I've Moved.

I'll be blogging at WordPress from here on out, in conjunction with my academic web page. There's an explanation of why and the slightly new focus of the blog at the new site.

Still Here!

My academic life is all a bit unbloggable right now. I'm suddenly playing my intellectual cards a little closer to my chest than I have in the past (which I don't like but which is necessary for the moment — but lots of good, if cryptic-for-now stuff coming down the pike/out soon). I wasn't teaching this semester. And everything else I'm doing university-wise can't really be discussed without breaking confidences or the bounds of propriety. So this is all to say that I'm still here despite the lull in posting and will hopefully have something that is somewhere in the realm of interesting to write about in the general vicinity of soon.

Guest Lectures, Omissions, and Dumb Visigoths

A really terrible account of Islamic Spain was posted to the academic blogosphere a couple of weeks ago by a modernist. (Not going to link to it.) It basically read like a parody of what critics of Ornament of the World make that book out to be. One medievalist (not me) responded and the author replied with ad hominem attacks against her and against medievalists in general and defended her post in an argument that boiled down to, well, it's a blog post and not a doctoral dissertation (And also: Not all cultures are equal so how dare you call me out for saying that the Visigoths were dumb? I really wish I were kidding, or even exaggerating.)

The blog post =/= dissertation formulation was on my mind this week because I was preparing a guest lecture to give in a colleague's class. It's a "presidential honors seminar," part of a program for the best and brightest NYU freshmen that includes extra access to advising and enrichment, and participation in a seminar that meets every other week and culminates in a trip  to the part of the world that they are learning about. My colleague is teaching the "Spain" seminar, and my guest lecture was the only thing that these students were going to hear about the Middle Ages. It's the guest teaching equivalent of writing a single blog post or teaching one single session on the Middle Ages in a big survey course.

To be sure, I couldn't do more than give a sledgehammer overview of the period. There's even a decent possibility that the group of students I met now think that the red-and-white alternating vouissoir is the single most important cultural development in the Middle Ages — because the Great Mosque of Cordoba is a really nice encapsulated way to talk about interreligious cultural relationships at that time and place; and because it's concrete, it works well under limits of time and continuity. I did a lot of that kind of shorthanding. I compared the mythology that grew up around the Cid to the mythology that grew up around George Washington because it was an analogy that allowed me to say a lot in just a minute or two, even though it's never an analogy I'd use in a semester-long class. I used the word multicultural, which I hate. And I used the world hybrid, which I spend a lot of time unpacking when I use it in seminars.

I showed these slides and did not once mention the word Almohad (an omission that should be abhorrent to me as a cultural historian of 12th and 13th century Spain), instead explaining that artistic and architectural tastes changed over time and that synagogues and palaces, just as much as mosques, kept up with the times.

But all of the shorthanding and all of the omission was done in the service of conveying the one main idea that I wanted them to take away: That religion is one factor amongst many, including economic interest, taste, desire for power, that goverened people's behavior in the Middle Ages; that they gravitate towards what is familiar to them without regard for its complex history; and in this respect, people in the Middle Ages weren't all that different to us. I thought that was a good takeway for a bunch of college freshmen I'd only ever meet once before they were loosed on the historic Toledo which survives unscathed in name only. It's not how I'd talk to my own students and certainly not how I'd talk to my colleagues (it's also not how I'd shorthand it for my own blog post or even for a general public talk to an older lay audience outside of a university setting) but there's still a certain integrity and logic to the talk that I gave.

So I've really said all of this to hopefully start a conversation.

We all make judgment calls and omissions and elisions when introducing material in introductory classes, and even moreso when we're stepping into someone else's class for one session or giving a public talk. I'm curious to hear what kinds of judgment calls other people make? What do skip when you're pressed for time? What would you unpack in a seminar that you leave at face value in a one-off talk? What kinds of principles or ideas or guiding frames help shape your thinking about what to leave in and what to take out?

Okay. Go.

Divided Time

I really feel like I ought to have something really intelligent to say to make up for the previous post about social media for academics and cat photos (and to get it off the top of the page) but every ounce of the fairly minimal amount of brainpower that I am finding myself able to muster is going towards finishing a first draft of the last chapter of the book, a draft that I know isn't very good but just needs to be put on paper, integral and complete-ish, so I have something to start working from, something that I can transform from its boring and derivative beginnings into a final chapter that's more fitting to the rest of the book. I really envy people who manage to blog thoughtfully and regularly and at length while getting work done.

