Winding Down Before Gearing Back Up.

The semester is thankfully nearly over. While I do have about 150 pages of grading to do, I get to start that on Friday, giving me plenty of time to work it all out. And while I do have two major papers, drafts for both are finished (thanks to me forgoing Thanksgiving). There will also be a take home exam, but I’ve seen the questions and they are interesting and thought provoking. Plus I have time to gather quotations and write outline before I know which question I’m answering.

So semester break is rapidly approaching. Only it won’t be a break. Yeah, I’ll take a few days off, and take it pretty easy most of the rest of the time, but I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Focused Proposal, another Presentation

For those keeping score, I spent Thanksgiving break writing. I wrote a solid draft of both a paper on Artificial Authors (mainly on BRUTUS, the storytelling machine) and a research proposal. It is the latter that I want to talk about, because I will be doing a short presentation on it in a little more than an hour or so.

All semester, I’ve been trying to focus, to narrow down my topic as much as I possibly could. A few weeks ago, with the last presentation, I came up with something. The idea I am looking at, from the large view, is how new technologies are brought into the classroom. So I decided to take a single case and look at it. Specifically, I decided to take a technology that is used in classrooms, but hasn’t been for very long: PowerPoint.