sheep shearing

I spent a little more than 48 hours in Flagstaff the other weekend. gorgeous weather. wonderful wool and fiber festival (even if my very favorite vendor couldn't be there this year). also, as always, the most excellent traveling companions. so grateful to those lovely humans. 

on Sunday, the last day of the festival, I spent 3 hours teaching a little lacemaking workshop and it was wonderful! just 6 enthusiastic students, plenty of time, plus friend Shannon helping out as unofficial assistant, and it all went so well. I'm so glad everyone came ready to learn and practice and struggle with the weirdness that is tatting and tatted lace. I hope they all keep going with it. and maybe some of them will join The Lace Coven too.

the days since then have felt like a dragging two-dimensional swamp, somehow. I think I need more rest.

since summer 2024 I've been prioritizing the whole weekend of Flag Wool, every June, for a getaway with fiber friends. (this year the festival dates conflicted with my favorite academic conference and I confess it was not quite a difficult choice even though I do miss Computers & Writing and all its fun community a good bit.) a different house rental each time. some shuffling of who attends. so much gratitude that I get to be included in the fun. 

at some point along the way I was handed a copy of this book, The Lost Flock, by Jane Cooper. a meandering autobiographical style, very well researched, and fascinating to read. will I ever find myself tending sheep on a remote Scottish island? highly unlikely. more than happy to read about it though. storms and mud and diseases and all, it sounds pretty romantic.

 

the book cover itself (not to mention the setting and the sheep and the land and all that too) reminded me of Pratchett's The Wee Free Men.

sheep and shepherds. cheese and fleece. community and stories. the books are not that similar at all but you can see the echoes across the two covers I'm sure. blue sky or sea. green hills. close-up on a fleecy sheep with beady ovine eyes. more fleecy sheep wandering the hills in the background.  

I don't reread books that often, but maybe I'll revisit these two again sometime soon. the whole Tiffany Aching series is splendid and poignant and worthy of deep attention. maybe I should acquire a boxed set of them. hmmm.

has anyone in the world of the wee free men considered teaching them how to perfectly shear a sheep? I can't remember.

sheep shearing is a dying art, they say. a strange little niche profession, so delicate and demanding. too bad we don't have any magical little dudes to help out with it. sometimes I wonder if I would or could ever learn. such a prospect feels almost as far-fetched though, most days. 

sheep need shearing. I'm glad that at least a few other humans out there still know how to shear them. the shearer who typically demonstrates at Flag Wool is Mick Hofmann. my guild friends who have fleecy animals hire him every spring to come shear for them too. 

 

there weren't many nice fleeces for sale at this year's festival. even if there had been though, I remain uninterested in acquiring any raw fleece to process myself. carding 6 batts of Finn two summers back was tedious enough, I promise. 

if the apocalypse arrives and all the industrial fiber mills become defunct and I need to process wool by hand, I'll get over the tedium and hopefully also make friends with someone who can teach me shepherding and shearing too.

fall semester, 2024

the word semester shows up in at least 130 of my past blogposts, which is a little more than 10% of all the posts I've thus far posted. considering that this little blog has always been roughly half focused on various academic and intellectual pursuits, this makes plenty of sense. semesters are like seasons.

the word itself is not even 200 years old, the etymology dictionary tells me: "...semenstris 'of six months, lasting six months, half-yearly, semi-annual,' from assimilated form of sex 'six' (see six) + mensis "month" (see moon (n.)). The word, and the idea, were picked up in the U.S., where the German higher education system served as a model."

apparently the Latin-y adjective forms semestral and semestrial are a few centuries older. interesting. 

anyway, I'm glad our semesters are not a full six months long these days. four months is plenty. 

and for these upcoming four months, I'm teaching three batches of students, including a few repeats from past semesters. the longer I hang out at this institution, the more that will keep happening I suppose.

COM 221: Technical Report Writing
counting the two sections I have this semester, I've taught practically a million versions of this course (okay, 15 total sections. that is still a lot). it's becoming a bit of a struggle to not get completely burnt out and bored of it, but I'm doing my best to keep it interesting for me. we're only in week 3, so I'm still getting to know the vibe of the students. we'll have some fun together I hope though.

HU 356: Audio Production & Podcasting
this one is going to be interesting no matter what-- it's a brand new class, only recently outlined and designed and proposed by me for our catch-all Humanities & Communication department. I am pretty excited to see how this goes. so far I'm having students practice various little audio recording tasks, then we'll level up to remixing all those clips into some fun story-arc, before finally moving on to pitching and workshoping individual podcast projects. the students all have great ideas so far. (wish me luck persuading the one who simply wants to copy Mr. Rogan's insufferably long-winded (at least it is to me) format into doing something at least slightly more inventive.)

what else? I signed up for a weaving class next month. some family is visiting next week. we have some more camping planned for during fall break. we're having a brand new screen door installed sometime soon. and our Monday evening D&D group is on the brink of moving up to level 8. in November, our crazy puppy will turn 1 year old.

at some point we should work on the mish-mash garden projects and other household tasks that need doing. and eventually figure out our holiday plans. 

or maybe we let go of shoulds for a while and enjoy the almost-autum while it's here.

favorite conference

last week, my time was taken up by another academic conference.

I presented on semi-academic podcasts and how awesomely they seem to cultivate discussions about scholarly things for the consumption (and perhaps participation) of non-scholarly audiences. such a thing seems pretty rare, but maybe it's less rare than I'm making it out to be. after all, 

“Podcasting’s bridging of knowledge barriers in an intimate manner is one of its key, and most readily apparent, properties. Thanks to the medium’s wide accessibility— given its general affordability and portability— knowledge in diverse domains can be shared by individuals and groups around the world. Thanks, as well, to their intimate, personal and often-conversational natures, podcast episodes can help individuals of different educational levels cross disciplinary boundaries easily. Audience members need not be enrolled in an educational system in order reap their benefits” (Swiatek, 2018, p. 177-178).​

how's that for a minimalist literature review, eh? Swiatek's chapter is in the collection I used as a textbook for my introductory podcast course last year. good stuff.

bridging knowledge barriers can happen across all kinds of lines, not just those of formal higher education, of course. academia is only one of many domains of learning. 

but for my presentation, I concocted a fairly narrow set of criteria for the four examples I showcased. to fit in properly with what I wanted to talk about, the podcast needed to be...

