June 27, 2020
Visit, Updates, and Notes covid-19: day 109 | US: GA | info | act
Todd and his son Alexander came for a visit today. Henry seems to play pretty well with the older boy and enjoys his company. It’s always fun to hang out with Todd, as we are both educators, travel enthusiasts, and literature buffs. We chatted about the usual and made pizza for everyone. It was a fun night.
I finally updated this site to the latest version of MediaWiki. I’m always reluctant to that, as updates with my current skin always seem to break the cite. That was true this time, too, but I managed to get everything working in short order, including the upgrade to the next version of Chameleon.
Ideas for journal posts: Lowest Common Denominator; “Children and Fools”; and Why I Don’t Use D2L. I linked them to make myself write them.
I also have to start preparing my syllabi for the fall.
World Literature
I think I will need to make reading quizzes that require some writing, instead of just multiple-choice. Yes, I will have to grade them, but it would require a bit more engagement by the students. Should I use Discourse? I’m leaning toward yes.
Genre Fiction
I’ll probably just run this as-is, using Discourse, as I think I have everything set up already. I can’t really think of an easier approach for this one. (For some reason, this class is very difficult to teach. I think it has to do with the weirdness of Area B in the core. It seems like a remnant of a moribund community-college approach to the core. It’s just some silliness we have to deal with, and my chair’s approach to scheduling is just recycling. Therefore, I always get the same classes over and over. I’d kind of like a bit more say.)
WritDM
Add reading quizzes? Require specific set of articles, like Macon stuff. A big headache for students each semester is choosing their articles, and many choose high-profile or non-notable ones, despite the training and my recommendations. WikiEdu is requiring an application for the fall. Maybe I should just do it on my own and see how it goes? I think that WikiEdu might cause more confusion than it actually helps. This could be the time to test that theory. I could probably continue using some of their training modules.