A Hearty Welcome

... to the person who arrived at this site via a Google search for "stupid women medievalists."

What were you actually trying to find with that search term?

Or, a more plausible question, since I don't expect to get an answer from the source, any speculation, earnest or facetious, as to what someone might have been expecting to find?

I've moved back.

After a brief interlude in which I moved my blog over to being a sub-page of my professional web site, I'm back in my old space.

This was my original rationale for moving:

I began blogging in the summer of 2011 as a way to compel myself to start writing on a regular basis and not in academese after finishing graduate school. I wanted to be able to think things through the way I do best, in writing, and I thought that knowing that there was an audience, even one in the abstract, would be enough of an encouragement that I’d go beyond keeping jotted notes and could really flesh out some ideas about my work and the profession. I originally set out to find a balance between “notes from the life of a medievalist” and writing about the Middle Ages in a way that would be accessible to a general audience. It has ended up being more the former than the latter, and even as I have lately begun to write a series of posts that drew connections between medieval and modern cultural production, it’s going to remain largely what it was in terms of audience and focus. 

That said, I’d like to post a little less frequently and a little more thoughtfully and content-heavily. That’s not to say that there won’t be the occasionalanecdote, quick photo of paper ephemera, pithy short comment or photo of my cat sitting on something professionally inopportune, but I’m hoping, largely, to be a bit more essayistic, a bit more careful, and a bit less reactive. 

I was going to be switching, at least partially, over to the WordPress platform for a nascent digital humanities project I am beginning, and so I decided to take the plunge and move my professional site and blog over here, too, to keep everything in a single platform. This seemed like a good moment, then, to refocus my purpose as a blogger. I have manually imported and backdated some of my old posts that I like best and think are most reflective of the direction I’d like to take. The old blog will remain up on the Blogger platform as an archive. 

This explanatory post will be what WordPress calls “sticky” for a while, meaning that it will stay at the top of the page. Scroll down below here to see new posts. I hope you’ll find the next iteration of the project to be fruitful as the last. I’m really ambivalent about leaving behind an old space that had become familiar and comfortable to me, but excited about letting the experiment evolve.

And the fact of the matter is that a lot of what I said about wanting post a little less frequently and with more serious, thoughtful content, still obtains. But at the same time, I was finding it paralytic to consider writing in my more conversational professional voice right next to all my black-and-white professional details. I've moved the few posts I wrote in the interim back here. The location doesn't change who might or might not be reading, but somehow, this just feels a bit more comfortable. So here I am. 

Too Much-Not Enough Information

I get some pretty good statistics about the page-views for this site: country, city, hardware and operating system, search keywords, pages visited, exit links clicked. I can often tell when people visit from university networks, and can sometimes narrow it down even further. For example, I know from my site statistics that one of the fellows at the Katz Center reads sometimes from the office I occupied last year. And NYU's network even identifies specific computers when they are wired into the network. I don't do anything with this information except to occasionally make a mental note.

But occasionally there's just enough information to completely weird me out without there being enough information to assuage that sense of the creeps. For example, right now, right as we speak, there is somebody at NYU systematically reading through the archives of my blog. The mystery reader is on the wifi network so I can't tell anything else about his or her location within the university except that he or she is here. I have to assume it's innocent, but there's this nagging sense that I've been "caught." It's a patently ridiculous fear. I have always blogged out in the open. This is because I wanted to be able to talk about my work in a substantial way and my field is so small that even writing pseudonymously, I would have been identifiable. I didn't want to give myself a false sense of security that a pseudonym might have offered.

What's more, while I have strong opinions I'm civil in expressing them. I don't talk about the university or department politics or my students except in very general terms to write about the practice of teaching. I don't engage in offensive or high-risk blogging. (Okay, all the pictures of my cat sitting on my book manuscript this winter may have been a little bit loopy and even tedious, but hardly controversial.) But I still, right at this moment, feel exposed. And I'd hate to think that just the fact of blogging might be a risk. I've heard it said but I didn't believe it. I hope I can continue in disbelief.

