and the rules that govern it. Linking, sharing, quoting and remixing are fundamental to the web, but also fraught with legalities (legitimate and otherwise), which is why things like CreativeCommons and EFF have sprung up from within the industry to bring some order and balance to online copyright, while preserving and promoting the existing culture of openness. While citizens in “real life” (or whatever), through years of being beaten down, ignored, and propagandized, may be prone to letting harmful and irrational legislation pass unchallenged, those of us who create content on the web frequently respond to power-grabs, injustices and legislative threats with an immediacy that is uncommon offline. This perhaps reflects the “right now” nature of the network. But I think this immediacy is also related to the fact that many of us understand just how fragile the web actually is (technically, legally and culturally), and how easily it could be fundamentally changed or even destroyed by the rash actions of the ill-informed and/or ill-intentioned.

Internet Enforcers

While there is ample room for debate and disagreement over tactics and ethics, I find in web protests like those of Anonymous or the Reddit-led mobbing of Cook’s Source an undeniably populist and democratic spirit. Many -  notably the music and film industries – have complained that the Internet generation has an outgrown sense of entitlement. There may be some truth to that, especially when it comes to pirated content, but all in all, the web’s “power users” have also displayed a very sharp sense of justice, an affinity for the theater of public relations, and a knack for rapid coordination. Imagine the world we might live in were offline political organizing so fast and effective. (There is, of course, the obvious dynamic of anonymity at play here, which is not to be discounted. But one could argue that is equally the case for any sufficiently large protest, on the web or on the street. Anonymity is what makes the mob a mob, and mobs can be blamed for acts of brutality as readily as they can be credited for acts of liberation.)

“Go web young man!” (groan)

While it’s beyond ridiculous to call the web “the wild west” or the “cyber-frontier” or whatever the hell people say or used to say with that newscaster-y blend of vague understanding and condescending doom, it’s still an apt metaphor (or at least one that’s good enough to indulge for the next few sentences).  The web really has always been about opportunity, possibility,  growth, and a great push into the unknown. As with the westward expansion of 19th century America, the web has seen it’s share of gold rushes (real and hysterical), fortunes made and lost, an array of ever-shifting economies, and an embrace of the classically-liberal capitalist ideal that markets (in the modern case: investors, developers, and users) will decide the natural order of things, distant legislators be damned. (Of course, laissez-faire societies are rife with all forms of collateral damage. Perhaps we should begin to regard the 20th century version of the music industry as the wild buffalo of the digital age.) As the colossus crawls west, possibilities emerge for the young and recede for the old. In this dead horse of a metaphor, the web is both the prairie and the railroad, the developers are the prospectors, and users the settlers (California is basically still California). The danger and the promise are one: only the real frontiersmen know how to get things done out in this wilderness of ones and zeros, and yet our so-called statesmen have failed to even commission themselves a Lewis and Clark (to clarify, I’m talking about this horse shit).

Industry is on our side for once

The web/tech industry is historically rooted in openness and decentralization. Reading up on the history of the Internet and the web (see for example Johnny Ryan’s History of the Internet and the Digital Future or James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood), you will see a recurrence of geeks (boy, am I tiring of that word lately) pushing back against authority, circumventing military protocol, skirting institutional bureaucracies, and escaping co-optation. The web and its core of makers have always pushed toward the fluid and open, and against the staid and stable. In many tech companies, one can almost detect a sort of institutional joie de vivre. Not to overstate or even fully accept such an assertion (corporations being profit-oriented legal constructs and not actual moral/emotional beings), but it makes sense in light of the fact that these companies are made up overwhelmingly of people who do what they do for a living because they would otherwise be doing it for free. The industry and it’s constituent parts have a shared interest in keeping the web as open as it was when they walked in the front door, and as fluid as it was when they were first seduced by its possibility.