- officially made by/with credentialed, institutionally-affiliated academics ​
- making use of the ethos and/or expertise of their degrees at least a little
- purposefully talking to and/or translating for non-academic audiences ​to some extent

I also limited my examples to humanities/communication-y topics, because that's my discipline, and a 15-minute conference talk cannot be much more comprehensive than that anyway. I am curious to look at other podcasts in this vein though. eventually. Huberman Labs would count. and probably plenty of others I haven't heard of yet.

my observation, as a fairly high level podcast fangirl, has been that most scholarly podcasts don't bother talking beyond their own discipline, much less beyond the academy in general. in a sense, that might be what "scholarly" means-- by, for, and of scholars. but I also knew of a few counter-examples. a few podcasts that managed to feel more openly, accessibly, publicly academic.

for this little starting-place of a conference talk, I looked at these four: Material Girls; Lingthusiasm; Think Fast, Talk Smart; and Professors Play. 

according to my proposal for the event, I wanted "to highlight these as particularly valuable examples of public scholars demonstrating from the ivory tower how playfulness, connection, and personality are key ingredients for learning, teaching, and thriving as 21st-century humans."

want to see my little digital handout with transcribed bits from each show? there's a link to my slides from there too, which in turn have a few painstakingly chosen, hopefully entertaining-ish, audio clips. 

it is perhaps silly to turn my little presentation from last week into a blog post here, but (now that I'm halfway through doing it anyway) it does seem to match the spirit of my whole point— academia doesn't need to keep all of its cool conversations to itself.

on top of making that point, my other goal with the talk was to have fun introducing whoever showed up at my 11:00am panel to a few very engaging podcasts. I called it "Public Scholarship as Playful Pedagogy," but the title easily could've been shuffled into “Playful Scholarship as Public Pedagogy”— I'm still not sure which sounds better. the lines between all these things are fairly slippery at the best of times.

the lofty version of my whole argument is something like this: podcasts are conversations, usually quite public ones that can shape the cultures and communities of the world we live in. sometimes they even create new communities, which in turn have their own world-shaping power. so it matters who gets to be part of the conversation. it matters how the conversations are designed. 

Computers & Writing is one of the best conferences. next year it'll be in Athens, Georgia. will I get to be there and keep talking about podcasts as scholarship or pedagogy or public pedagogical artifacts or anything like that? we shall see.

and spring semester 2024

eleven years ago, back at the very beginning of my academic career, I trekked 6 hours west from Lubbock, Texas, in my very old leper of a car (the paint was all but totally peeled way from its poor hood), to attend my first ever academic conference in Albuquerque.

this week I'm gonna trek 6 hours east and attend the same conference, this time in a rental car, with way more academic experience, an institutional credit card for travel-related purchases, and a significantly different research agenda. I'll be presenting this Saturday all about how I designed and get to teach a fun little class on podcasts. 

 {the title slide, so far anway}

 

and I'll get to see some of my old professors from USU. very excited for that bit. 

it'll be fun, hopefully. I hope I'll meet some other cool new interesting fellow scholars along the way, too. we shall see, given how sunny and warm it looks to be in Albuquerque this weekend, how much of the conference I actually sit through.

in the more normal weeks of this semester, I'm teaching a couple sections of technical writing. the same old basic tech writing course, only slightly different every time by virtue of new students and a new me and a new world.

besides teaching, I'm also working on a book chapter about podcast transcripts and leading various faculty from various other programs through a series of mushy but important assessment adventures. friend Caroline and I are still working on soliciting content for a new issue of the campus literary arts magazine (the second since we took charge of it last year). maybe we'll have an official reading event at the library with the creative writing class-- fingers crossed. 

it's all nearly haflway over, this set of 16 work weeks called spring semester. at the moment the halfway point feels encouraging. time ticks onward. work gets accomplished. knowledge is made and shared and reinforced. skills are modeled, practiced, learned, forgotten, re-learned.

in other news, I'm also finally getting to see some work from the past year come out in official publication! perhaps the coolest online academic journal of all, Kairos, made space for my multimedia oral history-ish interview piece all about two colleagues who recently retired.

and then colleagues and I have a co-authored piece in the most recent issue of Programmatic Perspectives (the differently cool but still very awesome journal from the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication). some awesome Purdue colleagues have an article in the same issue, which is quite cool to see. 

time ticks onward. I've been here 4 years. 2 more until hopefully they give me tenure. 

in the meantime, age and experience accumulate. some days I feel older and other days not at all. 

next January, in the auspicious year of 2025, it'll be 20 years since I started this blog for a class. how will we celebrate that, I wonder?

spring semester, 2023 + attendant miscellany

there's not been much of anything new in my courses for several semesters now... but at long last, this spring, I am teaching a very brand new course-- brand new both to me and to everyone:

HU 145: Themes in Humanities (the art and history of podcasts) 

HU 145 is a sort of catch-all lower-level Humanities credit, required of all students so we can make sure our pilots and engineers have some well-roundedness about them. I have specifically themed my version of this course around "the art and history of podcasts," because why the heck not. it has been so, so fun to plan for this little 100-level intro course. nothing like it has ever been taught on this campus. and maybe nothing like it has been taught anywhere, since I have been making it all up as I go.  

the welcome note / course description I wrote for students / the course catelog goes more or less like this:

This semester, we will explore podcasts and other audio productions from a critical perspective. We will practice our listening skills while examining the conventions of radio and audio production, analyzing the styles and genres of specific productions, and thinking carefully about the cultural contexts in which audio media circulate ideas and contribute to public (or not so public) discourse. Tracing similarities and differences across the history of recorded sound, we will discuss how audio media has been used to record historical events and stories, to foster fandoms and communities, and to shape or re-shape human cultures.

alongside two sections of that awesomeness, I've got one good old standard section of COM 221: Technical Report Writing. 

my students all seem pretty cool so far. it's early in the semester-- we're all still getting to know each other. I trust that learning is happening, little by little, in all of our spongey curious brains.

--

relatively unrelatedly, I'm gonna toss some recent photo bits in this post. do enjoy the randomness.

foggy winter morning, not long ago

weaving, upside down

red toenails, contemplative pug puppy

the sun and the sky and the mountains somewhere down near Tuscon

blooming orchid. light-starved succulents.

my first Tunisian crochet project: a shawlette of ruffles. (this is the yarn-- isn't it lovely?)

virtual academic-ing

as part of this virtual conference going on here at the end of the month, I was able to attend a workshop hosted by the very professor who once upon a time, almost 20 years ago now, assigned his professional writing students to create blogs and write every Wednesday about our webdesign readings. he's still teaching at dear old Utah State University. I should try to go visit again someday. 

for now: thank you, dear rylish, for nudging me into this writing space. 

almost winter break

the stars in the winter seem brighter, or shinier, or at least more, possibly because there is more night for them to shine in.

yesterday, it rained and rained and rained all afternoon and evening. it began around noon as the barest mist of precipitation in the grey, chill air. at some point while I was teaching my last three technical writing classes of the semester, it intensified until all the sidewalks were slicked and slippery. 

today was the first fully cold-cold day of the season. 

a dusting of snow on top of Granite Mountain made it look a little like a delightfully craggy, if lopsided, bundt cake. 

