Always a bit of whiplash to read the brilliant work in composition studies. I really shouldn’t do it; it depresses me when I compare it to the seething vista of nonsense that counts as pedagogy in speech communication. There’s nothing but discussions of how to grade, how annoyed they are at students, and how teaching…

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Feeling kinda useless right now. Wish I was a bit more helpful or had some means to be helpful. I am still a firm believer that formal education is one of our finest ways to avoid the state of affairs we find ourselves in. This education is unfairly constructed, serves the interests of established power,…

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Tried to sing this title to the tune of “Waiting for a Star to Fall,” but no luck. It appears now that I won’t have access to play the game until 4AM tomorrow, so no dice tonight.  Been writing a lot, but not here, so here’s a post that contains several threads, kind of like…

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Finished with my grade submission, so I’ve been doing some reading and watching these amazing bird feeder videos. They are so great, and I get to see a lot of birds I wouldn’t normally see. I don’t have a yard, or really any good scenery here in my New York City apartment, so this is…

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Joined a friend’s podcast and did all the things I know shouldn’t be done when you are giving a talk in an online format, but it was still a pretty good time. Used it as an excuse to put off all the actual work I need to be doing, yet again. Good times.  The podcast…

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What will it take for us to accept that the public speaking course is a composition course, and we should be in frequent, deep, constructive dialogue with those who teach composition and work in writing centers? The pandemic, and the quarantine, have shown that public speaking instructors who have not invested in, or looked at,…

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What has quarantine done, and what did you expect it to do? Quickly approaching the start of month two, and I have little to show for it. A lot more hours logged in video games, a lot less reading done. Writing promises and obligations have been furloughed, by me, so that I can stare at…

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I was meant to be presenting this idea at the Third International Workshop on Debating at the University of Florence this weekend, but obviously that cannot happen now. I hope you are safe and secure wherever you are as we ride out this pandemic. Here’s the video version of the presentation – I tried to…

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Yesterday I thought about, wrote out, and recorded some thoughts about my process of designing online instruction for university students. I thought I would make this video to share with you some of those ideas that have helped me ground everything I’m doing online in good principles, practices, and care in order to make sure…

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In my last post, I gave the higher elevation view of how to put a debate together for an online course. Here’s my specific rendition of it for my debate course. The course is about the significance of large debate events for the public -whether they matter or not. Each unit has a debate with…

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