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Score one for edtech

Today was finals day. Two classes had their finals due this afternoon. These were done remotely and submitted online. To celebrate we, of course, went for a bike ride. It was a fast 20-miler, and then I got right back to it. I started the day knowing I had 144 papers to read, and knowing that 48 of those were going to come in today.

And for that hour, just a bit more than an hour, my empty mind drifted over to the questions I’d asked on the two finals. One class had four simple questions. Two hypotheticals I was asking the students to work through, and then two questions that were a tiny bit subjective. In the other class I had the students watch a program and answer a bunch of questions about it. You can run through all of those questions quite a few times while you’re not thinking about anything else.

I hope I caught all of my typos. I hope the students did well. I hope it was all clever enough to let them show what they’ve learned, how they’re thinking, what they’ve possibly gained from their time in my class.

Not too long after we got in, Canvas, the platform the university uses for online classwork, crashed and died.

One class had finished their allotted final window. The other was mid-final. About four people hadn’t submitted their final yet. Well.

Also, my online students have their submissions due on Monday. Who knows how long Canvas will be down? And some of those students manage very regimented schedules. Well.

There was nothing more from the university than that. During finals. Well.

(Update: It came back overnight, in fact, not too long after I shared my contingency plans with all of those students with work still outstanding. Problem solved. Can kicked down the road. Everything is now due next Tuesday.)

But I can start grading that one final right now. (Mini-update: They’re doing well.)

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

That is the view at Ballymastocker Strand.

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4
May 26

Out here playing games

As a child, I got a bunch of these peg board games from my grandparents. They came as a set, but I guess they didn’t come with a way to store them, because I’ve always kept them in a cardboard King Edwards Imperial Tobacco box that my grandfather gave me. (Fitting them all into one box became a game itself.)

They’ve been sitting in a filing cabinet for a while, and I dug them out this weekend while looking for some class paperwork. (My filing system is a game of another sort.)

It seemed like a good time to not stare at a screen, so I pulled the games out and tried to figure out how they all worked. Most of them were a mystery to me, as a kid. Not that they’re overly complex, but I guess they were just beyond my patience at the time. There’s one game I knew well, because I’d been to a Cracker Barrel. I played a few rounds of that, trying to remember the pattern I devised to win. (I’d devised a pattern, which is a thing I would do, of course, but it’s been decades.)

All of which is to say, I’m telling myself it takes real talent to do this.

The good news is the other games now make sense. I need to play around with them a bit more to see which is the most entertaining.

Anyway, 144 more papers to read and grade. Two finals are due on Thursday. The rest come in next Monday. Suddenly peg board games seem like fun, don’t they?

In September of 2024 I devised a 25-mile time trial. It is a big circle with nine turns. Critically, eight of them are right turns. It involves going down the hill and back up past the haunted house, into town, by the park, through the sheep pastures, and then taking that left turn. Then you go a mile, turn onto a busy state highway, go 2.3 more miles and turn right, to get back into the countryside. Then you eventually get to the downhill that is always in the headwind, which makes the downhill feel like an uphill. You go by the crazy house and then into the woods, until the road ends. You turn right again onto another highway, one which you can absolutely fly on for four miles, before turning into another small town.

You go through three towns on this route. You pass many more warehouses. And I need to rename this. It’s not really a time trial if you’re just getting slower on the thing.

I am getting slower on the thing. Twice I’ve done it so far this year, and these are the slowest times in the series.

Much of that is about me, of course. But I can blame the weather, too. Today I had headwinds from three different directions!

If you’d like to go there, ask around for directions to Tulan Strand.

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27
Apr 26

The bridge between here and there

This is the last week of class. The last week for my two in-person classes. My online class runs another week. I don’t set the schedule and I’m not sure how this works. They start on the same day, the classes end a week a part and the finals are six days a part.

In a practical sense I don’t mind this; I know about all of the things I must grade in the next three weeks. (The official count: a lot.) I wonder if a student taking both online and in-person classes notices. I have one student this term in one of my in-person classes and one online, she hasn’t said anything about it. Maybe the students don’t mind it because, in a practical sense, they have a fair amount to do, of course.

The online students are now working on social media platform audits. This is a four-step process that we spread out over five or six weeks. It is a substantial portion of their grade. With each of their submissions I send them a lot of feedback. We are between steps two and three, with the third being the dress rehearsal, if you will. There’s a lot I try to offer, most importantly it must be done quickly since they don’t have a big turnaround. Also, they have a final to worry about.

This week in my in-person classes I have one final lecture on Tuesday and group presentations on Thursday in my Rits and Traditions class. In criticism we’ll have one final conversation tomorrow about some written content, and one final documentary on Thursday. They’ll both have finals due next week.

Then grading, and some grading, and probably some grading. Also, there are meetings.

So, busy-busy.

Late this afternoon we tore ourselves away from work for a quick 60-minute lollipop route. There was no candy, sadly. It just looks like a sucker on a map. I noted that it felt sluggish, but mostly because the last few miles felt that way. In the early going, I was as happy as could be.

We went down a road we haven’t been down since last July or so. I’ll give you one guess why.

The bridge is still closed, but not closed-closed. If you are properly motivated that sign is just a suggestion. If you go over the bridge right now you’re traveling over firmly packed dirt. It’s just a highway overpass, so it’s probably safe as can be. Hearing all the cars and trucks roar beneath you as you’re on an out-of-order overpass might be unnerving.

It’ll probably be another year before they get done with this project. No one seems to be in a hurry to fix it.

That beautiful spot is Dún na mBó

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24
Apr 26

Getting us to the weekend

Just computer work all day today. I had a committee meeting this morning. Trying to stay up on the grading for much of the rest of the day. We had a spirited little bike ride this evening, caught the wind on the way out, which made me feel strong for the first two-thirds of the route. I had a 30 mph sprint for no reason at all.

The cattle weren’t impressed.

To be fair to the snobby bovines, I was moving pretty slow just then.

Otherwise, I spent a few minutes updating the rotating headers and footers for the blog. There are now 124 banners for the top of the page and 125 for the bottom of the page. If you click refresh you’ll see them all, eventually, in a randomized order. Here are today’s additions.

Lights at the Guinness Museum, Dublin, Ireland.

Signage at the Guinness Museum, Dublin, Ireland.

Sliabh Liag Cliffs, Ireland.

Malin Head, the northernmost point in Ireland.

A toy store at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

A sporting goods store in Ballina, Ireland.

A pedestrian trail sign at Tulan Strand, Ireland.

Bozorth Hall on the Rowan University campus.

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23
Apr 26

Counting down

On campus today, the students in my Rituals and Traditions class enjoyed a group day. Next Thursday they’ll be presenting their work and recommendations to the athletic department, and we used the time to start putting together the first few finishing touches on their work. Everyone looks calm about it, which both pleases me and makes me just a little bit nervous.

In Criticism, I reacted to last week’s student suggestions. Someone said we should watch a gymnastics documentary. I searched around and settled on the first episode of “Simone Biles Rising.”

It has, for my money, one of the better cliffhangers in a documentary. The class actually groaned, almost as one, when the credits rolled. This was a good example of some of the media aesthetics we’ve been talking about, and also gets into some other mediated effects, and editorial choices.

We got home just in time for a quick ride. We did our first river run of the year. Down and back is 15 miles, and you can get back in time to clean up for dinner at an almost reasonable hour and, happily, we’re not even racing the daylight on that route at the moment.

You can tell this is when we are on the back from the river because my lovely bride is riding from the left to right.

That’s how web browsers work, right?

This is at Dún na mBó.