(did you know that "bundt" is technically a trademarked brand name? I was somewhat astonished to learn this when I doublechecked my spelling just now. I guess it's like kleenex and google and velcro and all the other trademarks that have crept into the zone of regular old vocabulary for what was once the latest amazing innovation but is now just everyday stuff. the company still enforces its trademark over Bundt cake pans-- but you can call the cake itself a bundt cake without issue. thank goodness.) 

way up to the north, the mountains around Flagstaff have much more than a dusting of snow-- they look like they've been repainted altogether in a major revision to the horizon. the distant trio of sharp peaks seem to be layered with at least seven perfectly fine, perfectly white veils of silk. 

when will it snow here in the valley? my guess is not until next month. but it's hard to say. the nights are officially freezing. the skies have been grey all week. the chill wind and the bright sun are battling over the temperature of the air.

now that classes are over, we'll see if I can sleep in past the late sunrises and hibernate a bit more, as nature's signals have been directing us all to do for at least a month. 

what else? my other winter break plans include... 

- visiting my family and homeland to the north
- getting a neat haircut, and maybe some highlights or color or something to go with it
- reading at least ten books for fun
- watching all the longest versions of all the Lord of the Rings films
- baking several pies + some other sort of holiday sweets for the neighbors 

I did want to join a Christmas choir this month, but I'm still a bit too worried about a certain viral pandemic situation. and singing in a facemask doesn't seem like it would be feasible or effective. hopefully next year...?

in less fun (but still pretty fun) arenas, I also have research to work on (more podcast transcript tracking, among other things) and LibriVox projects to edit and finish (just 4 more sections of this to get done). and that is plenty. in fact, I should take some of my expectations about all that down a few notches. two pies will probably be plenty. 

we'll see how industrious I actually want to be during the nineteen or so days of de facto freedom I have before spring semester drags me back to the office. if I can plan all my Business Communication syllabi next week, I won't have to think about that at all until probably... January 10 or so. 

 

{ these two images are very old scans of very old Christmas card sketches }

I, pedagogue (spring semester, 2021)

back in the day, I thought I'd never want to teach. and then I realized that in some ways, everything everyone does can involve a layer of teaching somehow. even if it's a very subtle one.

even still, for these past seven years of wading deeper and deeper into teaching college writing classes of various kinds, the real practice of teaching (with all the planning and record-keeping and decision-making and performing and grading and authority-wielding it typically requires) has not often been my favorite part of academia. it's fine. but it's hard. and I never feel very good at it, so it simply can't be as naturally rewarding as all the other corners of academia where I feel far more skilled.

for better or for worse, my two full-time assistant professor jobs so far have been quite teachingcentric. twelve credit hours of teaching every semester, plus a few during summer semesters, until this year. dozens and dozens of students show up in August or January or June for whichever iteration of professional writing I'm teaching this time, working and sharing and hopefully learning, and then they disappear again.

this year, I have one course release for being brand new in town. it gives me a chance to get used to things a bit.

they also gave all the new faculty a copy of the book What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. a few colleagues and I read through it together last fall semester and talked about ways to apply the findings in our own classrooms.

the book and our little faculty discussion group made me think much more intensely about my teaching than I've cared to thus far. it also gave me some concrete hope that maybe I can become better at this thing I don't feel very expert in at all. 

so. what am I trying to do a little better this spring? what have I begun to internalize from Bain's research?

possibly more things than I can articulate very well in a little blogpost. but here are a few:

> talk about your own learning journey with students. model or reenact the kinds of transformation you hope that they will undergo as a result of your class.

> trust students and treat them like whole humans with a million shifting priorities, just like you. this is something I already knew and practice decently, I think. but I took particular comfort in it this past year. my course is a small droplet in the ocean of everything these students are trying to learn and become. if my teaching isn't perfect, they probably won't notice or remember for too long.

> ask students big, meaningful, authentic questions--the kinds of questions that professionals in your field will ask and try to answer. (this is particularly tricky in writing because writing, for most people, in most important contexts, isn't very often about itself. its actual subject is the everything else that we write and communicate about.)

I think I do pretty well being authentic and open and compassionate as a teacher. but I have been guilty in the past of assuming students could never be all that interested in the big questions that I study. we don't have time for that, do we? especially at a fancy aeronautical university where nobody is an English major and everyone mainly wants to design or build or test or fly airplanes and other such contraptions-- how could any of those students care about a communications course?

but if Bain is to be believed, the enthusiasm of a teacher combined with the sparks of a big, meaningful question can draw students in, motivate them a little, even if they didn't think they'd care very much about a communications course. 

and I can be good at questions, surely. 

especially big ones! like: how do you know what anyone means? how do you know what anyone else thinks you mean? how people really ever understand each other enough to make good things happen in the world? and what does it mean to read? to write? or to do those things effectively?

the trick now becomes figuring out how much time to spend getting philosophical about definitions inbetween all the more "practical" work of practicing reading and writing and revising and all that. I still think students learn most from doing things, more than they can from reading about things or discussing them or whatnot.

but anyway, I added this little linguistics video to my list of assigned readings. I opened the first day of class reading from Celeste Headlee's book We Need to Talk, which recounts the tragedy of an ineffective conversation in an airplane cockpit. in technical writing we spent the first day exploring informal crowdsourced technical descriptions on Reddit.

and when I listened to this recent episode of So Many Damn Books with George Saunders I felt more affinity for Saunders's love of teaching writing than perhaps I might once have felt. his advice is to remember that you're never just teaching 20-somethings who barely know what to do with their adulthood when you meet them-- you're also teaching the 40-something-year-olds that they'll become. I like that. (not all college students are 20-somethings, but the concept holds. we are all humans-in-progress.)

maybe I'll go back and give the Pedagogue podcast another chance, too, now that I feel more hopeful and less grumbly about this whole teaching business.

separately solemn: fall semester 2020

today begins week three of my first semester teaching at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. I am the newest Assistant Professor of Professional Writing in a department without a degree program. students here can get a minor in Humanities & Communication, but nothing more. since they all want to be pilots or engineers, that's how it is.

I'm teaching two courses, three sections, this semester. one of technical writing and two of business writing. there are 62 students enrolled altogether, which might be the most students I've taught at one time ever.

COM 221: Technical Report Writing
this one is quite reminiscent of the English 421 I taught once at Purdue. for the most part, I've kept this course very similar to the technical writing and technical composition courses I've taught for the last two years. but for our final project, I'm finally going to teach some podcasting stuff. finally. 