Old media operates on a culture that could not be more opposed to that of the web, which is why they and their frighteningly-effective lobbyists have been cast (rightly) as enemies of the open web. Where the web fosters openness and decentralization, old media culture is one of centralization, hegemonic control, and hair-trigger litigation. For the most part, this is the culture of corporate America as a whole, but even the giants of the tech industry have a stake in maintaining an open, fair and free Internet. On the most obvious level, legislation like SOPA and PIPA present a very real threat to the existing legal and technical foundations of the web, which is why web and tech companies, joining open web activists, have been waging a very public fight against them, even as politicians and old media outlets struggle (or perhaps refuse) to understand what’s actually being proposed. But perhaps less obvious to some is the longer term threat posed by such heavy-handed intervention. It’s not just that SOPA, PIPA, and the like threaten the web of today (curbing speech while propping up the decrepit media titans of yesteryear), it’s that it threatens the web of tomorrow, and a whole range of innovation and opportunities yet unknown. As such, open web activism has yielded an unlikely common interest that includes citizens of every type, free speech activists, software engineers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, lobbyists, universities and massive multinational corporations.

That’s quite an unusual alliance and frankly if we can’t make progress to protect the web with that constituency, then one has to wonder about the entire premise of representative democracy. But I’m hopeful that progress will be made in the coming years, and while attacks may continue, I don’t think the dynamic described above will change any time soon. As we look down the barrel of yet another absurd and borderline retarded election year, it just feels good to be hopeful about something.

These bills are scheduled to come to a final vote on January 24th, 2012. If you haven’t already (and maybe even if you have), visit americancensorship.org, fightforthefuture.org or EFF.org to learn more about SOPA/PIPA and how you can help stop their passage. I know it’s a drag but you should really consider calling your representatives in Congress. Using a telephone.

It’s worth noting at the outset that I don’t know anything about generating ContentDM export files (partially because even the ContentDM documentation is proprietary, or at least hidden behind a login). But I do know that every time someone has sent me a cDM export file, it is in tab-delimited format (UPDATE: here is the Tab-delimited export documentation), which is basically a plain text spreadsheet. I gather these spreadsheets can be produced pretty easily so I think we can start by assuming you already have the spreadsheet and need to prep it for import into Omeka, which will be done in this tutorial using the CSV Import plugin. If you are not already familiar with how that plugin works, check out the documentation page at Omeka.org before continuing.

You probably need to use Excel

First, open the tab-delimited spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. You will later save this file in CSV format. If you prefer using non-MS spreadsheet software, you are probably out of luck. As far as I know, neither OpenOffice/LibreOffice nor Apple’s Numbers have an equivalent ‘Text-to-Columns…’ functionality, which will be used in this process.

Remove unwanted and problematic rows/columns, Rename column headers

Once you have your spreadsheet open in Excel, go ahead and remove any ContentDM-specific administrative metadata, or anything else you don’t wish to carry over to Omeka during the migration. At this point, you should probably rename the column headings to something meaningful. This will help with the crosswalk step later.

Breaking out semicolon-delimited values

Next, you will want to check for columns having multiple entries within a single cell. At the very least, this will probably include the Subjects column (because archivists/librarians are never satisfied with assigning just one subject term… subject classification being the Lay’s potato chip of librarianship). By default, these multiple subjects will be separated by a semicolon (e.g. “Librarianship — Potato Chip Analogies; Librarianship — Puns; Librarianship — Personality Disorders;” ). Instead of copying each one of these entries into a new Subjects column, you can just use the “Data > Text to Columns…” feature in Excel. I recommend using a separate worksheet for this step as the new columns will overwrite your existing ones if you are not careful.

Getting the File Path URLs

So you’ve shaped up all the metadata on the spreadsheet. Now you need to define the path to the item file in ContentDM. This is probably the trickiest part to come up with on your own, especially if you are not so familiar with ContentDM. Basically, our starting point will be the cDM “Reference URL.” Those look something like this: http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/u?/press,59. Assuming you have a whole column of Reference URLs, you need to run a Find and Replace to create your file path (again, I recommend doing this in a separate worksheet so you don’t accidentally overwrite important data). Let’s begin.

UPDATE: in ContentDM version 6+, ShowFile is replaced by GetFile. Adjust the following instructions as needed (i.e. in the first Find and Replace, swap out showfile.exe with getfile.exe).

