Tag: schedule

#E17, Polymorphic Frames of Pre-Tenure WPAs, #4c14

/ dmueller

Our CCCC roundtable wrapped up a few minutes ago (exactly :05, according to the entry-scheduler’s timestamp). Eight of us planned and proposed this as a session that would be delivered simultaneously in Indianapolis, live, and also via Twitter, using scheduled tweets with the #4c14 hashtag with links to YouTube versions of the presentations, complete with closed-captioning. I finished setting up the scheduled tweets a few minutes ago–on Monday the 17th–and thought I may as well embed the full playlist into a blog entry, too, both to capture the event here and to circulate it yet again for anyone who might have missed it.

I’m sure there is more to say about it–both about the mix of pre-tenure WPA perspectives collected here and also about the production process involved with planning and putting together the slidedecks, audio files, and transcripts. I’m also interested in when this is delivered and circulated in time. How many nows? With any luck, there will be time enough for thinking through this more and considering the value in session-wide durable artifacts (hyper-deictic time capsules) after we’re all tick-tocking on the other side of this busy week.

Dawn of the New Semester

/ dmueller

New semester dawns in a little over one week. The syllabi for ENGL328 and ENGL505 are ready (I have two sections of the first, one section of 505, plus an independent study). The grad course is also a new prep for me. Our graduate students in Written Communication at EMU aren’t obligated to follow a sequence, but ENGL505 is positioned more or less as the first course (i.e., lowest numbered course) in the Professional Writing track. We’re reading a short stack of articles, a few books, and working through a couple of different projects that ought to familiarize everyone with selected frameworks for doing rhetoric: dramatisms, stases, appeals, situation, and process/procedure (I realize the slash in this last item stands rather like a stick of dynamite, judging by Ian Bogost’s recent entry, which I’d like to come back to one day soon in an entry of my own).

ENGL328: Writing, Style, and Technology is a course I’ve taught 8 times in two years (twice online in the shortened spring term; you might not realize this, but 8 is actually a vertical infinity symbol). I think of it like this: if ENGL328 was a horse and my other teaching assignments were its rivals in a horse race, it would have lapped every other course seven times. Or infinity times, depending on how you decipher such ambiguous alphanumeric symbols. Oh, de doo-da day.

Between now and Wednesday, Aug. 31, the first day of classes, we are also unpacking our boxed and binned office wares in the refurbished Pray-Harrold. We can get that underway this Wednesday. And then in the week between this Wednesday and the start of classes, I have—as of now—9.5 hours of meetings showing on the calendargh. To be fair, our annual department retreat (shouldn’t retreat be set in left-leaning italics?) has the biggest share with its six hours, and the others are on different days. And there’s a good chance I will have to ditch one of the other meetings because local school children don’t have their first day until Sept. 6, and Is. starts Kindergarten. It’s a question with choices: What to do? A. Hire a sitter. B. Skype. C. Take her to the meeting with me. D. Go for ice cream.

One last note about the new semester. I mentioned that we begin on a Wednesday this fall. For Monday evening classes, such as the one I am teaching, this means we will have our first meeting on Sept. 12. The university calendaring committee adjusted for this by setting the last day of classes on Monday, December 12. Exam week begins on Tuesday the 13th and runs a full week. Just wanted to note that it feels odd (especially when figuring out a class schedule) to end on a Monday late in the semester. Call me old fashioned, but I after creating schedules for this fall’s classes, I’ve realized how much I prefer semesters with x number of whole weeks starting on a Monday.

Appointment Slots

/ dmueller / 4 Comments

I saw the announcement about Google Calendar’s appointment slots feature a little more than a week ago, and the various reports of its availability reassured me it was being rolled out gradually. Until yesterday’s CNET report, though, I didn’t realize the reason I wasn’t seeing the feature had to do with viewing my calendar as four weeks at a time. The appointment slots feature showed up when I switched to the weekly view.

The spring term is winding down such that I don’t have much occasion right now to use this for scheduling office hours, but I will definitely give it a try in the fall. Just in tinkering around with it for a few minutes yesterday, I learned that the appointments are exceedingly easy to schedule, that the notifications are prompt, and that appointments, once scheduled, show up on the Mozilla calendar I use offline (and for keeping multiple calendars in one place). That it’s built into a system I already use for my calendar makes it a better option than Tungle.me, which I tried this spring term. Trouble with Tungle.me is that I don’t think to update it, and I don’t do enough to push students in its direction for appointment-making. Selecting one of Google’s appointment slots requires the scheduler to have a Google account, though, whereas Tungle.me’s appointments can be booked without signing up for an account. I remain undecided about the magnitude of this difference and will have to watch whether it makes any difference in the fall.

The appointment slots feature also gets me thinking about integrations for our University Writing Center, which has not yet adopted a booking system for writing consultations. We’re not there yet, but it would be ideal if we could create a scheduling system built on the Google Calendar API that would rival WCOnline.

Clouds to the Left of Me, Clouds to the Right

/ dmueller

Cloud Parallax

Finished fine-tuning my cloud-parallactic contribution to a roundtable at the CCCC in Atlanta later this week. We forecasters are predicting a sitting-room (i.e., entire row to yourself?) crowd for N.30 session, 12:30-1:45 p.m. on Saturday. As for the fine-tuning, I’m pleased enough with the changes, and I had to work especially hard to resist incorporating more than a cliche or two from Stealers Wheel, e.g., “Trying to make some science of it all, but I can see it makes no science at all.” Yes, the paper is–it’s hard to believe–better because I axed a half-dozen lines like this from it.