COM 222: Business Communications
if Com 221 is the English 421 of ERAU, then Com 222 is the English 420. though the distinctions between professional/business communication and technical communication aren't so very huge, they do exist. it feels like ages since I've focused on the former. so I'm resurrecting some of the projects I taught back in 2016 and 2017, updated a little, with a new textbook to go with them this year. cause-related marketing proposals. very exciting. 

overall, Embry-Riddle feels like a mini-Purdue in many ways: engineering-heavy. mostly white and privileged students. the differences, however-- that it's a much smaller private university, perched on top of a desert-- are significant.

how many college campuses have I spent how many autumns, now? this will be the sixth campus (USU, U of Plymouth, TTU, Purdue, NSULA, and here). I don't feel like counting the autumns themselves just now. someday maybe I'll make a chart.

{ photograph borrowed from this kind user of Flickr }

true autumn weather is a month or so away, still. but regardless of weather, classes have started. and that comes with a particular and lovely feeling.

only... it's different this year. and I don't think it's different just because I'm getting old. 

something like the same old scintillating energy of a college campus in September is here, jolting through brain and body every now and then. but it's so muted. six feet of space (give or take) has diluted it. closed office doors and silent office hallways are smothering it. I didn't know the trademark thrill of any given academic autumn would be so vulnerable to the side effects of separation.

after a summer of moving and reading and blogging and not teaching anything, my teaching muscles need re-building. it might take me longer to find a workable rhythm this semester. 

talking for 4+ hours (thank goodness not completely consecutive hours) in a cloth mask is exhausting

keeping track of two separate classroom cohorts for each section I'm teaching is a little hectic. 

finding my place in a new institution is tricky enough, without such strange circumstances. what with all the reasonable but seemingly unending surveillance and daily temperature checks and stern, scolding emails from administrators and wobbly hopes tossed about on fathoms of uncertainty-- it's so easy to be so panicky. and almost as easy to sweep the panic into a corner and pretend like it's not there at all.

it makes me wonder, again and again, what really matters anyway? 

I'm thankful, for now, for patient and smart students. it's a weird time for all of us. hopefully we still learn a few things that will still matter beyond this semester and next.

August aspirations

goals, of a sort, for the last two weeks of summer break:

sewing. last weekend I cut out pieces for two sundresses and picked apart a long skirt to transform into a third sundress. I also have some trousers to mend and probably a few other random small projects too.

reading. I'm still working my way through the Audre Lorde collection from the library. I also have five tabs open right now that need the attention of my reading brain. (there are usually much more than five, but I'm trying to be realistic and abandon any that have been open for more than a week; I know deep down I won't get around to them anytime soon after all.) one of those tabs is this article, which I've read already but want to plan on rereading every semester for the rest of time, as a reminder that however lazy or unmotivated students may seem, it's more complicated than that. if there's time, I'll also fit in some more short stories from Tor.com, one of the most useful online venues for new and intriguing short fiction that I've come across.

seeing the Grand Canyon. I haven't visited this landmark since I was fourteen, I think. we're just going to make a day of it. drive two hours north. bring snacks. take photographs. indulge in a moment or two of reverence for nature and its grandeur.

writing. even after this month of blogging-every-day is over, I have chapter revisions to work on for an edited collection on user experience research. I have letters of recommendation to write. there are also a few more editing projects to tidy up in the coming weeks, not to mention syllabi and lesson plans. will there be time for fun writing, too? I hope so.

gaming. I completed my second playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn not long ago. only one irritatingly difficult hunting task was left incomplete. I'm now working on Detriot: Become Human-- a unique sort of game where almost all the choices you make change how the rest of the game goes. yeah, it's got problematic elements, but it's also thought-provoking and intense, which is interesting to me.

of course at some point I also should probably figure out how I want to arrange my new office-- not that I'll be there that often, since in-person office hours are prohibited this semester-- and make sure I'm as ready as possible for teaching three hybrid face-to-face technical/professional writing courses. it's a lot.

but two weeks is also a lot. fourteen days or so. more than three hundred hours. not counting the hundred-ish I'll spend sleeping, that's an abundance of time. hopefully I end up happy with how I use it all. even if I don't officially accomplish all the things I'm presently imagining I might.

editing work and so-called "educational technologies"

it's not the most important volunteer gig in the world, but I am on the official Board of Copy Editors for a scholarly journal in the field of social work.

see? (I still need to have them update my institutional affiliation, I know. soon.)

the article I'm editing now is about perceptions of social work and advocacy organizations in Ireland. it's pretty interesting. part of the fun of this position is getting to dip my brain into current scholarship from another field, from lots of other perspectives. one of the pieces I previously edited was all about volunteerism-- something not unrelated to my own scholarship.

today I've been combing through this forthcoming article's reference list, checking for completeness and formatting. like most social science journals, this one uses APA style, which I'm thankfully pretty familiar with.

my editing process can be a little haphazard for a project like this. but generally it follows these broad strokes:

1. read through the piece once and make notes about persistent issues or anything else that stands out, tidying up a few of the easy things (commas, spelling, other punctuation) along the way

2. check that everything listed in the references is actually cited in the text, and vice versa (this is something I learned from Dr. Hawkins as part of her teaching in Bibliography & Research Methods many years ago)

3. attend to citation formatting (all the periods in the right spots, capitalization as APA dictates, and so on)

4. make sure all the headings and subheadings are styled properly (and I'd usually check tables and figures here too, but this particular article doesn't have any)

5. draft a makeshift style sheet for any judgement calls I get to make about hyphenation or capitalization of terms (these are always really informal sticky-note things, if that)

6. go through again, adding queries for the author where needed, making decisions and changes for the major issues previously noted, watching for consistency and fluency at the word- and sentence-level.

7. spot check one last time for the things on the style sheet, review the queries and comments to make sure they make sense, and then send the whole thing off after appending my initials to the filename.

if it's work for hire, I'll prep an invoice and send that along with my edits. I've done a huge amount of editing for hire this summer, it seems like. dissertation proposals, articles about orthodontics, computer graphics, and GPS, and even several book chapters about analytic software programs. but for this particular job I'm only getting paid in collegial respect and academic clout. it makes a nice line on my CV and boosts my ethos as a person with practical, ongoing experience editing. plus, I enjoy it.

there's about a day or two more of work left on the piece. the references and headings are sorted, so all that's left, roughly, are steps 5 through 7. from this point on, I shouldn't need to keep opening and closing the section on APA style at the Purdue OWL. it's down to the less tedious part of the job now. I could, I know, be a lot more meticulous about how I approach the work and how I track the time I spend on it. for now, this is what works for me.