Start with something like:
http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/u?/press,59

FIND this:
u?/
… and REPLACE with this:
cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/

Next, FIND this:
,
…and REPLACE with:
&CISOPTR=

So now we have something that looks like:
http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/press&CISOPTR=59

This is a working file path that can be used by the CSV Import plugin to ingest the item file along with the metadata record.

In some instances, you might need to tweak this process. For example, if your ContentDM installation includes JP2 or TIF files (or some other unfriendly image format) but you don’t want the hassle of building a custom display wrapper into your Omeka theme, you can append some additional query string parameters to your file URL.

So if you want ContentDM to serve up a JPG instead of a JP2 (or other…) file, add this to your file column
&DMSCALE=100.00000&DMWIDTH=1600&DMHEIGHT=1600&DMX=0&DMY=0&DMTEXT=&REC=1&DMTHUMB=0&DMROTATE=0
…using this Excel function (where A2 is the first column/cell in need of appending):
=CONCATENATE(A2,"&DMSCALE=100.00000&DMWIDTH=1600&DMHEIGHT=1600&DMX=0&DMY=0&DMTEXT=&REC=1&DMTHUMB=0&DMROTATE=0")

Finally, you need to swap showfile with getimage in the file URL above by running one more find and replace in Excel.

So now, your file path looks like:
http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cgi-bin/getimage.exe?CISOROOT=/press&CISOPTR=59&DMSCALE=100.00000&DMWIDTH=1600&DMHEIGHT=1600&DMX=0&DMY=0&DMTEXT=&REC=1&DMTHUMB=0&DMROTATE=0

This will return a JPG file, which is pretty handy. These additional parameters will vary by installation and file type. I don’t know what all of the parameters are or even what each one does; only that this usually works. Again, this is a case where actual ContentDM documentation would be really handy. UPDATE: Keep in mind that this only works with image file types. For more details, check out the GetImage documentation.

Metadata Crosswalk

It’s usually a good idea to plan out your metadata crosswalk in advance, especially if you have multiple export files (and you should if your collection is bigger than a few hundred items; more on that later). Remember that Omeka – out of the box – only uses the first 15 Dublin Core elements. You may need to add a new Item Type or install Dublin Core Extended in order to find/create an appropriate home for your legacy/custom metadata in Omeka.

Batching

To avoid server timeouts, you should consider breaking your spreadsheets into manageable batches. I try not to import more than a few hundred items at a time, and even then one of the two servers involved is likely to timeout or throw an error or something. Keeping the batches small makes it easier to isolate problems, avoid import errors, and undo problematic imports.

Using the CSV Import Plugin

From here, just follow the standard instructions for using the CSV Import plugin.

Bugs, Known Issues, and Limitations

As of version 1.3, there are still some quirks. For example, your file path – that hideous long URL you worked so hard to create – will become the actual name of your imported/migrated file. In some instances, your files may be ingested sans file extension (e.g. .pdf, .jpg, .mp3), which can cause various headaches (though it’s worth noting that these files will generally display inline on your site, due to the way most Omeka themes handle media files, and will only break down when someone tries to download the file, in which case they would need to manually add the file extension). From time to time, you could have an import that hangs indefinitely, never finishing and never failing — and thus not easily “undo-able” (at least, the “Undo Import” button will not be visible). In such a case, you can manually create that button by entering the following URL pattern into your address bar:

http://[PATH TO YOUR OMEKA INSTALLATION]/admin/csv-import/index/undo-import/id/[IMPORT ID]

– this is on the plugin documentation page by the way, as are several other points in this tutorial.

One of the biggest limitations of the CSV import strategy is that you will probably have issues migrating compound objects and other multi-file items, primarily because of the way ContentDM formats the export file and serves compound objects online and partially due to limitations in the way the plugin works with Omeka. Basically, you need all the files for an item to be in the same row as all of the other item-level metadata (e.g. in columns like “File 1,” “File 2,” “File 3,” etc). And there is currently no way to use the CSV Import plugin to assign file-level metadata. For example, if you had a postcard in your ContentDM collection and it had distinct metadata for each side (say, for front.jpg and verso.jpg), along with general metadata for the object as whole, something is going to be lost in the migration without some serious elbow grease.

