Thursday, August 9, 2007

Assorted Preparations

Making preparations for the fall, I have posted the syllabus and in-progress schedule for the course I will start teaching later this month. Most of what is posted comes from the shared syllabus for new TAs. I decided to use the shared syllabus because it connects with a lot of the extracurricular programming throughout the fall, it synchs up in explicit ways (demanding very little justification) with the program's goals for this particular course, and it will mean for me just the second time in seven semesters (since Fall '04) that I don't have to prep a course I haven't taught once before (the two WRT205s I taught two years apart were very different).

Yesterday I fused two del.icio.us accounts into one. I set up dnmexams last summer so that I would have a dedicated space for tagging and exploring linkages among my notes entries related to qualifying exams. At a much slower pace, I have continued to post notes to the Dissarray blog (formerly "Exam Sitting"), but the separate del.icio.us account no longer made sense. Reading for exams was relatively contained; reading and notes for the diss--at this stage--feel somewhat more sprawling and dispersed. Plus, it's more convenient to keep just one del.icio.us account and, with it, just one login. I've also switched from subscribing to individual del.icio.us accounts to subscribing to one feed for my entire network. With this switch there has been a marked improvement in the steady flow of materials into the aggregator over the past few weeks.

Finally, in anticipation of a narrow job search in the year ahead, I have been mulling over my web site at the behest of our job seekers group. I'm fairly satisfied with the site and all that it includes, but I would be tremendously appreciative of thoughts anyone is willing to share--recommendations, critical asides, feedback about design, presentation, navigability, and so on. At the next job seekers meeting we will be taking a look at teaching philosophy statements, but I won't be able to attend, so I'd love to hear your reactions to what I say there, too (either in the comments or via email).

Posted by Derek Mueller at August 9, 2007 1:45 PM to Rhythms