the tedium of citation-tidying, I'll add, is pretty pleasant tedium. actually one of my favourite things about editing scholarly work like this is replacing all the default hyphens with en-dashes in all the page ranges of the references that have them. APA doesn't strictly care about that detail, but the beautiful differences between hyphens and dashes were irrevocably drilled into me back when I worked with the more comprehensive Chicago style at Texas Tech University Press.

style guides like Chicago and APA and resources like the OWL that grow up around them all count as educational technology, don't they? sure, the term is burdened with connotations of electronics, computers, digital connectivity, and such, but books are technologies too. I'd count these guides' paper-based versions as technologies just as much as I'd count their websites at https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html and https://apastyle.apa.org/.

the Purdue OWL has always been a website, though its offline home, the regular Purdue Writing Lab, predates it by almost twenty years.

educational technologies. any technology that serves a process of education, right? well, one would hope.

about a year and a half ago, the dear Purdue OWL entered into a partnership with a purveyor of so-called educational technologies called Chegg. shortly thereafter, citation generator banners appeared all over every page of the OWL, offering quick and easy auto-citations in MLA or APA style. I reacted with great disappointment and irritation at the time. and so did plenty of other people.

since then, the powers-that-be over at the OWL have toned it down a bit. the citation generation tools are still there, but not on every single page. still, it feels odd. one tool, the OWL, gives students valuable reference information and examples and helps them learn to apply that knowledge in their writing. the other just black-boxes it all away and says, more or less, "trust us, we'll handle it, you don't have to think too hard. or at all."

I guess there are probably times when not having to think too hard about some process or technology is perfectly okay, but in academia? it seems thoroughly wrong. this kind of thing doesn't really serve education. does it?

such over-reliance on technology goes beyond students, too. a related "educational technology" here is plagiarism-detection software like Turnitin and other such tools. these companies give lip service to academic integrity and education, but their true goal is profit. they're invested in manufacturing some kind of vague ethical crisis so they can sell software subscriptions.

using software to catch students "cheating" is not education. it's barely relevant to education by any stretch of the imagination. and if you have to rely on such tools to figure out if your students are cheating on their writing assignments or not, then you haven't given your students or their writing enough of your attention, and you haven't designed very good writing assignments.

what has bugged me most about Turnitin and the like is the fact that it copies piles and piles of student work for its own databases and uses those copies as a core part of its function. and I suppose they think that because their terms of service say this is all perfectly fine to do, it is.

I say not. if students had any real choice in the matter, then maybe. but given the power dynamics of your typical college classroom, they don't. if their professor says upload your work via this tool, then students are more or less forced to do so, whether or not they care about the implications.

copyright is a whole mess in itself, but any logical understanding of intellectual property should acknowledge that students own their creative work, even within the relatively convoluted confines of formal education. for a third-party technology company to copy that work and profit from its application is pretty clearly unfair. unjust. messed up. all because some teachers are so worried about cheating they're willing to outsource part of their job to a for-profit company rather than design more robust assignments and trust their students half an inch.

for further reading:

"A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin."

"Plagiarism Policing and Profit: Great news! Our students produced $1.75 billion in profit! Too bad they won't get any of it."

"Re-Thinking Plagiarism as Unfair Competition."

generosity and gratitude

basically we have one week left in this quaint little Louisiana town.

no, we haven't managed to sit ourselves down to watch Steel Magnolias yet. should we still try? (part of me does want to.)

one week!

and there is so much to do. food to use up from the fridge. piles of things-we-don't-need-anymore to organize and donate somehow. fragile dishes and art and knickknacks to wrap and stuff into boxes.

if times were even a tiny bit more normal than they are now, we'd have a goodbye party. we'd schedule in plenty of time to visit one last time all the friends we've made here. we'd go out to that Mexican place one last time. have another end-of-semester karaoke thing. 

but times are not very normal. so instead of all that... what will we do?

I'll distantly and carefully turn in my office keys next Monday morning, distantly contrive to drop off  a few spare houseplants and some spare yarn at a few dear colleague's doorsteps, and perhaps write short goodbye notes to leave in everyone's mailboxes on campus. I'll assume, for now, that campus will return to something like normal eventually.

right now, there are thirteen days until grades are due for Spring 2020. not long after that, my contract with NSULA will officially end. the summer will start to uncurl and stretch its scaly paws, and I'll have three months to play and write and daydream before my next job starts in August. will those three months go by as slowly and weirdly as the last eight weeks have gone by?

right now, I am lucky. my contract with the new institution was signed a few weeks before all of this happened. we've been able to find a new apartment and afford all the headachey moving expenses, so far. I can do my job remotely, for as long as I have to, without too much trouble.

we are lucky, so far. 

my students? most of them are hanging in there, keeping up with things despite everything. this semester has been the opposite of ideal in about a thousand ways. it's been seven weeks since normal classes in normal classrooms. some learning opportunities have worked out okay and many others have not worked out very okay at all. but by now we've adjusted our earlier definitions of "okay."

through all this uncertain weirdness, I've tried to be as generous and patient and responsive with all the students as possible, even moreso than usual. I don't know yet how that generosity is going to finally and concretely translate into course grades next week. I hope to still see evidence that learning about professional writing has been attempted by all the students, whatever else is happening. I hope to read some thoughtful and thorough reflection from everyone before the end. learning is more important than grades.

despite all the important considerations reflected in this recent post and this less-recent post, I'm not sure if all my students will pass or not. I'm not sure how far my responsibility to be generous right now extends in relationship to students' responsibilities both pre- and post-pandemic. maybe all of these things need their definitions adjusted, too.

I haven't read Kathleen Fitzpatrick's (who keeps a very nice blog) new book Generous Thinking yet, but I want to. the whole idea-- generosity, open collaborations, re-imagining our institutions so that they serve more people more equitably-- feels so lovely.

despite the loveliness, I can't help but ask questions. who can afford to be generous and in what ways? what are the little hidden costs of personal generosity? it seems so cynical to ask such things.

in terms of my students, I can definitely afford to be outrageously generous about their grades. I hope the students and their brains can afford it too.

in terms of everything else, I can probably afford more than I think I can.

right now, there's just enough time to ponder everything I'll be leaving behind next week. there's time to feel a few puddles of regret and a whole mountain range of gratitude. we haven't been here long, but friends and colleagues and students and neighbors have been very generous to us. lucky. grateful. and hopefully, in my own ways, just as generous.

fall semester, 2019

ten days into fall semester. it's been a bit of a rough transition from lovely summer travels to four new sets of students and curricula and work routines and everything.

for the official blog record, here's everything I get to teach this fall--

English 1020: Composition & Rhetoric II
an entirely new course for me, more or less. last time I taught anything like this was spring 2013 at Texas Tech University. I'm a much different instructor at a much different institution this time. but I think this class will be fun-- one of our projects involves writing about some of the opinions/controversies on the Change My View subreddit. each student is also choosing a theme to research and write about over the semester. should keep things exciting for us all.