The Omeka Dev forums are the best place to report bugs, inquire about error messages, discuss workarounds, and submit patches. The general Omeka Forums are also great for more basic questions; happily, most questions get answered in fairly short order. Please do not post support questions here. Please do, however, feel free to leave general comments, suggestions for improvement, requests for clarification, etc.

IMAGE NOTE: poorly Photoshopped post image contains assets by multiple artists and designers, including the amazing “Bob” sketch from Matt Haley’s unreleased but totally awesome sounding Twin Peaks: Season 3 graphic novel.

Given that one of my primary occupational roles is providing tech support, I offer the following question in part as preemption in my own self-interest but also in the interest of exploring the scope of instruction in the digital humanities (or the “digital” anything for that matter): Should Your Syllabus Include a Note on Web Browsers? If you teach an online class or a class with a significant online component, the answer might be yes.

Whether you are using BlackBoard, a blog platform, or a “proper” CMS, if your course site is doing anything remotely interesting, one of your students is probably using a browser that is not up to the task.

I get questions all the time about browser-related issues and even when I do instructional sessions and warn against using certain old browsers, the questions still roll in. My first troubleshooting question is invariably “what browser are you using?” If the answer is Internet Explorer, that’s usually the last question, followed by many “informative” statements of (arguably) questionable relevance and utility. If nothing else, my mini-rants leave a student with — if not a full understanding of the problem — at least a sense that the “blue e” on their desktop is called a browser, that it’s used to “open the Internet,” and that there apparently are multiple options from which to choose. For many this is a revelation of no small impact.

While not the higher order stuff we (think we) should need to teach at a college level, understanding browsers can still be an opening to understanding lots of “entry level” issues in new media and web publishing. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more all rely on the surprisingly fragile ecosystem created by both the browser and the coder (even when the coder is a giant billion dollar company like Google, who themselves have given up on supporting old browser tech). If you plan to even broach the topic of web development and design, the browser is the natural place to start. Even if you just want your students to be able to use and evaluate web sources and digital projects, using an old browser is going to work against your sanity and their success.

Browsers are also an obvious choice for opening up discussions about open source technologies. Firefox, Chrome/Webkit, and Opera are great examples of a movement by which users have become creators/participants, and technology can — through small but scaled contributions — be bent to our will, rather than the other way around. If you are using Drupal, WordPress, Omeka or some other open source web publishing platform in your class, or if your students use open source desktop software like Audacity or GIMP, this is a natural connection. Open source is the key to so much recent innovation in education, academe and on the web more broadly, that if you don’t think being an open source advocate is part of your job, perhaps you should ask yourself why not.

Savvy students and instructors may intuitively understand that they can improve their online experiences by seeking out new approaches and alternatives when problems and questions arise, and that recency and novelty are actually important in technology, but this is by no means a norm in any non-tech sector of our culture. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you pretty much stick with what you do know — even if it sucks. I recently questioned a colleague for requiring that assignments be “prepared in MS Word”; if the end product is in the right format (.doc in their case), why require a specific software that comes with specific costs and benefits. Let students choose what software to use and note that there actually is a choice to be made (yes, OpenOffice, iWork, GoogleDocs, and more all export into Microsoft formats if desired), instead of hiding a broader question (what software to use) inside of an unnecessarily absolute decree (buy and use Word) that addresses a specific problem (students turning in papers in unreadable formats) but ignores the bigger context. This is not Microsoft hate (I like Office and, surprisingly, even Windows7), but a serious question about how we prepare students for careers that will invariably involve software and hardware choices (if not by them, than for them). So maybe your students won’t be designers, programmers, IT specialists, or whatever, but they will be consumers of technology and perhaps digital creators of another kind. Scholars and writers (not to mention managers, etc) still need to be versed in the basics of technology so they can understand the options at their disposal, the forces that shape their world, and the language with which to convey their needs and ideas (try asking an 80 year old to describe the usability and effectiveness of a piece of software or a website; these are learned skills). Connoisseurship has its utility.

Security is another issue that needs little description here. Basically, keeping your browser, your OS, and all of your other software updated will go a long way in preventing spyware, viruses and generally poor performance.

