Or at least being driven by a blog­ger engine. I got Word­press run­ning tonight. It’ll be a bit before I switch the blog over. I still have to redesign the tem­plate. But you can check out my humble begin­nings at:

http://​www.​wak​ing-​dream.​com/​i​n​d​e​x.php

Word­press is up and run­ning. Cool beans, yo!

Wel­come to Word­Press. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Thanks for the sug­ges­tions regard­ing the pre­vi­ous post. I’m still work­ing out my response plan for tech gone bad.

The lack of post­ing has been due to a crazy week at RIT and out­side. Much of my time has been eaten up with some grad­ing that I was doing for the Data­base Pub­lish­ing Course. I’ve also had a lot of meet­ings and lec­tures that I just couldn’t miss. Plus, its dif­fi­cult to jus­tify blog­ging when I’m still behind on pulling together my appli­ca­tion. It’s clear that writ­ing the teach­ing state­ment will be as much of an exer­cise in pulling teeth as the thesis was. Grrr… I really need to work on over­com­ing this writ­ers block. Oth­er­wise there will be bigger problems.

FYI – I’ve bitten the bullet and decided to switch the blog over to Word­press. In theory the switch will go down next week. There may not be too many posts in the interim period.

Oh… and for those who are inter­ested, the cur­rent GoogleAd’s rev­enue total is a whop­ping $0.20. I’m not sure where I’ll be spend­ing it all. Though it does give me a slight wry plea­sure know­ing that the postage for the check will cost them more than the check itself. Not that have any­thing against Google… I just appre­ci­ate the humor in that situation.

Today, while attend­ing a New Media Per­spec­tives lec­ture, I dis­cov­ered that the view from the last row of Webb Audi­to­rium at RIT pro­vides a sober­ing lesson for the bud­ding teacher. From my van­tage point I watched as stu­dent after stu­dent opted out of the lec­ture with the help of portable elec­tron­ics. The stu­dent imme­di­ately in front of me spent most of his time watch­ing anime episodes on his video iPod (just as an aside, I was totally blown away by it and want one). Ahead of him was another stu­dent hiding a Playsta­tion Portable (PSP) behind his note­book (the oldest trick in the book). Around the class­room mul­ti­ple stu­dents were check­ing e-mail and tra­vers­ing the web on their lap­tops. In the inter­ests of full dis­clo­sure, I have to cop to doing this once or twice while at the U of C. But I never spent an entire class alter­nat­ing between play­ing Quake III and Mad­ness Inter­ac­tive, with an occa­sional break to watch Sealab:2021 episodes. A number of others resorted to using their cell phones to txt and play games.

I’m not sure how to react to this or take it into account in plan­ning classes. The knee jerk extremes would be to either ban lap­tops (which is just plain dumb) or simply pre­tend that it shouldn’t happen (or even worse, won’t happen to me). I’m just not quite sure what the middle ground would be. Any thoughts about it?

I’ve started the process of pulling together my appli­ca­tion packet for the full time posi­tion at the School of Print Media. For those not famil­iar with it, the aca­d­e­mic appli­ca­tion process dif­fers in a number of ways from that of other jobs. Instead of a resume, I will be sub­mit­ting my cur­ricu­lum vitae (cv), a detailed account of my aca­d­e­mic and pro­fes­sional his­tory. I am also expected to submit two state­ments, essays that present my research inter­ests and teach­ing phi­los­o­phy. Each state­ment shouldn’t go much more than a page.

Right now, I’m deep into plan­ning them out. I’ve been fill­ing pages with notes about my per­sonal beliefs on teach­ing and research. The latter, research, has been pro­gress­ing far more smoothly. It hasn’t taken much time to refo­cus my media anthro­pol­ogy inter­ests on the world of print and new media. Heck, it was pretty much there already; just replace sex-​bots with Gutenberg.

The teach­ing state­ment on the other hand is vexing me. This is sup­posed to be a deeply per­sonal doc­u­ment that lays out who I am and what sep­a­rates my approach from others, not to men­tion what will make my approach effec­tive. In theory, this would have been devel­oped over a few years of TAing. Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t have that luxury, and I’m a little con­cerned about that. But trust me, that little detail isn’t going to stop this process. For the moment, I’m read­ing the wealth of online infor­ma­tion about teach­ing phi­los­o­phy state­ments. I think I’ve got the struc­tural for­mula down. The next step will be to put a first draft together. I’m trying to accom­plish that by Friday.

One of the fond­est mem­o­ries from my time as an under­grad­u­ate at RIT was being sin­gled out and favor­ably com­pared to Ben Franklin during a School of Print­ing Event. I don’t think I was deserv­ing of the honor, but it meant a lot. Franklin and I will be get­ting to know each other better in the months to come. In the mean­time, happy 300th birth­day, oh Patron Saint of Print­ing. Were you alive today, you’d be blog­ging, and far more elo­quently than most out there. Cer­tainly more so than I.