English 3230: Technical Composition
this is my seventh section of this course. oddly, I've only got the one Monday-Wednesday-Friday section for this semester. 15 students, 15 weeks left. I've switched up a lot of things for this time around (including our textbook), so it's been more work to prep for this time around. ah well. we're doing our team project first, then instructions, then resumes, etc. hopefully plenty of useful learning happens.

English 3610: Intro to Digital Cultures
this is the undergraduate version of my graduate course, Engl 6560, last spring. different readings, a lot more hands-on things in our face-to-face classroom. yesterday I had students compare/contrast working in Google Docs vs. Word Online vs. Graphite. in future weeks I want to have us play around with wikis, twine, glitch, twitter threads, terms of service, interface design, maps, social media, and maybe some of these activities too. 
 
English 5220: Technical Writing
this year, I'm teaching this graduate course to 9 students instead of just 2. it's my one online class this semester, and it should be great. we're using Solving Problems in Technical Communication as our main textbook, and we also get to read (or listen to) all this great stuff:

• Johnson, Tom. Simplifying Complexity, Intro https://idratherbewriting.com/simplifying-complexity/
• Nordquist, Richard. “Technical Writing” https://www.thoughtco.com/technical-writing-1692530
• Giordano, Connie. “What is Technical Writing” https://techwhirl.com/what-is-technical-writing
• O’Hara, Frederick. “A Brief History of Technical Communication”
• Rutter, Russell. “History, Rhetoric, and Humanism: Toward a More Comprehensive Definition of Technical Communication”
• Durack, Katherine. “Gender, Technology, and the History of Technical Communication”
• Jones, Natasha, Moore, Kristen, & Walton, Rebecca. “Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication”
• 10-minute Tech Comm Podcast, “Dr. Emily January Petersen on How Women Technical Communicators Get Undervalued.” https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/uah-technical-writing/10minute-tech-comm/e/54413468 
• Allen, Jo. “The Case Against Defining Technical Writing”
• 10-minute Tech Comm Podcast, “Katherine Spivey on Plain Language” https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/uah-technical-writing/10minute-tech-comm/e/katherine-spivey-on-plain-language-42062936
• Johnson, Tom. “Plain Language Ruined My Delight in Language”
• Johnson, Tom. “The variety of tools tech comm professionals use” https://idratherbewriting.com/2016/08/21/survey-of-tech-writing-tools-among-professionals/ 
• section from https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/index.html
• Markel, M. “Ethics and Technical Communication: A Case for Foundational Approaches”
• Rabil, Richard. “Order Out of Chaos: Patterns of Organization for Writing on the Job” https://alistapart.com/article/order-out-of-chaos-patterns-of-organization-for-writing-on-the-job/  
• 10-minute Tech Comm Podcast, “Dr. Kirk St. Amant on User Experience in International Contexts” https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/uah-technical-writing/10minute-tech-comm/e/52583945 
• 10-minute Tech Comm Podcast, “Amruta Ranade on Learning New Technology” https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/uah-technical-writing/10minute-tech-comm/e/55624504
• Wilson, G. & Wolford, R. “The Technical Communicator as (Post-Postmodern) Discourse Worker”

most of these are the same readings as last year, but I added that final one after discovering it this summer, and several of the podcasts are new additions also.

ten days done, most of four whole months left to go... 

professor-ing, spring 2019

there were at least a dozen robins out in our backyard a minute ago, chirping away and pecking things out of the damp dirt.

I didn't notice when they left and I don't know where they've gone now. to someone else's backyard? some other patch of damp ground?

I'm working from home today, with the window in the den half-open and a dish of homemade granola (too crumbly to be bars, but I tried) on the table next to me.
 
there are revisions to focus on, but mainly I've been writing emails to send and posting comments on the blog for my graduate course.

did I write last semester about all the courses I was teaching? it looks like I did not-- not specifically anyway. not the way I've done for all my many semesters as a student. I'll make up for it now.

English 3230: Technical Composition
I taught two sections of this last fall as well, and I'll be teaching 3 sections this semester. Two are face-to-face, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we've almost reached the end of our first major project. Our next project will be a service-learning/community-engagement project built around a partnership with our university library. who knows if it will spark for my students the kind of gushy enthusiasm I felt about my first service-learning project way back in 2005/2006... but I'm excited about it anyway.

English 6560: Digital Cultures - Theory & Practice
this is my online graduate course, in which four delightful graduate students are enrolled. we are discussing various aspects of and scholarship and theorizings about digital culture over at https://engl6560.hcommons.org/ and meeting for video conferences every other week to discuss further. I'm enjoying it quite a lot and can't wait to see what kinds of projects these students come up with for the rest of the semester.

I have more new and exciting courses (undergraduate and graduate) lined up ahead of me for the next few terms. most of them are technical-writing-related, though I also get to adapt the digital cultures course for undergraduates next fall. I'll get to teach an advanced tech writing and editing sometime in 2020...  lots to look forward to.

being a teacher and not simultaneously a student is pretty much a million times better than doing both at once. teaching is still difficult, but I think I'm somehow slightly more sure of myself now that I have a different focus. my own scholarship has not been set aside, of course (in fact, I should be working on article revisions instead of blogging, probably), but rather than having all the pressure of three reading lists for grad classes + seminar papers to draft + my own scholarship to advance + teaching, it all feels more manageable and spacious and steady.

endings, middles, randomness

September is nearing its rainy, grey end.

yesterday, I opened three windows in our house, and the gentle, humid breezes felt almost a little chilly. does this mean my sensitivities are fully transitioned to southern climate mode? that 72° Fahrenheit is on the cold side of things?

before classes started, I spent many mornings coloring. listening to podcasts. it was lovely, and I actually did finish some pages from this stained glass mandala book friend Patti sent me way back during prelims time.