A “note on browsers” doesn’t directly address all of the issues above, but it’s potentially a start and it probably can’t hurt.

Even if you are not interested in any larger questions about digital literacy or open source advocacy, or it simply does not fall into the purview of your course, you still might want to include some kind of note on browsers, if only to reduce time spent troubleshooting and haggling with tech-averse students. So with that in mind, I offer the following:

Prefab “Note on Browsers”

This course requires extensive use of the Internet, including websites and other online resources that may require the use of a up-to-date, standards-compliant web browser. Web browsers are free to download and may be installed on any computer in a matter of minutes. Acceptable browsers include the most recent versions of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. To ensure that your browser is updated to the most recent version, open your browser and go to Tools >> Options (PC) or Help >> Check for Updates (Mac), or download the latest version of your browser choice at http://www.browserchoice.eu

A randomized list of browser choices:

www.browserchoice.eu
This is actually the same interface that is shown to new computer buyers in the EU, where it was decided that Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows was anti-competitive and potentially harmful to innovation.

IE6 No More

www.ie6nomore.com
A nice little script you can drop into the header of your site so that users of IE6 and IE7 will get a warning reading “For a better experience using this site, please upgrade to a modern web browser” with links to upgrade to the latest version of IE or download an alternative. Don’t forget to update the code when IE9 comes out in late 2010/early 2011 to be sure your students/users are taking advantage of Microsoft’s promise of greater support for existing and emerging HTML/CSS standards.

Browser-Update.org

www.browser-update.org
I haven’t used this script yet; it looks similar to IE6 No More but apparently checks for outdated versions of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. Billed as an “an initiative by web designers, webmasters and bloggers who want to bring the web further and help their visitors.”

NOTE: The images above are from the very awesome looking Harmonia Pastelis Icon Pack by Teekatas

My friend Joe, a newspaper editor, once said something to the effect of “It’s kind of crazy how all the punks end up doing such interesting and serious work outside of punk when they ‘grow up.’” Okay, he probably said something a lot better and more impactful than that because I remember the gist of it years later. For some reason this brief conversation has stuck with me. As I moved through undergrad and grad school and into the professional world, I have consistently noticed the phenomenon in action. The best students, the best teachers, the best writers, and the best researchers all seem to have this common background. I have seen it and confirmed it in many of my (more interesting) colleagues and it shows in the work of many others whom I’ve never met. It’s a certain flair for innovation, improvisation, and investigation; a proclivity for self-education and DIY solutions; a disdain for convention and privilege; and an eye for finding humor and absurdity in unexpected places.

3 Chords is All You Need (… at Least to Start)

Yep. The Ramones first album proved among other things that you only need to know three guitar chords to make great music. But like many other punk bands, the music matured over time, becoming more complex as the artists began to hone their skills and increase their repertoire. Sometimes the music got better, sometimes it got worse as a result. Even though I never was able to master even the requisite three chords to start my own band, the “anyone can do this” attitude that punk embodied has carried over into everything I do. Most everything one might pursue has those metaphorical three chords — the trick, as with the guitar, is figuring out what they are.

In digital humanities, those three chords might be HTML, CSS, and PHP. (Maybe others have a different idea. I’m focusing here on the digital part because the humanities part – the content – is understood. Afterall, if you don’t have something to say, you shouldn’t be starting a “band.”) The degree to which you need these “chords” will vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish, as well as on the tools you use and the people you work with. But generally speaking, these three will set you up to start web publishing, and also give you a solid base for understanding other more complex programming languages and projects.

So you find the chords, you master them. Then on to the next challenge… and the next. Before you know it, you’ll be soloing on your hand-built keytar as your self-produced album rockets to the top of the prog rock charts. Or not. Maybe you’ll just keep pounding away at those same chords and finding new ways to use them. But the point is that it’s alright to start small (and/or stay small).

DIY or Die!

It’s not just that you can do it yourself but that you should. To me, there is no such thing as a major label punk rock band (at least not after about 1980). Being punk has always been about doing it yourself – sometimes out of necessity, sometimes by preference, and occasionally as an anti-capitalist or anti-authoritarian gesture. If you do it yourself, you are free to do it however you want.

