Some things I should have already told you

(1) Marcia successfully defended her thesis last week and will be turning in her final, final version to the Grad School tomorrow. Yay, Marcia! It's a very timely argument for WAC to take on digital media.

(2) And TWO weeks ago, Daniel Anderson was in town and gave TWO excellent presentations that folks in my department have been talking about since:

* The first presentation, "The Multimedia Muse: Siren Song or Learning's New Spirit" was a lecture for my department's regular Friday afternoon colloquium series. Primarily attended by tenure-track faculty and graduate students, this talk offered a "low bridge approach to multimedia":

Easy to Build

Easy to Access

Easy to Cross

My chair described it as "inspiring." And it was!

* The second presentation was a 4-hour workshop on Saturday, attended primarily by non-tenure-track faculty who teach first-year composition in my department. This was a "low bridge" approach to integrating video projects into classes. We paired up to create literary or informational videos with iMovie. One group created a really wonderful video on graffiti as folklore.

With a member of my 8010 (Theory and Practice of College Composition) graduate class, I made a video set to Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," featuring mug shots of all the class members who weren't there. We showed it to the class last week, and it was received with a good bit of laughter. (I would post it here for you, but it includes last names of students. I had hoped to get rid of the last names, but sadly didn't manage to successfully save the iMovie file, only the Quicktime version. So since I want to protect their privacy, I can't share. And, really, it probably wouldn't be as much fun for you as it was for them.)

At any rate, it was great to have Dan here. Thanks, Dan!

(3) I just finished teaching my last class for the semester. Final projects will be coming in next week. And then I'll be done! (This is not an item I could have told you before today. But the previous two items could easily have been on this blog before. It's just been, you know, the end of the semester.)