How great is teh Interwebz?
18 May 2012 1 Comment
Iz amazing. It’s Friday, so forgive the lolcat. But really–in the last several days I’ve made terrific new connections, helped a colleague find resources, seen someone’s new kittens…. I’ve also updated my academia.edu page with conference and invited talks. Other great internet things this week:
- I’m very excited about the Folger Shakespeare Library’s decision to release all of their editions, which are generally pretty good, for free online.
- I’ve been using Astrid as my to-do organizer for a couple of weeks now, and I like the flexibility of it. I can include all sorts of notes, share tasks, etc. Astrid is a website, so you can use it from anywhere, and it just hangs out in your browser as a tab instead of taking up space on the screen.
- Orbis is an online map that helps you calculate travel time in the ancient world. This is a great tool not just for scholars but also writers of fiction. I hope it expands to cover more time periods….in the course of some of my own work I needed to find travel times in the early 20th century, and it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
- If you’re new to Twitter or considering using it, the go-to, must-read source for getting started is Katrina Gulliver (@katrinagulliver)’s 10 Commandments of Twitter for Academics.
- If you’re in an alt-ac (alternate academic) job, take the survey and check out the results. There are a lot of us, and we can all benefit by knowing more about each other.
Got more? Post them in the comments!
International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo: Friday
13 May 2012 1 Comment
Friday morning there were several sessions that looked interesting, including ones on Arthur, the medieval in books and TV series for children, and music. I opted for a session sponsored by the Kommission für Volksdichtung on ballads. There was a small audience. The first scheduled presenter thought the session began at 10.30, and arrived late; the second presenter went first and gave an interesting talk on The Ballad of Otterburn, which I’d researched a bit in my first Shakespeare book. The first presenter then took her turn, but her computer didn’t work and there was no tech assistance; in addition, her paper was kind of a muddle. There were two more presentations which were both good; the last presenter, though, came from Europe and said that because of the long trip he hadn’t brought his laptop at all and had to borrow someone else’s, which I thought strange and unprofessional. Why wouldn’t you bring your own? They’re portable!
I had a fun lunch with colleagues I’d never met before from the BRT group. It was great to meet all of them in person for the first time.
My session was in the early afternoon and was a great success. I cut out some of the film theory I’d originally written in the paper, thinking it might be too far removed from the general areas of the experiants, and it was a good choice–one person even said she’d been worried I’d talk about music theory and she wouldn’t get it. I explained that one reason I present at interdisciplinary conferences is to make sure that what I’m writing is accessible for instructors who might use it, but who don’t necessarily have a heavy music background. Anyway, I had tech support for the slides, the paper went well, I got lots of positive feedback and good questions, and was able to chat with a lot of interested people afterward. The session was the very first one sponsored by the new Queen Elizabeth I Society, and was organized by Anna Riehl Bertolet and chaired by Kavita Mudan Finn, both of whom were terrific and I’m very happy to have met.
I was disappointed to have to leave that afternoon–next time I’ll definitely stay for more of the conference. It was an easy drive there and back.
I should note, though, for anyone who hasn’t gone and is planning to, that the campus is huge and sessions take place all over, so it isn’t always easy to session-hop. I guess I could have session-hopped within the building of my first paper, or maybe between two close buildings, but even when the buildings were close, sometimes the seating arrangements in the session rooms made it difficult to leave or enter without a lot of fuss. I’m also glad I had my car, because the hike from lunch to my own session was a long one, and I don’t think I’d have wanted to carry all of my computer stuff up and down the hills. So if you have any mobility issues, plan on having transportation of your own so you don’t have to walk everywhere or rely on the buses, which may or may not get you where you want to go in the time you need.
Overall it was a great experience, and very valuable for me in testing out book material and getting the project on more peoples’ radars, and I’m looking forward to going back.
International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo: Thursday
13 May 2012 Leave a Comment
This was my first time at the Zoo, as they call it, and it was simply terrific. I wish I could have attended for more days–perhaps next time. I arrived Thursday afternoon and got my parking pass and hit the exhibits. (My friend Natalie has great pictures of the exhibits over at Funnier Than Grading.) It was the best spread of exhibits I’ve seen at a conference. Not only was there a huge primary exhibits hall, there were several smaller rooms that had been transformed into shops. Powell’s of Chicago had taken over one room and packed it with books, many at huge discounts. I got a copy of a book I wanted for my current EM project for just $5, marked down from $114. In addition to the books, there were vendors of manuscript pages, antique coins, harps, and horns and knives. The horn and knife guys–Griffinstone–saw my affiliation as JMHP and offered to let me play one of their horns, but I wasn’t sure how good I’d sound–it’s been decades since I played any brass. So the vendor did instead…it would have been a terrific sound to call the dogs come in with. I did pick up some fun gifts and made a list of books to check out later on.