I find I have less time for podcasts these days. my commute is 1/3 the length that it once was, unless I bike to campus-- and listening to podcasts while biking is probably an ill-advised course of action.

so instead of listening on the bus or in the car, I listen while I craft or color or clean.

or while I roadtrip to Arkansas.

it was in preparation for that roadtrip that I found this old-but-new-to-me podcast, Never Not Knitting. it seems to have run for 10 seasons between 2008 and 2016. one hundred episodes. and surprisingly, the host's blog is still around.

so far I've listened to 40something of those one hundred episodes. and also skimmed the whole accompanying blog and associated Ravelry content. I want to make a version of these mitts. and possibly this hat. and also someday be good enough to knit a whole sweater/cardigan or a nice top.

a few other new-to-me podcasts have joined my podcast queue recently, too. among them:
Science Update
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
and
Out on the Wire.

the first and last of these are inspiring me to eventually design some technical communication coursework around podcasting. 

eventually and soon, I also want to write about the final episode of one of the most unique scholarly podcasts out there: Masters of Text. now that I think about it, a review of that podcast might belong in a more scholarly venue than this blog. hmmmm. I shall have to ponder. maybe the answer could be both.

speaking of scholarly venues, I shall have a piece coming out soon as part of this fall's blog carnival with the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. the short speculative little essay was originally spawned from a prickly little question my dissertation committee asked me last May, and it's called "Hypermediated Workscapes and the Digital Rhetorics of Personal Branding."

and speaking of short digital publications, I was poking around on Google Scholar the other day and found that this long-ago book review of Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing has been cited in an article about publishing information systems from the European Journal of Information Systems. how random.

cryptocurrency, female empowerment, + podcasts as technical communication

I am loving this podcast: https://zigzagpod.com/

especially this recent episode of listener stories and general reflection.

and especially Ms. Manoush Zamarodi's response in that episode (around the 19:01 mark) to a listener who wrote in to criticize the hosts' allegedly "acting like silly dumb girls." as she read his letter aloud, I waited, eagerly and impatiently hoping to hear a rebuttal pointing out just how sexist and short-sighted it is to code female laughter as automatically juvenile, thoughtless, idiotic, or stupid, or as some sort of coy, superficial act. Zamarodi is subtler than I think I would have been in her response, but she makes much the same point: there's not one single societally-approved way of sounding or acting intelligent.

she says, "we laugh because we know it's okay not to know everything, that this is a real-time exploration, an investigation into changes that are happening in tech and our culture. And you know what, we don't care if it's not a good look, because it's who we are, and I'm sorry if you find that tiresome. But I really do hope you will keep listening and get used to what strong, intelligent women sometimes sound like. We're being real. And maybe you just haven't heard women in such an up-close and transparent, authentic way before."

thank you for that, Manoush.

the whole podcast so far is wonderful stuff to listen to. people, real experiences, uncertainty, trying new things. plus you get to learn a little bit about blockchain technology and journalism and the future.

I got thinking the other day that this podcast, personal and documentary-ish though it may be, is a great example of technical communication.

podcasts-as-technical-communication is a preoccupation of mine generally, given my scholarly immersion in the later and my personal enjoyment of the former. I want to write more about ZigZag and tech comm someday, but I think that post needs more thinking time.

for now... what other podcasts could be counted (at least in some way) as technical communication? let us explore my subscription list of 30+ podcasts and see what else we find.

most obvious examples:

10-Minute Tech Comm
interviews with scholars and practitioners of technical communication. this makes it more meta, perhaps, but it still counts as sharing information about technical topics. (also--I was in an episode, did I mention that?)

RadioLab 
presenting science-y information and stories in creative narrative forms. definitely a form of public tech comm.

What Trump Can Teach us about Con Law
legal communication is arguably a more narrow sub-discipline than most, but law is very technical. Roman and Elizabeth break it down and make it relevant. that counts.

The Infinite Monkey Cageinformal, comedy-infused, very science-y discussion panels, with episodes based on a theme like space travel or the immune system. the show mixes informative with entertaining very well.


and then a few slightly less-obvious examples:

Lingthusiasm
there's a lot of technical, science-y stuff related to how we use language (mouths and tongues and air and frequencies, not to mention unicode and twitter). and though it's sort of hard to think of it as such, language is a technology in its own right. Gretchen and Lauren make all that technical stuff very fun. (sidenote, I kind of can't wait to read the book Gretchen is working on.)

Ways of Hearing
music and sound and how our bodies and technologies mediate those things. so much about this is inherently technical: see above.

The Sporkful
food and cooking = technologies. most of the time this little show is human-interest stories and entertainment, but Mr. Pashman gets pretty technical about all kinds of food things every so often. they even settle debates from listeners about the practical ethics of grocery store lines and free ice cream samples.

Succulent FAQ podcast
horticulture and plant science, even if discussed mainly in hobby-ist terms, count as technical topics, I say. this one is more how-to than any of my other examples, so that makes it especially similar to traditional tech comm.

others I can think of but don't subscribe to myself-- Planet Money, TED Radio Hour (and most TED talks in general), Song Exploder, StartUp, and Car Talk (even if it is all re-runs now).

I'm sure there are dozens more out there, ranging from specifically how-to-ish all the way up to generally educational in some way. can you help me think of more? feel free to add to the list.

reflect, revise, reset

I am preparing to teach an online technical communication course for a handful of graduate students.

it is an exciting and slightly daunting prospect, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity. teaching online is fun. teaching graduate students will be new. hopefully I will love it. hopefully the students will love it too, at least a little bit.

as I've started putting together assignment sheets and syllabus sections, I've gone back to the files I have from my first semesters as a graduate student, way back seven years ago. my experiences from then are inspiring my preparations now in a messy but helpful sort of way.

the class I will be teaching is not going to be exactly like the first technical communication course I took in 2011. there are no PhD students at my new Louisiana institution, and there isn't quite a full tech comm graduate program, either. we offer a certificate in Writing for Business, Industry, and Technology and a related MA degree in Writing and Linguistics. my work here will fit into the little tech-comm-shaped niches around and among those programs and the offerings for our undergraduate emphasis in professional writing.

it's been interesting to look back at the work I did as a brand new graduate course and revisit the thoughts I was thinking about everything I was learning. one of the essays I turned in to Dr. Kelli Cargile Cook at Texas Tech in 2011 starts out, after one boring sentence that sets the stage, with a million semi-rhetorical questions:

"Who is qualified to create or enforce a definition of technical writing? In the face of rapidly changing technologies, will a static definition be at all important or useful? What is the clearest, most accurate way to make sense of our place as people who write and communicate among extremely diverse communities? What commonalities among those communities are worth emphasizing? Are any of the basic truths about technical communication universal enough build a profession upon? Will it be possible to include all the essentials without being completely vague? These questions and many more continue to shape the process of figuring out who we are, what we do, and why it matters."

that's six questions, all crammed into one opening paragraph. another professor of mine, Dr. Richard Johnson-Sheehan, always gave me pointed critiques when I included too many rhetorical questions in essays for his courses at Purdue: "your reader is going to lose patience with these," he would say, implying his own quickly waning interest.

I think I've learned to agree with him, by now. I do still love questions, but I understand now that they can be a tiresomely slow way to introduce one's main point.

one day soon I may remediate that whole long, rambly essay into a less-long, less-rambly blogpost. that could be fun. for me anyway. possibly useful for anyone out there who might wonder what I really think I'm doing with my academic life, too.

definitions of technical communication (and of rhetoric, or writing, or art) are still, forever, being debated. my own place in this disciplinary debate is still debatable too. malleable. amorphous. emerging.