"Aaay." (Or, What Does the Fonz Say While Grading and Jumping the Shark?)

The current iteration of the "adjunct movement" has jumped the shark.

Its self-appointed spokesman, who has been making far too much of a career out of being post-academic to legitimately call herself post-academic (does a general news-reading public actually care about sex at the MLA?), has written that her rageful, vulgar, over-the-top rhetorical style is a deliberate way of showing other people that it's possible to speak out without the world coming to an end. Except apparently it has:

Losing your job and rendering yourself unemployable technically isn't one of the signs of the Apocalypse, but it's also completely disingenuous to exhort people to do the things that have gotten you fired without admitting that fact except off-handed and buried in a comment thread.

Perhaps it's not unconscionable to ask other people to put their jobs on the line for systemic changes, but it's completely unconscionable to claim that you're being completely honest about what you're asking and about what it implies — the only truly honest one out there, in fact, because you have nothing left to lose — and then not to be.

Theme and variation on that conclusion, which also starts to get to my next point about this discussion just becoming a lot of noise, is this:

As I said the last time I wrote about all of this sound and fury, I hope that in a few years I will be in a position to do something both about academic publishing, which is my pet issue (about which I have written angrily and honestly but completely differently), and about the state of hiring, which is a far greater systemic issue. I'm fortunate to be in a department that is very supportive of non-TT faculty, so the idea that I would be in such a position isn't at all far-fetched. But that'll never happen if I were, say, to pull the house down on myself right now; so I'm going to do something that is completely self-serving while also being the thing that will position me to do something other than shout.

For the first time since I signed up for Twitter, I'm finding the cacophony of the academic Twitterverse to be far more distracting than productive while simultaneously being completely tedious. So I'm taking a social media break, if not until my book manuscript is finished, then at least until the end of January when my book-manuscript marathon is over. It's a bit like putting on my own oxygen mask in a depressurized airplane cabin before helping others with theirs. I'm able bodied, to continue the analogy, and yes I'm helping myself first, but if I were to pass out from lack of breathable air, I wouldn't be any good to anybody.

I don't want to continue to watch what is, in effect, someone having a huge professional meltdown, and that's what's come to dominate these last few weeks. It is no longer a social movement but rather has become voyeuristic social-emotional gore:

I'll continue to write in this space, and I may even post the occasional link on Twitter or Facebook, but other than that, I'm checked out. The din in my head, to borrow a turn of phrase from Cynthia Ozick, has just gotten too much.

Fact-Checking and the Job Market

The post-ac series of MLA job posting naming-and-shamings as a way to call out a broken system of academic hiring continued this week, and was picked up by Inside Higher Ed. As I noted in my links roundup last week, there's starting to be some pushback against blind, self-righteous rage as the primary response to the state of the market. This most recent effort garnered a response from Claire Potter in her Chronicle of Higher Ed. column, in which she takes on both the tone and the fast-and-loose-with-facts methodology.

As Potter concedes she has done, I have written some angry blog posts about frustrating aspects of the profession. But I also agree with her that the tone and flailing scope of this discussion is problematic and singularly unproductive. (Though apparently that puts me in the oppressive category of the "tone police.") In fact, almost everything that I would have wanted to say has been said by others: Potter herself, Historiann, and a few commenters in the Tenured Radical thread, of which Schuman has questionably declared herself victor. So this will be a quick post, one that elaborates just a bit of Potter's point about fact-checking.

This was one salvo in the back-and-forth:

In a later blog post, Schuman says that this isn't meant as an ad-hominem attack on Potter, just a reflection of the truth of the current state of affairs. I know that the market sucks and that while some good people do get good jobs, loads of good people don't get good jobs or don't get jobs at all. But the fact of the matter is that new and very green PhDs are still among the set of good people getting good jobs. I was hired into my current TT position three years ago while ABD and with no publications. The next person in my graduate program to go on the market after me (tiny program — one or two students per cohort) fared similarly. A friend in another field and with a PhD from a different university was hired into a TT job at a prestigious liberal arts school just as he was finishing his dissertation. It happens and not in isolated cases. In other words, I know I was exceptionally lucky, but I also know that my luck wasn't exceptional. And so yes, while the job market is unquestionably tighter than it was twenty years ago, to say nothing of fifty years ago, to say that Claire Potter wouldn't have been hired into her job were she applying today with her 1991 CV is nothing but an unfounded ad hominem attack that's as ungrounded in reality as a search committee that gives candidates five days' notice for an MLA interview.

