Some pleasant things I'm enjoying in the interstices of the busy times...sharing with the world, as is the blogging custom, on the off chance that some one of you may also enjoy them.
1. To Be or Not to Be: That Is The Adventure, by Ryan North. Published by BreadPig, originally a Kickstarter, now available for the general public. A "choosable path" adventure version of Hamlet. You don't have to be Hamlet - you can play as Ophelia if you like, or even King Hamlet. This is truly Awesome Sauce.
2. Persian Letters, by Montesquieu. A delightful melange of social commentary, political satire, and philosophical analysis. I can't believe no one ever made me read this in school.
3. In Treatment, season 2. HBO series set in the office of therapist Paul Weston; each episode is a single session with a patient. Compelling portrayal of the complexities of human relationships.
4. Girl Genius. Webcomic combining multiple tropes well: the mad genius, the steampunk (though the authors
eschew that label as inaccurate, preferring "gaslamp fantasy"), the rollicking adventure. I absolutely advise you to start at the very beginning, else you'll be very confused.
5. Gone Home. Very cool, brand-new video game. Just reviewed in the NY Times on 18 August. Available for Linux, Mac, PC. Absorbing gameplay, and a slew of memories from the '90s. It's games like this (and Braid and [eventually!] Miegakure...) that give the lie to the foolish generalization that video games are all about mindless violence.
It's mid-August, when a young academic's fancy turns to thoughts of ...
THE FALL SEMESTER.
In my day-job capacity in my college's Center for Academic Technology, I've been here all summer, supporting various programs around campus, from new student orientation to summer sessions to the LEAD Academy. But life gets quite a bit busier as my faculty colleagues start heading back to campus (mentally and physically), prepping for the start of the next academic cycle.
For the first time in quite a while, I myself won't be teaching in Fall 2013 (the seminar I was hoping to do didn't look like it would attract enough registration), so there's a fairly large chunk of time and attention I can now divert to my tech-side work with faculty, particularly in effective use of Canvas for online course support. There've been a large number of changes since people logged out of their courses in May, and one of my major goals is to encourage everyone to pay attention to the changes, rather than assuming things are the same as last year.
(By the way, that's a hard habit to break, since our last LMS notoriously didn't "do" updates, except maybe once per year. People are not yet fully used to the idea of dynamic [dare I use the buzzword "nimble"?] SaaS. Updates and fixes every three weeks? Unheard of! Absurd!)
Another work goal I have for myself is to work more closely with our campus's Freel Library. Our Digital Services librarian Pamela has been doing fantastic work developing and promoting resources at Freel, and I want to do my part to help. It helps that our respective resource-sets naturally overlap, and we have, in fact, already done some mutually-supporting development in the past year. "More of that" is the watchword. Watch-phrase. Whatever.
Anyway, I've got some fun projects in the planning stage too. One involves organizing a campus screening of the brand-new documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply; another is a panel discussion about Henrietta Lacks, hooking in to the college's First-Year Experience reading of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; another is, of course, my ongoing work with Dungeons & Discourse.
In closing, a goofy video I made this past weekend for our faculty, and which caused a little spike in my Twitter traffic yesterday...
I'm going to be testing out a new idea on Twitter - Zella's TechTips, a regular tweet in which I'll mention a piece of software, or a practice, I'd recommend to my colleagues who teach. Sometimes, I have a small nugget or comment to share, and posting it here at the blog seems like a bit of overkill - so we'll see how the cross-platform thing goes!
By the way, I already posted (just a couple of minutes ago!) my first Zella's TechTip - follow me at @gpetruzella if you want to see how this plays out, or the other random things I tweet. (Btw, I forgot to do this on today's inaugural tweet, but henceforth, I'll be using the #zellastechtip hashtag.)
Hmmm... I can just imagine the harrumphing of those who decry the online world - "even writing a blog post is too long-form for today's scholars? O tempora! O mores!"
Yes, I've been too distracted to set myself down and post here for the past two months. I've been doing a fair amount of other things, including micro-blogging (does that count? does anyone actually refer to Twitter that way anymore?) and, you know, actual job-type stuff too.
But in case you are that reader who was actually looking forward to Part 3 of my last posted series... I may yet share my own workflow at some point, but if you're looking for excellent information about, and tools for, managing your own online footprint, may I point you at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)'s Guide to Practical Privacy Tools, a very nice, organized starting-point.
3. In Treatment, season 2. HBO series set in the office of therapist Paul Weston; each episode is a single session with a patient. Compelling portrayal of the complexities of human relationships.
