Tag Archives: housekeeping

Moving is Done!

Posted by on March 24, 2011 No comments

So, in the last few days I have moved the Devenney Teaching Hub to a new web host. Except for me mentioning this now, you should not be able to tell. However, the only data that did not make the jump was subscriber/user data. That means any students who were registered at the old site for the purposes of receiving email notifications when new material was posted…are no longer registered. Please register again using the link found in the sidebar or on the Lectures/Resources page (the article “Ways to Follow the Website”) if you would like to keep receiving notifications.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this or if you find any dead links I need to update. There are a few, I’m sure.

Post Notification by Email Disabled

Posted by on September 11, 2010 1 comment

This is just a heads up that I have disabled subscription notifications for posts and other activity for the time being. Database and plugin problems is really all I can say. When I come up with a workaround, I’ll let you know.

Update: I think I have solved things for now. Please let me know if you are not receiving email notifications when new posts are made.

HST203.SU10: Post-Final Housekeeping

Posted by on August 11, 2010 1 comment

I should have your grades finished and posted to Blackboard & Banner by Thursday (give or take), so check the system after then to see how you did. Stop emailing me.

For those of you who signed up for email subscriptions to this site (as a subscriber), I would advise you either to go in and remove your subscription to the HST 203 category or delete your account altogether (I can do this for you, if you want, just drop me an email). As the Fall Semester approaches, I will be pinging the shit out of my new students in 203, and I don’t believe you want to keep getting those updates. You are of course free to remain a subscriber, if you so choose, but as most of the material published to this Teaching Hub is geared toward my current classes, whenever that is, it’s probably not all that useful for you. You can mostly find my own stream of consciousness ranting on Twitter or my personal blog, if you are so inclined.

So, relish the rest of your summer. You’ve made it. Go relax and get down or whatever…celebrate life!

Posting my Course Evals

Posted by on July 31, 2010 1 comment

For the information of whoever wants wants it, I have posted to the Teaching Hub student evaluations for the various courses I have taught over the years. This is by happenstance a rather incomplete collection, as I have taught at a number of different universities and community colleges, and only some of this material is in electronic form. As such, the only evaluations up currently are the ones from my last year at Grand Valley State University. Hopefully I will be able to fill in the blanks on some of my past teaching experiences over the next month before school starts again, but I can’t guarantee anything.

What exactly has possessed me to do this? Well, again, it comes down to me wanting to embrace a more productive transparency in my teaching. There has always been a part of my professional personality that has bought heavily into this idea of an academic as independent, untouchable auteur beholden to no one; what I did in my classroom, so this thinking went in my head, was my business and no one else’s (if I wanted to poke a few people with sticks, I suppose I could label this attitude as “Tenured Egotist,” made all the more ironic in that I’m not tenured in the slightest, but I digress…). Lately, I have grown rather bothered by this attitude. The Teaching Hub itself is one aspect of me attempting to move beyond this academic bitchiness about openness in teaching; posting my teaching evaluations is the next step in the process.

Also, last week, I found myself pinging back through a series of ProfHacker posts on the merits and uses of teaching evaluations (see here and here) until I came across a post from last year by Brian Croxall that really planted the seed in my head. As usual, the digital humanities borg infects my meatspace computer without even trying.

Anyway, the die is cast, and from now on, I will post my course evaluations to this site, warts and all. If nothing else, you can all be entertained by the amusingly obnoxious comments some students feel the need to make (although I have nothing that tops a comment my Wife once received regarding an improvement she could make to her English composition class: “Teach in mini-skirt!” I mean, really…).

You can find the evaluation page located as a subpage to the Syllabus Archive in the nav bar above or by clicking here.

6 Aug 2010 Update: I have posted some more course evaluations, mostly from 2007-2008 when I was teaching for Central Michigan University. Have finally developed a good and relatively quick method for digitizing these files, so hopefully I’ll get these up quicker than I had anticipated.

HST 203.SU10: Post-Midterm Housekeeping

Posted by on July 16, 2010 No comments

Now that we have reached and surpassed the midway point for the course, I thought I would drop you a few reminders about what we will be doing next week.

First, for Tuesday’s class (20 July 2010), in addition to reading the section from Strayer Ch.4, please also make sure you read the two selections from Reilly Ch.4 (#18 & #21), as these two will figure heavily in the class activity we will be doing (after last week’s lecture bonanza, there’s very little lecture for this week).

Second, please make sure you have completed Practice Editing Quiz #2 before class, as I will be giving you Editing Quiz #2 over Passive Voice at the end of class.

Third, please remember that your rough drafts for the Critical Book Review are due on Thursday (22 July 2010), as you will need them during the Peer Review Workshop. These do not need to be complete rough drafts, but there should be enough so that your peer reviewers have enough to look at in order to provide you will decent feedback. You will need to bring two copies of the Peer Response Checklist with you to class on Thursday.

Finally, on a lighter note, here’s an educational video designed to help motivate you through the dog days of your summer course: