Planning Technical Writing

This summer, I will be teaching technical and professional writing. I teach this course differently than most, and I think my method works pretty well. Some people involve the students directly with real companies, which I appreciate. But my method involves on the one hand much less direct involvement but on the other much more [...]

Getting ready for the C’s, planning classes

Tomorrow at a god awful hour of the morning, I board a plane that, through a series of other destinations, will eventually get me to San Francisco. At least, that’s the plan-there’s a chance the snow will decide otherwise. But most likely, I’m off to the C’s. This is not my first conference, but it [...]

Discount Peer Response=Peer Response 2.0

I had a meeting on Friday where I described my thesis and my idea of discount peer response. At first, the person I was talking to thought it was a fine name, but when I started going through my ideas and hit Peer Response 2.0, she said that was perfect and that the idea was [...]

Discount Peer Response no more

In about 10 minutes, I’m going to a meeting to discuss my theory of discount peer response. In a few months, assuming I can still get a plane ticket, I’ll present it at CCCC (which was iffy for a bit, until I found I had departmental funding). Somewhere between now and the beginning of the [...]

Class planning, part 2

Okay. Let’s talk course goals. The way I figure it, the first step to designing a course is to figure out what the course is about. What it’s teaching. Once I know what I want to impart, what I want to talk about, I can start working up a reading list and group of assignments [...]

Side projects: early attempts to invent courses

The semester has begun, and while I have not yet actually been to any classes, I am doing my best to dive into work regardless. This semester, I am doing research rather than teaching. This is a definite change of pace for me. Over the next day or so, I intend to sequester myself in [...]

What I’ve been doing

I feel I should put some kind of prep entry. The new semester starts a week from today, after all. There are a few things I need to talk about from last semester, and then I need to berate myself for not working harder over break. First things first. While I presented on the idea [...]

Plans for preparation

My exams are coming up. Slowly. In fact, very slowly. I will have to take them around this time two years from now. But it’s not too early to start planning. I bring this up because I’ve been working on annotated bibliographies lately. Which was difficult, because I don’t feel like I’ve ever really learned [...]

Tackling the Research Question

At the start of the semester, I had a research question planned out. It was basically asking what the future holds for technology, and how we can prepare for using that technology in the classroom. Since then, I’ve refined things a bit. And in the interest of clarity, I’ve broken it down into a list [...]

The Burning Question

When I was in college, I came to the conclusion that the only way to really go through with a PhD was to have a burning question, something that kept me up at night, that demanded my constant consideration. I should say that by ‘came to this conclusion,’ I mostly mean that I was told [...]