I had dinner at the Great Lakes Shipping Co., a steak and seafood place recommended on some food site or another. It was fine, but I understand now that the cool place to kick off the conference is Bilbo’s pizza. Next time. Dinner took longer than I expected, and I missed the beginning of the evening session I wanted to go to, so I went back to the hotel, where something really odd happened.
I wanted to charge an item form the lobby kiosks to my room. I provided my room number to the desk clerk, and he said, “No, that can’t be right—did you mean XXX?” I showed him my key packet, which had XXY written on it, and said that they keys had worked for XXY and that I was unpacked in that room. The clerk asked for my name and said that everything was straightened out. Several hours later, after I had gone to sleep, I awoke to hear someone using a key card in the door to my room. I had locked the door both at the handle and with the bar, but the person continued to try to access the room—the key car was working, in fact, but the other lock kept the door from opening. I went to the door and opened it with the bar still in place, and a man was standing outside with his key card. He said that he had been assigned the room, and indeed his key packet also read XXY. I told him that (obviously) the room was already occupied and that he would need to sort it out with the desk. About five minutes later the phone in my room rang: it was the desk clerk. He asked who I was and why I was in the room. I gave my name and explained again that I had checked in earlier in the day and been given key cards for room XXY, that the cards obviously worked, and that I had been sleeping when the other person had tried to open my door. The clerk asked for the room number again, and then repeated the request for my name. Finally I asked if everything was straightened out, and the clerk indicated that it was. It was bizarre, and what made it worse was that I’d gone to sleep early because of a migraine. Also, the place was quite a drive from WMU, and while I don’t want to stay in the dorms, next time I’ll pick a closer and, I hope, more security-minded place.
Once more for good measure: calling NCer
09 May 2012 Leave a Comment
Once more for good measure: calling NCers “crackers” isn’t any more acceptable than discriminating against anyone else: http://ow.ly/aOfu2
End of semester survival: a round-up
25 Apr 2012 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: academia, research, teaching, writing
There are some great posts and articles coming out right now about surviving the end of the semester. Before I link to those, just a few thoughts of my own.
- Perhaps the best advice is that you can’t care more about your students’ outcomes than they do. So don’t spend extra hours trying to figure out ways for Stu Slacker to pass. Don’t mark up a paper the same detailed way you would a colleague’s article for publication. Streamline.
- Arrange your grading intelligently. This has to be done before term, as part of your prep and syllabus construction, but it’s well worth the time then to save time at the end of term. If you have four courses and they all have term papers due, stagger the due dates and make them due well before the end of term. Use the last week or two weeks for student presentations, and grade these as they are given with a rubric. Make a few comments, record the grade, and give the finished rubric to the student when zie’s done. For courses that don’t require long papers, don’t assign them. Assign short papers throughout the semester–again, staggered between courses–instead. Then the final exams can be quick to grade. In my survey courses, I assigned short response papers, a presentation, and three exams, which were listening ID and multiple-choice. I had them graded by the end of the exam period.
- Use rubrics. Everyone says it, and so few do it. With a stack of blank rubric sheets, you can work through papers and other assignments quickly. Contrary to popular belief, you can give detailed feedback on a rubric if you so desire. But if your students are taking Music Appreciation to fill a requirement and you know they will never, ever listen to Beethoven again, you can also decide not to spend the time.
- Set aside grading hours, and put them on your schedule on your office door and website. Don’t answer the door during those periods, and don’t look at email. Just grade and get it done.
- Make time for yourself. Find 15 minutes twice daily when you aren’t subject to email or anyone knocking on your door. It can be as simple as taking a long stroll around campus–away from your department. Or keep a yoga mat in your office and stretch. If you have the time, nothing beats stress and helps put things in perspective like exercise. If you have a large stack of papers, grade half, go for a run or a swim, and then do the second half. You come back fresh and are less likely to burn out during the grading process.
- And this time of the year is terrible for allergens. If you’re tired or sluggish even without sniffles or sneezes, that may be wearing you down. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist. Yes, that will take some time. But time is like money–sometimes it takes some to make some.
On to the links:
- End of semester coping strategies from the Chronicle of Higher Education Forums (free to read, free sign-up to post, no subscription to the Chronicle required).
- Humane teaching policies for the entire year, also from the CHE Forums.
- Use the Pomodoro Technique to set time goals and break times for grading, writing year-end reports, and just about anything else.
- Surviving Crunch Time from InsideHigherEd.
- Rubistar is mainly for K-12, but you can easily adapt the rubric templates here for higher ed grading
- This personal piece asks for reflection: what did you learn? What will you do differently next semester?
- Managing the last class meetings from Colorado State U.
- Don’t forget the end-of-semester checklist (ProfHacker)
- And if you did get burned out, some strategies for recovery. I especially like the “statement of availability” suggestion here.
Readers, any other favorites or suggestions?
