Proposed immediate solutions for faculty and staff: Allow people to decide for themselves how to teach or do their jobs while the pandemic continues. This may include online or hybrid solutions. This disburdens multiple levels of administration. It places a slightly greater burden on Teaching and Learning Services, but only to support the level of blended …
Category Archives: Academe
Aaaand, some good news
The latest cancer update is that after this week’s CT scan, everything is steady and controlled, which is how it’s been for awhile. Sometimes I wonder if I should even keep doing these updates unless something goes south. Here’s where we are at. I’m on a kind of oral chemotherapy called a TKI. It works …
A Simple Guide to Hybrid Classes for Teachers
This is a guide to setting up audio and video for hybrid courses, especially seminars. This based on some research I did this summer: I asked friends who have genuine expertise in the area, and with my partner Carrie Rentschler and our friend and colleague Darin Barney, we ran some audio experiments with Darin on …
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On Resistance to Better Academic Writing
A recent Facebook post by John Sloop asked why academic writing isn’t better–more creative, more varied, more polished. This has been on my mind lately, as I spent a month in March with the copyedits to Diminished Faculties. On one hand, the book is very intentionally academic. With A Political Phenomenology of Impairment as a …
Three Defence Strategies for Living at Work
This is written by an academic for academics, but maybe it’s useful for others. Tl;dr, here they are: Only have work email on your work computer and keep it in one place in your home. If you have other devices, keep it off them. Order your off hours. Have Zoom free workdays. Sometime in the …
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Here’s why online teaching is sort of like chaos right now
I just got a query from a student reporter, who asked, “did McGill provide professors with enough Zoom training this summer?” I can only imagine what students are seeing! The institution provided a lot of training. So much so that by mid summer I was “webinar-ed out.” Specifically, credit must go to Teaching & Learning …
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Recording Your Lectures #4: techniques
This is the fourth in my series of posts on how to record your lectures. Tl;dr: a little focused practice up front will help a lot: spend some time experimenting with positioning the microphone, and how you address it. Record a bunch of short takes saying the same 1-2 sentences and then listen and see …