I'm Back!

I'm back! I feel like I haven't written in forever. We hosted a regional workshop on Friday on Web 2.0. Here's the program's Web site. Jody Fagan was incredible. I was lucky enough to get to go to dinner and breakfast with her. I was so impressed by her online CV, and it's not even entirely up to date. It's 16 pages long, and she's only a few years older than I am (a.k.a. not close to old). Yet she's very personable and down-to-earth. Most importantly, she's easy-going, which was important because we kept having stuff pop up... our entire campus scheduled an emergency preparedness day for the same day as the workshop and it included sirens, fake shooters and hostages, police in full S.W.A.T. get-up... then two days before she was to arrive, Palin and Biden announced they would both be in little 'ol Williamsport on the same afternoon, and Biden was on campus!

I think my poster and panel session went well. I accidentally set off an audio file during my panel presentation... that was a little embarrassing, at first I though it had something to do with the emergency drills outside! I would have liked to walk around to see other peoples' posters more, but kept keeping an eye on my own poster (for any visitors), so didn't focus well on what they had to say. But I was so impressed with what I saw other people put together and hope to catch up with the handouts I collected and any electronic files they send me to post on the Web site.

One of my best friends from grad school drove 2 hours to present and help out. She is a great public speaker and her lovely personality comes out when she does public speaking. However, she got intimidated by a previous panel session and said in her introduction it made her "scared shitless"... I'm sure more than a few faces turned bright red. Jody thought it was bold, I thought it worked with the rest of her talk (though I'm biased as my husband swears like a sailor at home). She says she didn't notice it until she sat down at the end, then was quite embarrassed!

I'm so glad October is done. I still have a presentation in two weeks that I'm nervous about. Our campus has these "teaching effectiveness" workshops once a month where different faculty share things they're doing that have been successful. I have been involved in one in the past, where I presented a Flash tutorial on plagiarism. It was very well-received. I'm ganging up with the head of the Writing Center to present an interactive tutorial we've created on citation. Professors are so frustrated with students not knowing how to cite, so this is meant to help the utter citation newbie. The thing is, we haven't yet done much testing on students to see how effective it really is, though she will in her freshman comp classes in the next week or so, and I'm really hoping it's enough to be a real teaching effectiveness workshop. I did base it on lots of articles I found on teaching citation, so if I bring that stuff in...

But no matter what, now that this Web 2.0 workshop and Harry Potter Night are done, my life is becoming soo much easier. I have finished the third Twilight book (TEAM EDWARD!), and will soon go home and spend the rest of this Sunday afternoon working on the fourth. My wonderful husband cleaned the house for my friend's visit so I could read the books I've been obsessed with. Now if that isn't prince charming, I don't know what is.