I can imagine some of the criticism I might get for saying this, specifically that I'm inured to the suffering of the masses on the job market because of my own success and that having someone like me on board doesn't matter because I'm now officially part of the privileged class. But I do get it: I can see the numbers and as much as I have done well and know people who have done well, I also have friends who are struggling, taking their second or third adjunct gig or postdoctoral fellowship in the hopes that they'll get a "real" job soon. I can see that both experiences are reality, I believe that hiring should be more fair, humane and accessible than it is, and in another couple of years (inshallah) I may well be in a position to do something about it at the institutional level. But I definitely don't want to jump on board with a shrill movement that disregards some realities in exclusive favor of the ones that suit its purposes.

Readership Changes Afoot

I've decided to close the readership of my blog for a finite period, beginning in the next week or so. If you're a regular reader, if I know you in real life or on Twitter, or if there's some other reason why you ought to be able to keep reading, shoot me an email or leave me a comment with your email address in the comments section and I'll send you an invite when I change the privacy settings.

I'm Not Dead Yet!

I'm cognizant of the fact that I've not been updating much and that recent posts haven't been hugely content heavy. Beyond the usual start-of-term chaos, I'm chalking it up to my readjusting to the classroom after fifteen months on research leave and having to remember how to manage my research time while teaching, to the high holidays, and to a variety of personal nonsense. I have about five half-finished posts and a bunch of semi-academic books to review here, so this is just poking my head up above the water line with a brief plea to bear with me. I'm still here, and I'll get back to being interesting very soon!

Second Annual Delurking Day

I'm a little late in celebrating Delurking Day this year, but I didn't want to let it slide entirely. Site stats tell me that there are loads (well, not loads, but some) more people reading than commenting. So, if you're one of them, consider this your invitation to join in the (various) conversation(s) here. I'm really curious about who you all are! I've seen some blogs post a question for delurking day to give people something to delurk about. I'll do the same, going with an old but evergreen standby: Any good book recommendations?

Academic Blogging Etiquette Question

This has only happened to me once before. I'm having one of those "someone is wrong on the internet!" moments.

The fact that I'm even casting it in these terms tells me that I should just step away from the keyboard. But instead — oh, academic training!* — I'll turn it into a quandary: How and to what extent does someone jump into a conversation on a blog where she has some expertise in a related area, and clearly more expertise in it than the people who are blogging, whose expertise is ostensibly a) in the field of the blog topic but not in the ancillary cultures, and b) masters' and early-PhD level?

It was kind of a running joke in graduate school that I was "Capital-N, Capital-A, Not an Art Historian." After my qualifying examinations (all of which I passed easily, a caveat that is worth making given where this anecdote is about to go), one of which was in Islamic art history, the examining professor commented that it was as though I was doing art history by deliberately sidestepping as much of art history as possible.

With my art history issues disclosed, I pose the quandary again, this time in more concrete terms: A blog has been advertised on one of the list-serves that I'm on; specifically, they were calling for guest posts. It's a medieval art history blog written by what looks to be a group of students mostly at the University of Edinburgh. Don't get me wrong. I'm not picking on students. I think that what they're doing is pretty cool and a great way for them to write in a low-stakes forum but for a public audience while still in grad school, something I definitely wish I'd had as a student. The kinds of questions they're asking when they write about Islamic art are definitely not the sorts of questions I'd ask, but then again, there's room for all sorts of questions in this world, and plus,  I'm a Not an Art Historian.

There's one post, though, that sort of alarmed me, but I'm not sure what the etiquette would be in commenting on it. It's funny. I'm not quite but almost part of the digital native generation, a perch that gives me the unique perspective of being totally comfortable with technology like the natives but also actually understanding pretty well how it works rather than just expecting it to work, like the non-natives, especially those who used, say, early DOS machines. In spite of this, digital etiquette is something I still struggle with. I'm as unclear on protocol for academia.edu as I was when I wrote this post a little more than a year ago. And in this situation, I'm not sure whether it would be okay to just randomly comment on this blog. It's a students' forum, so I'm inclined to say I don't really belong. Plus I'm not sure whether one can just start commenting on a blog to which she has no prior connection.

