Rural school near Milton, North Dakota, 1913. Courtesy of Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, Fargo.
This week’s readings were all about using technology to open up teaching and learning and to take advantage of the “abundance” of teaching materials, expertise, and networks. These pieces all strike me as fine, as far as they go, but they mostly reveal an understanding of what makes for good teaching that is fundamentally different from mine. Read more
Time waits for no man.
Today I discovered another virtue of the Faculty Initiative on Digital Identity: it provides deadlines. This is a truth I have long understood about writing, about the academy, and about myself: it’s really hard to produce anything worthwhile without a deadline to focus your thinking. When I’m productive, it’s because a deadline is looming, and when I’m unproductive, it’s because I have all the time in the world. The need to build out my digital identity forced me to undertake some (small) writing tasks that I might otherwise have put off. Today, I wrote a brief intellectual autobiography for my “Scholarship” page, a task that I had put some idle thought into but which I had never bothered to actually complete. The necessity of filling in that blank white page with something forced me to finally be rigorous in thinking about and writing down some of the unifying themes of my various scholarly projects. So if nothing else, the deadlines inherent in this initiative (as much as they seemed tediously quotidian to me yesterday) are forcing me to think more clearly.
Woodville’s Charge of the Light Brigade (courtesy of Wikipedia), another famous exercise in futility.
This week I have been thinking about digital identity as a process, an insight that emerged from a serendipitous overlap between an email conversation with a friend and the the week’s readings for the UMW Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative. Read more
Yesterday I got to spend the afternoon reading and writing at Hyperion Espresso, Fredericksburg’s main coffeeshop. It was a real treat, because life has been so busy recently that I haven’t had time to sit and think and absorb the atmosphere. The experience didn’t disappoint, because I was joined in my lazy Sunday afternoon contemplation by a group of reenactors in costume. It was a classic Fredericksburg moment.
According to this new study out of the Open University in England, couples without kids are happier than couples with kids. And gay couples are the happiest of all. So apparently back when they were calling you gay in middle school, they were really onto something.
I have often argued that the square, blocky buildings of the 1940s-1970s that dominate American cityscapes don’t deserve all the hate that they get. A lot of them have very nice proportions, and I find their minimal adornment preferable to plastic historical pastiche that has dominated architecture since the 1980s. See for example my favorite plain midcentury building in out neighborhood of College Terrace in Fredericksburg, the Washington Building pictured at left. And now there’s a blogger who shares my feelings. Actually, he feels them much more strongly than I do, strongly enough to have developed an extremely impressive (and impressively productive) blog on the subject, Midcentury Mundane. I cannot express how much I love this blog, both its concept and its execution. Plus, lots of bonus Upstate New York love, and he even covered Fredericksburg’s “Big Ugly” Although he called it “not a very interesting and engaging building,” obviously I secretly love it. It provides your eye such a nice break from the cloying cuteness of Caroline St.
I had a great bunch of thesis students this year. I learned halfway through the semester that a bunch of them had been carpooling to the Library of Congress and had dubbed themselves “the Mack Pack.” (Also, apparently they dubbed my feedback a “Mack Attack,” which wasn’t meant to be complimentary.) They all presented their work at the History and American Studies Symposium last Friday, and they all did a great job. Read more
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to sit in traffic on I-95 for hours and hours of Thanksgiving traffic between Fredericksburg and Long Island. It occurred to me, watching the long parades of brake lights, that no state has made a classy red, white, and blue plate since the New York Statue of Liberty Plates in 1986. Now that was a classy, goodlooking, illustrated-but-minimalist plate. More recent takes on the flag-waving license plate genre have seriously failed to live up. Read more
