Sunday nights have always made me nervous. I want to get everything ready for the week that I can — not that there won’t be things I can’t prepare for, but that I want to be as prepared as I can. And I never am. I invariably oversleep the alarm on Mondays. I need to show up early to get things ready and I can’t find parking. My hair ends up being a mess, or I forget my coffee.

But once I get into the office or the classroom and the swing of things, I am OK. Everything will fall into place and those things that don’t, well the Devil take the hindmost.

I definitely did not grow up a beach girl. Given that I lived in Colorado, I guess that’s not all that surprising. But I am a convert. There’s something about sitting on the sand, watching and listening to the water, talking lazily that I really enjoy. I do worry about the tanning issue — I’m whiter than Casper and don’t want melanoma, but that’s why God (or his humans) invented sunscreen. There are few places I don’t feel like I should be doing sixteen things at once — and the beach is one of them.

We’re in the library computer lab today doing research on “issues related to Afghanistan”  and different genres of media — a topic and method I have left intentionally broad. Students keep asking me, Caitlin, and Meghan — “Now what exactly am I supposed to do??” and I keep turning the questions back to them — what do you think you are looking for? What is a good blog? How do you know your resource is a good one?

I think there is this assumption by faculty and students alike that when you get to college you can just “go do research” on a topic. This usually involves going to Google and using the first couple of hits. But good research is something else entirely. First of all, sometimes the first hits under Google aren’t good ones. The question of whether or not you should be able to use Wikipedia is still out — and how do you evaluate other sources when .org can be purchased and at least at one point whitehouse.com was a porn site (whitehouse.gov is the actual site — and I haven’t checked in many years if the other one is still porn so maybe it isn’t anymore).

Real research means using different search engines, finding something in one place and checking in other places to see if it is true, triangulating different resources — online news, blogs, video with “traditional” newspapers or television news. What about talk radio? What about cable news shows? Who or what is a valid source and why should we check — if it’s out there, can’t we trust it? What are the sources and means of production of information now?

These are big questions for anyone to wrestle with — and beginning college students, and busy college faculty already have a lot on their plates. Now we’re talking about shifts in the nature of information and learning between when faculty were students and their students’ sitting in front of them and that almost means retraining yourself all the time in what’s out there, how to trust it, what to think. No easy feat, especially in the dog days of July.

And why do so many sayings relate to dogs, anyhow? : )

Well obviously I have left this blog to go all to hell — I started teaching the summer prefreshman course and then promptly got sick — went from a 2 day migraine into a stomach virus. I thought of the terms “sick as a dog” more than once — and of the many, and varied things we have seen Willa throw up. For a couple of days there, I was giving her a run for her money and I HATE throwing up. But enough about that.

The summer course is going really well — I have a great group of students and two really strong TAs with interests in teaching and subject matter. Both are more organized and together as undergrads than I manage to be most days. I definitely think my own style blends disorder and design — hence the fact that I managed to finish a doctorate with the amazing ability I have to lose things like my iPhone that I loved so much (I’m still thinking it might have fallen out of my bag at the Denver Airport and someone picked it up. Shiny electronic things like those have legs, they do).

So Caitlin and Meghan are keeping the class on track and I am getting better (and trying to juggle an article almost ready to send out with an IRB continuation and wishing my own GA worked for me all summer). I need three heads and six arms. Or something like that. I guess I’ll have to work with caffeine for the time being and get back into the rhythm of teaching and researching and advising as my working summer gets under way.

Here is the post I asked them to do.

Complete the following sentence: Reading is…

My life

My favorite escape

Sometimes my demon (triggers migraines, I have too much reading to do)

A way to learn to see the world

A way to learn more than just what we’re taught

I so desperately needed that break. I couldn’t blog, could barely read the news online, could just lay and read regular books and go home for the weekend and forget about things. In fact, I think that worked so well that I am getting cabin fever and am in a day-long conference on Multi-User Virtual Environments for learning (also cool things like Twitter and other things) and I am really excited to be here. Last week was a good week for writing and got one article off and another close to sending so I am feeling better about it all — the academic life, the life life. Chris and I even went to the beach on Saturday and didn’t even read my book. Chris and I just sat in the sun and talked and people watched. It was long needed.