Thus far, a lot of the digital humanities projects I’ve seen are tied to institutional funding and labor, proprietary content and technology, and bound by copyright and contractual obligations. It’s not that these projects are bad. Many are great. And they often benefit especially from connections gained through these affiliations. They also employ people, which is good. It’s just that they can also become organizationally bloated, unwieldy, and tenuous as a result. This doesn’t mean you have to run your semantic search think tank from your mom’s garage (though, hell, why not?), it just means keeping hierarchies in check and making sure you don’t lose control of your project, or lose sight of your goals. It also means learning as you go; tinkering, experimenting, and failing are all important.

No Rights Reserved

DIY is not about individualism, it can also be about leaning on (and contributing to) like-minded communities. Open source technologies and Creative Commons licenses are totally punk rock. Open platforms (like WordPress, Drupal, Omeka, etc.) and software packages (Gimp, OpenOffice, FireFox) share their code, encourage non-proprietary standards, and are often developed and maintained by a community of users/contributors. If you want to use them, you can do so for free. If you want to study them, make them better or bend them to your own needs, you can usually do that too. Most open source projects operate under some kind of Creative Commons license.

But open content is also important. Humanities research requires the use of all kinds of content. Running up against unnecessary copyright restrictions can be not only frustrating but can actually bring projects to a halt – especially digital archival projects operating under the aegis of larger institutions; institutions that are understandably (though sometimes paranoically) wary of litigation. There are two (or maybe three) significant archival repositories in my neighborhood. One opens its content to all comers because they have defined themselves as an institution committed to education and community. They allow hands-on access, digitization, and non-profit use of nearly everything in their collections. At the other end of the spectrum is the more hallowed institution. They believe that their collections are sacrosanct and that their artifacts exist to be preserved. They do not make anything available online and they forbid reproduction of any type (unless you pay a ridiculous fee) for fear that everyone is out to steal their content. They really believe that if they increase access, they will lose their standing. Direct quote: “These items are all we have! We can’t just let people download them! Then how will we make money or get funding?” As if they are bringing in a lot of money in their current state: offline, behind lock and key, and crippled by the analog DRM called fear of obsolecense. The people who will pay (i.e. commercial projects like documentaries), will pay anyway. If they can find your content. Overprotection creates a situation where the “wondrous” artifacts they preserve may as well have burned in Alexandria. It’s pretty annoying to know that the perfect set of historic image sits just across town, waiting to help you complete your groundbreaking, non-profit, community-based public history project, but it will cost you $1000 (or the equivalent in months of grovelling) to use it.

So why add to this problem with your own unnecessary copyright barriers? Open it up, and let people benefit from and build on your work. They’ll do it anyway, so what do you have to lose? (see also Stuart Geiger’s post on the topic). The point of your work is to make an impact (on communities, people, scholarship, your reputation, etc.). While nothing is more punk rock than throwing the ole’ “No Rights Reserved” on your blood, sweat and tears creation, CreativeCommons allows you to choose the degree of openness that suits your project, so no pressure… you poser.

Death to Posers and EduJocks

Punks hate nothing more than posers and jocks (and maybe Ronald Reagan). They are antithetical to all the punk believes in. Posers are an affront to the punk rocker’s unending need to measure and display authenticity. In edupunk and in the digital humanities (interesting how these seem to be tied together), there are also what might be called posers. We will call them EduJocks (I sure hope you heard it here first, but I doubt it). EduJocks adopt the outward persona of the digital humanist/edupunk, but lack the internalized commitment and understanding of the bigger picture. If you hear someone saying, “Well, BlackBoard is good for some things…” or “Too bad there’s no alternative to Microsoft Office/ContentDM/Adobe…”, cut them off and walk away immediately. You are in the presence of an EduJock. This could be like a Jeff Foxworthy bit. You know you’re an EduJock if… [ahem - this is what blog comments are for].

That’s it for Part 1. I’m getting tired of this right now, but I have plenty more to say. Stay tuned for Part 2, wherein I will blow your mind with another ludicrous application of the time-honored punk rock tradition of making everything you like be about punk rock.

Yes, this post ends abruptly. That’s because it’s punk rock. I’m exploring the form.