I know a lot more now than I did in 2011. and I know much, much more now than I did seven years before that when I returned from studying abroad, declared myself an English major at Utah State University, and eventually started this blog. a whole decade and a half of experience has ways of teaching one things. sometimes without you even noticing.

it's August, 2018. new things are happening. the world and me look so different than they used to. it feels like a beginning--expansive, wild, wide, and uncharted. a chance for new rules. better habits. but it's hard to know what the best new habits might be. so much of this new life is going to be unfamiliar for a while. disorienting.

teaching experience and academic credentials have piled up on top of me over the years. those things have given me some grounding amid all the chaos of finishing one thing and beginning another. the transition has felt long. May 18 was almost a dozen weeks ago, and my new semester at Northwestern State is still weeks away. as much as this feels like a beginning, it's just as much middle, and partially an ending, too. as soon as August 4 gets here and Purdue's commencement ceremonies are over, I'll officially officially be Dr. Amelia Chesley, with a real PhD and a diploma in the mail, with an exciting tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor. soon enough I'll have this office in Keyser Hall arranged just how I want it. I'll have a phone in that office, and faculty meetings to go to and everything. 

I still have a million things to learn, at least.

fall semester, 2017

if all goes as it supposedly should, this will technically be my very last fall semester as a student. I am not sure how I feel about that yet.

I think I feel less optimistic than I was feeling last fall. this year is so different, so pressure-filled. so seemingly monumental in all its changes and changing. a final year. slipping away already. counting itself down from 11 months and a half to only 11 months and a quarter, just like every year but also in an extra-bewildering way now. the idea I can't help but swirl around in my head over and over again is: there will never be enough time.

and maybe that idea is right. but also... maybe... I'll deal with my finite amount of time just fine.

I will have to. we'll all have to, and so it goes.

today's writing music: Solar Fields
today's re-reading: Kathleen Fitzpatrick
and today's prooflistening: poetry

fall semester, 2016

no courses to describe this time around. just teaching some of same old things, working on learning how to be a real academic.

this is the weekend before the semester officially begins, and for days campus has been buzzing with students and faculty and that grand, subtle feeling of autumn ambition and learning-ness that I have loved for so long. it has been an exciting week.

I have just finalized the syllabus and assignments for my Business Writing class.

I am making lists and planning to dedicate this much work time to libraries, that much to notebooks, just enough to the undergraduates, and all the leftover time to my research gig.

and after work I will bake and eat, and read more stories, and walk and daydream, and water all the plants on my windowsills.

in sixteen weeks I'll be better at being a real academic. and it might be snowing.

it feels so good to be where I am. lucky me.

reflections on teaching online

the online summer class I've been teaching ended last Friday, when all the last final projects got turned in. as of five seconds ago, all the grades are tallied and posted and submitted. hurrah! two weeks til fall classes start...

did any sort of learning happen over those 8 weeks of summer term? on my end, definitely yes. I hadn't taught online before. during the spring and beginning of the summer I attended conference panels galore about online writing instruction. my wonderful mentor Kelli Cargile Cook spoke about the best practices she's developed and studied over her career. friend David Grover from Texas Tech presented on his dissertation research--all about how underprepared graduate students are when they get the chance to teach writing online. at Computers & Writing, I met the brilliant and generous people behind the OWI community website. so many awesome resources and inspirations. it was terrifying, but encouraging.

I was arguably more prepared (on paper, anyhow) for this course than for anything else I've ever taught in my life. most other things I've ever taught involved sticky notes with tentative 6-point outlines and thoughts, all scribbled down mere hours before the lesson. sticky notes don't work for online classes, though. instead, there were dozens of PDFs, a screencast video introduction, a website thing, bits of Blackboard fiddling, many many emails, and many Slack messages.

the slick, fancy Slack messaging app suggested itself as an especially appropriate online teaching tool for professional writing. I'd been hearing about the app on all the podcast advertisements, and I figured my bundle of Business Writing students could benefit from some exposure to it. with help from friend Michael, I poked around and tested things out and got everything set up just how I needed it for the various sections and projects of the class. hosting the whole class within Slack was disorienting for students at first, but most of them caught on quickly and enjoyed the interface. we didn't have quite as much fun as this Zach Whalen fellow seemed to have with his students on Slack, but ah well.

as the course got busier and summer ticked itself relentlessly into the past, I found myself wishing I could be sure my students were reading the announcements I made and the updates I posted. is there such a tracking device? my search just now brought me to this detailed list of Slack shortcuts and tips. there is a way to see who has logged in to Slack-- I'll have to explore that option next semester. it may or may not tell me who has read which channels. this piece might be something to share with students as they set up their Slack accounts for my class--hopefully they'd find it helpful. I need to remember the "reminder" function and the "pin file" function, for important information that students might lose track of too easily. the user-name policy also sounds pretty useful-- one way to maintain a sense of professionalism.

benefits a face-to-face class include students seeing each other and talking to each other a lot more, instead of merely performing for me and my syllabus of requirements. I'm not sure how well my students got to know each other. I did create an "off-topic" channel and let students have it to themselves (I checked now that class is over to find 4 lonely little posts there). our Slack space stayed very to-the-point and business-oriented, a place where work got submitted and readings got "discussed" within minimum wordcounts and with little dialogue. next semester, I'll have to incentivize more student-to-student communication and discussion. this boils down to an odd form of pandering bribery and forced-ness, which my soul squirms and recoils about just a little. I like to think that as an undergraduate student I would have been utterly happy to talk to my fellow students of my own accord (very not true). who needs incentives for that? but that's my vaguely-more-enlightened and far-less-shy gradstudent self talking.

my course was 99% asynchronous, and I so wished that I could have all 17 of my students in one channel at the same time. more focused, immediate discussion could have been way more useful. all the best online courses I've ever taken have included a synchronous Skype or chat-room element. but the way online courses are marketed in this program means students sign up expecting to work at their own paces and not expecting to show up to be counted at any particular time. because of that, I didn't feel like I could design a course with much, if any, synchronous discussion time in it at all. this summer, I asked students to sign up for one-on-one video conferences, so at least there'd be a sliver of synchronous discussion. this worked pretty well. for next semester, I may consider assigning small-group conference meetings, perhaps to discuss peer review work more directly. the institutional constraint here is a challenge to work around. perhaps it deserves to be brought up with my supervisors and program directors. we'll see.

this weekend I talked with a few potential community partners about linking my fall Business Writing assignments to their local, real-world business contexts and needs. it's lovely to know people who run small, local businesses in this lovely college town. wish me luck getting myself organized to incorporate some of those ideas for the next batch of scattered, disembodied online students.