And in case you can’t make it to N.30, maybe because you are at the Braves-Phillies game, the good news is that we can catch up on Thursday in the poster galleria, Room M301, Marquis Level, between 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., where I’ll be standing quietly next to my first ever attempt at an academic poster. For the full poster experience, it’s best if you pre-install a QR code-scanning app on your mobile device.

Soccer Media Guide

/ dmueller

The 2010 Park University Men’s Soccer media guide is available, and it’s worth a look–impressively produced. I say this not only because Ph. is in there (p. 11), but also because I used to do the work of creating materials like this (and in many ways not quite like this, not this good anyway) at PU. Without going into too much reminiscence about how shoestrung and cobbled together pieces like this once were, let me just say it has come a long way, indeed.


The guide answers every important question about the Pirates this year, except this one: Is August 12 too soon to book a trip to Orange Beach, Ala., for the NAIA National Tournament in late November?

Manic Monfri

/ dmueller

Most notable about EWM’s sixth year (2009, plus a few days) is that never in a month did I write more than ten entries. I don’t know whether this is more a comment on the blog or a comment on the year or a comment on their irreconcilability, their mismatch. Whatever the causes, there was less, less than any year before considering every other annual cycle consisted of 10+ monthly entries. 2009: Tweets a-bunch, blogs abyss.

Indeed, today marks another blogday, and since I haven’t missed announcing any previous blogday, I feel an obligation to mention the historic occasion (everything, after all, is more impactful if “historic”). Cake? No. We will celebrate at home later with leftover cod chowder (simple, delicious, i.e., better than expected), cheddar biscuits, and if somebody else feels like baking them, brownies. Today also happens to be a Monfri to top all Monfries: the first day of the first week of the new semester at EMU and, for me, the last day of the first week of the new semester at EMU. Frenzied, manic. Monfri, the average of Monday and Friday, their median, or Wednesday, depending on how you mark it in your day planner. Monfri, the grue moon of academe. No telling whether today is also EWM’s Monfri, the critical moment mid-distant between its initiation and its termination. No telling.

I’m teaching ENGL328 this semester, again unpicking the triple squareknot at the intersection of writing, style, and technology. Introducing myself in the first class this morning, I mentioned that I’m looking forward to re-establishing a regular reading and writing schedule this winter (perhaps it sounded like “irregular” as I said it). It’s not that I neglected to read and write in the fall, exactly. But I wouldn’t describe those four months as acceptably disciplined or scheduled. Not up to my standards, anyway. And I gather, hints and clues, that it’s typical in first years of new appointments to experience an irregular stride, an arrhythmia attributable to figuring things out, getting bearings, settling.

Student Center

/ dmueller

EMU Student Center

I am enjoying a few minutes of light computing in the Student Center at Eastern Michigan University right now: coffee, sunlight, email, Google Reader, Fantasy Football results. I try to spend an hour in the Student Center every Tuesday. The weekly, non-essential outing contributes to my New Faculty Continuing Orientation Plan. Basically, the NFCOP goes like this: leave your office every so often, develop a feel for the place. Frequently I run into students or colleagues as I make my way across campus, and we talk. Also, I walk alternative routes, get to know the landscape, the distances. These semi-strategic excursions are refreshingly ordinary, far less in the vein of anthropological scrutiny (a la Marc Augé) than in slow, deep, you-are-here mapping (a la William Least Heat-Moon). Walks less motivated by ground-truthing this "rhetorical country" than in walking, being here.

Continue reading →

Under Cover of Maymesster

/ dmueller / 1 Comment

Starting Monday I will be teaching a blended WRT307 course for Syracuse.
Blended, in this case, means that the course meets in person, on campus for the
second week of Maymester for two hours each evening, Monday through Friday,
before shifting to twelve weeks of online interchange and coordination via
Blackboard. The course is full. Twenty students are enrolled. Count
up the weeks and you get thirteen total (forgive me for flexing those
underutilized math skills, but this number is alarmingly relevant, as you will
see in a moment).

Syracuse offers this course in other formats: a six-week Summer I
course that meets on campus, a six-week Summer 2 course that meets on campus,
and a 12-week summer course that meets online. Sections following the
six-week on-campus format remain open. They have seats available, that is.

I wondered, "Why on earth would students so clearly prefer the thirteen-week
version, which includes a Friday evening session at the end of next week, when
these other options are available to them?" I floated this question in the WP
offices and heard about how great a preference many students have for actually
meeting a person. Might be exactly right. This falls into what I
think of as the "metaphysics of presence"-based critique of classes that meet
exclusively online: they’re too virtual, too dependent upon writing and only
writing, too far removed from the material commonplaces of fluorescently lit
bodies slumped over in badly designed deskchairs, classroom style. [I can’t make
up my mind about which emoticon to insert here.]

I accept that some students might be drawn to an online section where they
get to meet the instructor for a few face-to-face sessions. When I logged
onto MySlice this week to check the class roster, I found another reason that
could explain the attraction to this section, a section with a bonus week over
and above its 12-week online-only counterpart (other than the "metaphysics of
presence" shtick or the named instructor):

The class is listed as meeting only during Maymester. For half
of Maymester, actually: one week, instead of two. Ten hours total. I
won’t be able to confirm this suspicion until next week, but that crucial
qualification, Maymester Blended or Maymester +12, does not show
up in the online enrollment system. That’s…*gulp*. Worrisome, anyway.

So I went ahead and emailed everyone enrolled to explain that most of the
heavy lifting will get done in the 12-week online postlude to Maymester. A few
days since the email, the class is full. I welcome the full class (capped
at twenty, it’s a reasonably-sized group), but I can’t help but brace just a
little bit for Monday evening, for that moment when we take an earnest,
collective look at the schedule, when I’ll have no choice but to explain the
missing asterisk next to Maymester in the registration system.