Introduction

An Introduction:

Hey everybody, my name is doug and I'm a learnaholic. When I'm not doing academic work I spend my time playing drums with local musicians and practicing traditional Wing Chun Kung Fu. However, I don't see any of these activities as separate. That's just how I operate. Here, I'll show you a little bit.

My Teaching:

Teaching for me is an everyday activity. I'm a fan of moving through the world as a series of learnable and teachable experiences. But right now I'm spending a lot of energy working to understand the connections between the way I learn in Wing Chun Kung Fu and the way I teach. Kung Fu asks me to think about the act of fighting as a conversation: one in which I am sensing and sometimes manipulating the energy of another person. When I think about teaching in this way I understand my role as working with students to demonstrate strong/weak and effective/ineffective approaches to the work they're engaged in when they work through their ideas with me. It's all in the interaction with pushing, pulling, and asking and receiving questions. When the situation calls for it, I'll interject.

To see what I mean, check out this video featuring my Sifu's Sifu, Ip Ching, son of Ip Man.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qnHlLiYmVXA

My Technology:

Technology takes on a very functionalist application in the way I do things. Think of me as the old curmudgeon who assails "modern" technologies but enjoys using learning how they work and can be applied. What can I say? I'm weird. But I have a pretty strong ability to make tools work for me in the ways I desire. I work across three main computing devices: my desktop computer, my laptop, and as of last month, my iPad. All of these take on different roles for different tasks.

When home I work on my main thinking station. I like this space because I can multitask easily with two screens, which makes reading, researching, communicating, and taking notes much easier. Needless to say I spend too much time there (I'll post pictures of all my workstations in my next post).

Synchronized with my desktop is my laptop. Big surprise, it's a mobile workstation. Nothing special there, but now I only have to take it out of the house on days where heavy composition is on the docket. This is because...

I just bought an iPad. Last year I began getting excited about the slew of reading devices jumping out of the woodwork. After a ton of investigation and a deep assessment of my technological desires, I landed on the iPad for the interface and design commonalities to my computers. With the backup/syncing services I use, this device now enables me to go to a conference or spend a full workday outside of the home with something that doesn't weigh five pounds. I also love reading on it. That's new for me.

My Professional Profile:

I am a scholar of rhetoric, and my area of specialization is in cultural rhetorics. As of May 5 I officially slew my first year as a doctoral student. That is, unless this summer still counts as part of my first year (that whole AY thing sometimes tricks me). What I am interested in as a scholar is pedagogy in the big picture, by which I mean the curricular and the systemic. I understand the practice of education to be a deeply rhetorical practice; the way we imagine students—and the way we imagine systems to shape those students—reflects back on the intentions, values, and experiences of the architects/practitioners. The work I want to do is the assembling of educational environments and the teaching of teachers.

With three years of teaching experience I am only starting to feel like I got my pedagogical sea legs. There are things that I do well, like working one on one with students and building macro level activities in the classroom. But in between those pieces I am still shaky with scaffolding assignment sequences. Teaching this summer online is already helping me develop new strategies as I adapt to the new environment.

More on that business as we move through this course together. Until next time.