And yet... there's this post about teaching Islamic art to high school students in the American south, a region where I think it's particularly important to reduce some of the "othering" of Islam and Muslims that often happens in American discourse about the faith and its practitioners, particularly in more conservative and less diverse circles. I would really want to encourage this person not to, even implicitly, teach her students that Muslims worship a god called Allah, which just happens to be the Arabic word for God and is used by Arabic-speaking Christians as well as by Arabic-speaking Muslims. I'd want to encourage her not to use dictionary.com to define technical terms in Islam and point her, perhaps, instead, to the Encyclopaedia of Islam and to some specific scholarship that was written less than 100 years ago.

So. I'd love to hear from some of you who write and/or comment on academic blogs: Do I weigh in or let it go?

*Well, it's being an academic combined with the fact that I'm up in the middle of the night combined with the fact that I just haven't had all that much to say here of late that's turning this into the subject of a full-on post.

Technological Failure

I'm having some serious issues with bandwidth and credentialing, both of which are adding up to make it impossible for me to upload photos. Since all of my Oxford posts, be they about the library or the wandering around outside the library, are going to be photo-heavy, I'm writing them now and waiting until I get back to upload the photos and post the posts. Bear with me, and a bunch of compelling, if back-dated posts will appear next week.

Update 7 Nov.: I'm able to upload some pictures now, but I can't work through the whole backlog now so they won't all be posted until I get back.

Carnivalesque 87

Welcome to the next installment of Carnivalesque, a roundup of the best recent blogging on the ancient and medieval worlds!

The Olympics are now upon us, so let's begin with a few looks back at the original Olympic Games and medieval sport:

Cambridge don Mary Beard casts a classicist's gaze at the ancient Olympics.

And the British Library's medieval manuscripts blog offers images of medieval water sports and a papyrus with winners' names.

There seemed to be a good bit of interest in ancient and medieval canines, real and in name only, in the last few months:

How do you decline "Rover" and conjugate "fetch!" in ancient Greek? Find out in a post on the names of dogs in ancient Greece  over at Wonders and Marvels.

And when is a she-wolf not a she-wolf? When the Dusthoveller is writing about Isabella, the regent of France and the iconography of the Chapel of St. Stephen's at Westminster.

Segueing into further biographies of ancient medieval women:

What's that on your head? Four updates on the head of Nefertiti from Zenobia, Empress of the East.

A saint, sister or slut? You decide after reading a quick biographical rundown of Edith of Wessex, Queen of England and wife of Edward the Confessor that offers lots of interesting details about her life and the changing loyalties of her immediate context.

Sappho, as quoted by the Emperor Julian, an adventure in the later Roman Empire.

The Olympics theme is running deep in this series of links. Medievalists on women in sport.

Medieval scribbling offers further insight into the lives of medieval subjects with doodles and mmmmarginalia and medieval illuminations and scribal practices which can be thought of as being curiously high-tech.

And to end with a total non-sequitur, because medievalists do see summer movies, choose your bat-time and bat-channel with wine in thirteenth-century England and Vandals in tenth-century Europe.

The Continued Saga of My Pageviews

I swear. This isn't going to become a super frequent or regular thing.

***

I'm getting a lot of pageviews from StumbleUpon, but when I click the link that people have ostensibly followed, it takes me to an ad, and the stats counter isn't giving me data about what post it's  taking people to. So, a request: If you've gotten here via StumbleUpon, could you leave a comment telling me what from my blog has been shared there? Thanks much.

