One of my students was on my blog for an hour and 20 minutes last night at about 2 am. (Yes, students, I know when you've been here. Actually, I know when people with area ISPs have been here and I'm assuming it's you.)
I don't know everything they read, but I do know they likely read about the last time I thought students were reading the blog -- and where I assured them I don't say mean things about them -- and they also read about my Mom dying, about Kalamazoo, and about other events in my life both major and minor. They may have also read some substantive posts, like the one about calling Margery Kempe crazy, which I've always liked. So, as Bullock says, they know a lot about me now (and about him), but that's not necessarily a bad thing. One of the original purposes of this blog was to add to the voices making professors' lives more transparent, and since my students see me for only a few hours every week, it doesn't hurt them to know that a) I have a life, b) I have other responsibilities besides their class and have a lot of work in general, and c) I'm not just a "brain on a stick," as Bitch, Ph.D. says, and I have other interests, desires, and activities, not all of them cerebral. (Of course they already know I'm silly -- I showed them the pork video!)
So welcome, students. Stick around if you like and comment if you have something to say.
Friday, February 1, 2008
It has begun
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7 comments:
You are a brave medievalist!
I second ADM. Courage!
And by the way? That pork video was insane. Yikes. I'm not sure what its pedagogical value might be, but hey, whatever.
You know, it's really not as scary as I thought it would be. It's actually kind of funny.
And as for that pork video, it has no pedagogical value (unless, I suppose, you're talking about issues of meat and animal identity, as Karl does). I was showing it before class to kill time and entertain the students who showed up early.
I know that many of my students stop by my blog -- it's not that bad to share some things with them!
A small handful of my doctoral students read my blog, and it's been just fine. They haven't spread it around at all. I've had other close calls that no one seems to have picked up on or been curious about -- such as being recognized as PG on my computer while working with a student and we're both looking at the screen.
I was a bit amused the first time one of my students found my blog, and I knew it for sure, because I started getting hits from what turned out to be an LJ post of theirs going "my medieval history tutor has a blog!" I did wonder if I should out them back, and in the end decided it wasn't a certain enough 'good thing', and after a while they lost interest. They had an interesting LJ though, including the observation that people in the UK appear to be obsessed with sandwiches, which is not one I'd heard before...
Of course it's different for me, because knowing that anonymity is almost impossible online I'd decided early on not to deliberately conceal my identity, but just to present it carefully. But our aims in blogging are rather different in the first place. All the same, your reflections on such interactions are one of the things I read this blog for...
Oh, gosh, the Pork Video. That was so adorable.
But what I wanna is know who was the freakin' Google Ninja who'd tracked this blog down within 24 hours. Because I sure didn't.
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