As a general philosophy of learning, I do not aim for coverage. Rather, I am trying to help you learn the skills that you will need to uncover whatever aspect of method and thought that will help you with your research goals. A big part of that is trying to teach how to deal with what might feel like ‘failure’, on first blush. I want you to swing for the bleachers, and not to be afraid of whiffing on the ball. After all, to mix sporting metaphors, you’re here for icetime not the Stanley Cup.

On another note, this course originally was intended to be a kind of hybrid course, blending face to face work in the classroom with resources and digital tools.

That of course, can’t happen at the moment.

Moving online just means that I have to work harder at fostering the social aspect of learning and education.

Social Contact

Another problem with moving fully online is isolation. Working with digital tools and environments, especially when you’re not overly familiar with how they work - or even the underlying metaphors that would help you make sense of what’s going on - is frustrating. Bad enough when you have classmates you see twice a week and can at least complain with over coffee later; extremely awful when you’re on a bad internet connection and everyone thinks that you’re not really doing schoolwork.

In past classes, I have used Slack as a way of trying to meet that need for human connection that makes learning meaningful. It worked, more or less, but if there was a conversation going on and you missed part of it, it could just feel overwhelming and impenetrable.

And it was one more damned thing to install. One more damned thing to get a password for.

I tried Zulipchat another year. Same problem again.

This year, as I write this, I’m trying Discord, for its voice and screensharing integration. We’ll see how that goes.

This website is built using Hugo, a static site builder. Static sites are quicker, more secure, and separate content from container, thus making them more sustainable. I write all of the content in individual text files, which I can then turn into whatever output - html, pdf, word doc - that I need. My writing is freed from subscription-based software that might lock it in. I push all of the text files onto github (you can see them here.) Then, I have netlify.com watch those files for any changes. When it spots changes, it uses Hugo to turn them into html, and serves them up to the world.

I am grateful to Chantal Brousseau, who did a road-test of this entire site, checking for dead links and so on, before we went live in September.

The course logo is by user ‘corpus delicti’, at The Noun Project.