How are all of you? How was the rest of your May and the beginning of your June? I’ve been missing you and missing blogging (that’s how you know you’re ready to come back to something, I think, is when you actually miss it) so please let me know — if any of you still read me after all these long weeks. : )

I ended up having a migraine yesterday — perhaps thanks to the fluorescent lights and staring at my screen too much. Today is much better — we’re working on specific projects with people to implement into their classes. The more concrete we can make new technologies, especially by creating exact ones, the better I think. It’s hard to really conceptualize a wiki or a blog when you’re not sure why or how an educator would use one.

I think I need to spend a week off the grid, out in the mountains or desert. My eyes are crossing from looking at a screen too long. And let me tell you how much I don’t want to go to the grocery store on the way home, but the animals (us included) are out of food.

I probably don’t need to eat, really.

The conference is over, I am working in a summer hybrid tech camp for faculty, and things are slowing down, bit by bit. So I turn my thoughts to something else — traveling and taking pictures, which are two of my favorite things.

Recently, with some leftover grant money, I was able to buy a Nikon D40 SLR with two lenses. In many ways, this is my dream camera. Four or five years ago, I found that I love to take pictures when I saved up birthday and Christmas money and bought a higher-end consumer camera — not an SLR but a nice enough camera where I was able to get some good pics (which are on my flickr whose password I have forgotten and need to resuscitate). My father gave me his 1977 Nikon SLR — a real camera, with two lenses, this past year and I have loved using it.

But digital photography has just gone past film in so many ways — it’s cheaper and easier, I can edit the photos and post and send them online all over the world. Tools like the Nikon digital let me play without assuming a high knowledge of shutter speeds and aperature and, when I want to, I can go completely manual and play with those settings.

By the weekend I should have some time to get out and shoot some film, and in a couple of weeks I go home to the West and can shoot my head off, in a manner of speaking. I am SO looking forward to it.

As a special treat, in thinking about travel, here’s a neat little site I found on Unclutterer — One Bag: The Art and Science of Traveling Light.

This morning, as I trawl the web for nuggets of interest, I find on Higher Ed a great article about professors online.

The article points back to another on in the NYTimes this weekend about professors’ online presence — about how and what having a blog or a MySpace or Facebook page means in the relationships we have with students. Disclaimer here — I have a very active Facebook page and my students often add me as a friend. I also use it to keep in touch with friends from different schools, alumni from my program, and join new groups in my area of interest. I am very careful, however, about the information I put on it — no phone numbers or addresses, no comments about school or students. There’s really no need.

But then there’s ratemyprofessor.com

That site allows students to enter comments about us and our teaching, and without our knowledge necessarily. So yes, I look it up just to see what people have said and then I become really conflicted. I am a young professor, in her third year, and very much trying to find my way. I also teach specific freshmen classes about thinking, reading and learning on the college level, as well as graduate hybrid courses. And so far, across my ratings (and under two names, since my name changed), most of my students like me as a person and don’t find the class hard. In fact, they even call it easy — and I have to say that worries me.

I want to challenge them more, and push harder for all of us on our thinking. Other colleagues in my department get rave reviews for doing just that — teaching challenging, deep courses that make a real mark on our students. Am I going too easy because I am worried about the reviews and any impact they might have? I know that teaching more challenging courses won’t keep me from tenure — in fact, that’s probably  just what I need to do.

I think I have been too easy, especially on the undergraduates, because I am learning and thinking about what it means for them to be academically literate. I know too, that the ways in which I teach don’t come across as hard — I’m not a lecturer and we do lots of group and paired work along with whole class discussion. But I need to push myself and my students harder. They can do it — I don’t worry about that. I just need to stop pussy-footing around and give back to them what my very best teachers gave to me: the desire and ability to keep learning and stretching my understanding throughout my life.

Ready or not, here I come.