***

Okay. I wanted funny search results, and I've gotten them. These are all in the last four days (ironically, since I reverted the blog to being invisible to Google, though I presume it takes a while to clear from the cache):

Search term: nice and new amthal
Place: Beirut, Lebanon
Result: Women Poets, Part II

Search term: you are the reason why i draw hearts all over my notebook
Place: Maharastra, India
Result: Translation Diary, Entry #5

Search term: luftmenschlichkeit
Place: Quebec
Result: Leap Post (oddly, and not the post in which I actually use the word luftmenschlichkeit)

Search term: amthal in english mother's day
Place: Al-Fayyum, Egypt
Result: Translation Diary, Entry #6

Search term: translator diary make entries
Place: Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Result: Translation Diary, Entry #2

Search term: sweden academic dress
Place: Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico
Result: Pomp, Circumstance and Sweat

Search term: complete any 8 hour appointment sims social on facebook
Place: Joao Pessoa, Brazil
Result: Medieval Video Games

Carnivalesque! (Or, One More Post About Academic Blogging Before the Actual Academic Blogging is Resumed)

I'm hosting Carnivalesque this month. For the uninitiated, Carnivalesuqe is a  blog carnival (that is, a themed collection of posts by a variety of authors) that alternates monthly between early modern and ancient/medieval topics. July is an ancient/medieval month, and the collection of links and some terribly incisive commentary will be posted here on July 28 (or thereabouts).

If you'd like more information, you can find it here.

You can nominate posts, your own or others', on all matters ancient and medieval using this form or by emailing me at sarah (dot) j (dot) pearce (at) gmail (dot) com; if you submit by email, please make sure either to put "blog" or "carnivalesque" in the subject line so your submission gets directed to the right folder.

More on Technology: Blog Search Terms

I've tried an experiment over the last few weeks in which I made my blog visible to Google searches. I was curious whether it would bring in more regular readers and what kinds of searches would bring people to the site. What follows is an index of search terms, location from which the search was (either city or especially interesting institutional network), and a link to the page that the search led to.

Search Term — Location — Page Returned

ben ezra synagogue cairo — Protestant Theological Institute, Netherlands — Little Boxes

daniel's vision writing on the wall hebrew — San Bruno, CA — The Writing on the Wall

vatican textual scholarship — Temple University, Philadelphia, PA — Bashing Textual Scholarship 

st therese of the child jesus prayer — Staffordshire, UK — Christian Arabic Paper Ephemera

dr shakshuka tel aviv — Amsterdam — Old Jaffa in Nine and a Half Chapters

bialik story — Dauphin, Manitoba — Beit Biyalik

As you can see, I've not gotten any real howlers — ridiculous searches that lead, ridiculously, to my blog. (Although I did get one spam advertising comment from the Marbella Golfing Club.) But I also don't think that the people doing these searches are finding what they're looking for. And the sort of people who might be interested in my blog or might prove interesting as commenters don't seem to be doing searches that are leading them here. I'll leave the blog visible to search engines for a little longer, but barring the revelation of some really compelling reason, I'm going to set it back to being invisible. Visibility doesn't seem to have any benefits for me or for googlers.

Reconsidering the 21st Century: Academic Year 2011-12 Technology

I've been blogging for the better part of a year now and have since joined Twitter and set up a really extensive web site/archive for my intro course, and so it seems like the moment has arrived to reflect on my digital usage.

Blogger: I'm really enjoying blogging so far. That said, this has evolved much more into a series of reflections on life on the tenure track rather than about my intellectual life. I'm still struggling with how to balance the desire to produce that latter kind of content with the kind of time investment that it would take and the nagging sense that if I'm going to put in that kind of time, I should just go all the way and publish it properly in some form, be that for an academic or a general audience. This is definitely an area where I'd love to hear suggestions/thoughts/personal narratives from other academic bloggers. How do you balance writing good content with not putting too much time in or scooping yourself? So in sum, this is still very much a work in progress, which is not a bad mirror of the bigger project itself.

I'm also using Blogger to build an attractive-looking course web site/repository for digital resources for the team-taught intro course; the main advantage to using Blogger for this is that we use Google Apps for Education here so it's is integrated seamlessly into the suite that we and our students are already using. It should make it easier for students to use the site actively (leaving comments, using discussion boards) rather than just passively (downloading readings).

Twitter: Still a novelty, so far. I was mostly drawn in by the Dorothy Parker possibilities of the #hashtag. I've still not graduated into real punniness, though, what with the sight of #afewwordsstrugtogether enough to kind of crack me up still. Time to get moving in the intelligent witticisms department, as digital slapstick isn't really going to hold its own much longer. (Actually, I'm not sure the form is much good for humor: John Cleese isn't terribly funny on Twitter, and I sort of think that if he can't manage it, then there's no hope for the rest of us.)  I do know that using hashtags, which are meant to be like post labels, as a comedic device isn't really the right way to be utilizing that piece of it. Not sure if it's better or worse to march to a different drummer on this one.

