Home Stretch
As the busiest semester of my life draws to a close on this final 90-minute stretch of highway returning from the Thanksgiving holiday, I’m relieved and panicked at the same time. On one hand, most of my academic duties for the semester are behind me. On the other, many tasks will present themselves in the coming days. My pop culture students take their exam tomorrow and begin group presentations this week. My theory students turn in their lengthy annotated bibliographies Friday. Some students are enrolled in both classes. To them I extend my sympathies. In all seriousness, it’s been a fast ride this term. Not only did I fly to Los Angeles and Chicago for conferences within a month of each other, during the same month I also flew to my hometown in the Midwest to attend to a family matter for a week and coordinated reviews for a division of a regional conference in my discipline. At the end of this marathon my body decided to shut down and contract a non-flu bug that kept me in bed for three days.
My students deserve much credit for grasping 300- and 400-level theories in my extended absence. The pop culture class in many ways has taught itself via the course blog and Twitter. In the theory class we relied on Skype and the department video camera to keep group presentations on schedule. I want to examine these classroom tech topics more closely once the semester is officially complete. Many research and pedagogy ideas came to me at the National Communication Association annual convention in Chicago earlier this month that I have to find time to digest. In short, I attended a daylong special seminar on intersectionality and feminism that may turn into a book project with other scholars. I also made some connections at an amazing panel focused on using social media in communication research. Google Docs and Wave may give my research agenda just the boost it needs to study social media in the classroom.
The Twitter project made perfect sense for the pop culture class. However, the non-graded use of Twitter by my students for their other classes makes a compelling case for Twitter adoption by other professors in my department. I have noticed an uncommon offline connection between the communication students via their online chatter. They started creating their own course hashtags and making associations across courses and professors. I’m looking forward to our Twitter wrap-up in class Wednesday but feeling bittersweet about letting my tweeps go.
