My wife’s school has been closed (as all schools have been locally), and has moved to remote education. My wife is trying to replace as much of the library time as she can with a new blog: Spring Hill Library. If you have preK–6th graders at home, you can safely point them to her blog.
I helped her produce her first video yesterday (using iMovie, because Premiere Elements seemed too complicated for the simple task needed), and I helped her set up her first blog tonight. She plans to do a video a day and several blog posts a day for as long as the school is closed (which probably means the rest of the school year).
I may start blogging more often again myself, as I won’t be teaching the second half of my electronics course until Fall. The logistics for running the lab remotely were a bit too daunting for the BELS staff and me, so the lab was delayed until Fall quarter (and I’m swapping sabbatical quarters, taking sabbatical at home this Spring instead of next Fall). If we are still forced to be doing remote education in the fall, at least there will be time to figure out the logistics far enough ahead to be prepared.
Today I should have been grading, but I spent most of my time doing tasks as undergraduate adviser: faculty meeting, updating proposal for our new major, informing students of cancelled lab courses and increased capacity in other courses, trying to get additional courses scheduled to start on March 30, getting approval for our plans to let students substitute other courses for the cancelled lab courses (if they are graduating in Spring 2020), approving student petitions for substitutions, trying to get independent-study forms to not require wet signatures, …
Despite being on sabbatical for Spring, I’ll continue with my administrative tasks as undergraduate director and as a member of the Committee on Courses of Instruction.
I do have to get back to grading tomorrow, as I still have 24.5 design reports still to grade in the next week, and they are taking me about 2 hours each to grade. My wife and I will probably be taking turns on the big-screen iMac, though, as neither the video creation nor the grading work well on the 11.5″-screen laptop.
International Blog Delurking Week
Tags: blog, blogging, comments
Delurking badge, copied with permission from http://www.stirrup-queens.com/2016/01/international-blog-delurking-week-2016/
Thanks to xykademiqz’s post, I just found out about “International Blog Delurking Week”, which runs 2016 Jan 3–2016 Jan 9. The tradition seems to have started in 2005 (at any rate, there are a lot of Google hits for “delurking week” and 2005, but all the top ones for “delurking week” and 2004 are from later years).
The idea is a simple one: ask lurking readers to step out from their silence to make a comment, even an inane one. Like most blog writers, I get few comments, and it sometimes feels like shouting in a large empty building—there are a lot of echos, but no one there to hear what I say.
Many of my views come from search engines and people passing on links to specific posts, but I don’t really know who is coming to my home page or reading on an RSS feed, aside from the handful of folks who comment regularly. (And a big thanks to them—it helps me believe that my audience contains real people, and not just spider bots crawling the web to link to my posts.)
Tell me something about yourself: are you a student? a faculty member? a home schooling parent? an electronics hobbyist? …
What would you like me to write more about in the coming year?
You can post anonymously if you are shy—I don’t need to know who you are in real life, just who you are as my blog audience.
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