One friend suggested that using Twitter would give me better insight into my students by better understanding the kinds of technology they use. I've not yet had an opportunity to see if that's been the case since I started Tweeting at the end of term; and I suspect I'll have made a decision about the ultimate fate of the experiment, one way or the other, before I start teaching again in the fall of 2013. I haven't had any big epiphanies, student-wise, since starting to use the service. I suspect that the tempermental gulf between me and most of them is too great to be able to bridge it with more tech-usage or -savviness* on my part.

To be fair, though, Twitter seems like a reasonable place to have a sort of intermediate web-presence. By that, I mean that I'd be comfortable with my students following me even though I follow a few knitters and sometimes let my hair down a bit more on Twitter than I do elsewhere, in a way that I wouldn't be comfortable being Facebook friends with my students. I'm aware that lots of British academics tweet with their students, and I'm not sure I'd love having a Twitter relationship be quite as informal as some of those, but I think there are some possibilities here. A colleague has a theory that it's better for classroom management if your students know a little bit about you as a human being; I'm definitely not the share-in-the-classroom type, so if that theory is actually right, this could work to my advantage. That said, none of my students has found me there yet, so we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

I'm following a whole lot of medievalists and finding some useful and interesting events and articles, so that's been a concrete benefit, smallish though it is. I've just gotten added to a medieval list, and more medieval folks are starting to follow me, so we'll see; it may just be too early to determine whether this is useful or just entertaining. Following different authors and literary magazines been really helpful in keeping up with interesting essay-writing. The one definitively useful thing I've done with Twitter was to get some information from a boutique in San Francisco about how to replace a drinking glass that my cat broke. But then again, neither of those is a very medievalisty sort of thing to do.

Java: I've totally fallen down as far as my learning to program goals have gone. I was going to take on this coding-lesson-a-week program, and have managed not to do a single one. The email notifications of the weekly lessons are lurking in my inbox, unread, reminding me of my total failure. I'm not sure if I can catch up at this point, so I'm hoping they'll run it again next year. I'm using Blogger to develop my course web site, and that's actually a better decision anyway both for the aforementioned seamless integration issues and also because it's plug-and-play enough that it means that, with a careful set of directions written out, I won't have to be the webmaster for this course for ever and ever, even when it's not my turn to teach it.

iOS: I bought an iPad. I bought this as part of a grant to develop teaching materials for the intro class. I had a sort of epiphany when I used a video in class one day, the day that we were talking about paper as a commodity topic, and just the fact that I was using something that seemed like technology to my students made them much more open to talking about the idea that the advent of paper and the codex as technological innovations. And it was great — the students themselves were drawing connections between modern and pre-modern vocabulary (hey! we scroll through documents too! just like with scrolls!) and between different type of innovations (so, having books was as big of a deal as getting an e-reader!) Enough students have iPads that if I'm using one I can develop course materials that take advantage of the format, I can have students bring their iPads to class and share and thus be able to maximize how I'm using the technology. I just got it yesterday, so more on this as I develop the materials and activities.

As I was setting it up, and clicking, no, I don't want to use iCloud and have all of my personal photos, music, and email wirelessly delivered to this device, and no, I don't want to turn dictation or location services on, I realized that I'm making totally luddite use of this piece of technology. I want a lightweight, portable, high-res medieval manuscript that my students will think is cool and interesting.

I'm pretty excited about it as a manuscript reader, too, though. With the retina display feature, the embossing of the type that comes through from the back side of this pages is completely legible; I can't wait to see what it can do with challenging-to-read manuscripts:

High-tech medieval manuscript or low-tech iPad?:

So, that's my technology roundup for the academic year.

*The putative tech-savviness of the Millennials (of which I am allegedly one, but have trouble conceiving of myself that way) deserves its own post.

Site Traffic Question

What is a nachobot? Why did I just get 11 hits on my blog from one? Am I going to end up with melted cheese and small bits of vegetable all over my hard drive? And can I select a shwarmabot instead? It would be more thematically appropriate. (In all seriousness, though, has anyone heard of this?)

Update 6/11: Apparently it's some kind of photo indexing bot. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse.