Dr. Who's Reading Room

From my course blog.

The new semester starts on Monday at both places I’m teaching this semester: the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Endicott College. As such, I’ve had to update my syllabi. Among other things, I’ve adopted the newest (second) editions of both the textbook and reader I use in my Introductory Sociology classes. It’s funny that one of my friends recently asked “How do you keep it fresh?” Well, that’s one way. It wasn’t exactly a “rototill,” but the updates were substantial enough to give me pause. I’ll leave rototilling to my upper level course. I’ve just become aware of a textbook I may want to adopt for that, replacing the current aging entries. They’re not bad books, it’s just that a lot has happened since they were published, and they haven’t been updated.

But this is but one of the biannual rituals of teaching. Others include closing out incomplete grades from the previous semester, and I have had a few of those. So no, I haven’t really been “off” this week. While it’s been a slower pace than when I’m teaching four or more courses, I have had a single-pointed focus that has not been leisure.

I can think of no better way to observe this ritual than with an internet meme, courtesy of the free meme generator app I got from the Mac App Store.

A Maze of Twisty Little Passages

I am in the throes of writing syllabi for my Fall semester courses. I’ve got two down, and three to go. Right now I am working on the syllabus for Internet, Society and Everyday life, my theme for two of many sections of first year “Seminar in Academic Inquiry” at Endicott College. Partly because I’m a little bleary-eyed about now, for not having done as intensive computing in a while, and partly because the subject matter has me spelunking deep in the dark underbelly of internet history, I’m reminded of that little game “Colossal Caves” or “Adventure” as some of us may have known it.

A Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike

I’m not dating myself, for I only have a dim memory of playing this on a mainframe at somebody’s dad’s work, while I was in the Boy Scouts and high school. Rather, I’m more likely to have read about this in the now-classic Soul of A New Machine (1981) by Tracy Kidder. Either way, the sense of attention to detail and long hours seem reminiscent this early variant of addiction to silicon, which is to say, what people did to fritter away the hours before Tumblr. Also, Steve Jobs’s resignation also recalls for us this longer view of computing history.