As promised, my reaction to the most recent Digital Campus episode Some background: Digital Campus is a biweekly podcast from the Center for History and New Media, dealing with issues of technology and the college classroom. If you’re teaching college students, you should be listening to this podcast–it’s the most consistently intelligent and useful discussion [...]
Tags: academic blogging, digital campus, history, teaching
Posted in academic | 3 Comments »>Somewhere back a few weeks ago, I passed a milestone of sorts–the end of my first year teaching. I almost missed it, in the middle of everything else I was trying to keep track of. Presented for your amusement and edification, a brief (and certainly incomplete) accounting of what I’ve been up to in the [...]
Tags: commencement, teaching, vacation
Posted in academic, personal | No Comments »>I can’t really say that I’ve been following the sf-writer “pixel-stained technopeasant” kerfluffle with interest, because there isn’t much that’s -interesting- about one guy making an intemperate rant and two hundred people finding various ways to tell him he’s wrong. I do see one thin thread running through this particular intemperate rant, though, that connects [...]
Tags: integrated media, new media, science fiction, teaching
Posted in academic, science fiction | 5 Comments »>I have been trying to figure out what to say–I’ve been trying to formulate a clear and articulate response to what happened at Virginia Tech this week. I don’t have one. What I ended up saying to my class yesterday was that I don’t know what to say, but I know that we need to [...]
Tags: teaching
Posted in academic, personal | No Comments »>The problem is not, really, that I don’t have anything to say. It’s more that I have too much to say. I’ve got so many things that I want to write about that they’re all getting jumbled up with each other when I try to actually sit down and post. Such as: the expected “what [...]
Tags: miscellany, strange horizons, teaching
Posted in academic, personal | 2 Comments »>The timing of the Christmas tree (and the associated good cheer, etc) is particularly fortunate, since the end of the semester is making me a little melancholy. I’m looking forward to my courses next semester, and it’s nice to have a little break from the lecture schedule, but I’m going to miss these students. It’s [...]
Posted in academic, personal | 1 Comment »>UC Berkeley. Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi. Oh lovely weekend! Daylight Savings has -finally- left us, and not a moment too soon. (Several weeks too late for my taste, actually, given how grim the mornings have been.) And it’s gotten chilly, which makes it actually feel like autumn. (We’ve even had the first fog of [...]
Posted in personal | No Comments »>My lecture course this semester, the one on the history of premodern science, is divided into six major units. Each unit deals with a major geographical region, and the first lecture of each unit is a walkthrough of the geography, political history, and agricultural development of that region. There are a number of reasons for [...]
Posted in academic | 3 Comments »>You can tell that it’s midterm time. There are the obvious indicators–more students waiting in the hallways to speak to professors, library study rooms all booked up. There are other indicators as well. Walking through campus, I’m seeing a lot more jeans and sweatshirts, not as many stylish (and styled) outfits. At the start of [...]
Posted in academic, personal | 2 Comments »>Today in class, the history of math and engineering in West Africa and in Egypt. It’s a great topic that I hope I did justice to, because looking at the development of mathematical concepts in very different cultural contexts can possibly help us not take math too much for granted–it’s not just a fixed thing [...]
Tags: history, science, teaching
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