Sunday nights have always made me nervous. I want to get everything ready for the week that I can — not that there won’t be things I can’t prepare for, but that I want to be as prepared as I can. And I never am. I invariably oversleep the alarm on Mondays. I need to show up early to get things ready and I can’t find parking. My hair ends up being a mess, or I forget my coffee.

But once I get into the office or the classroom and the swing of things, I am OK. Everything will fall into place and those things that don’t, well the Devil take the hindmost.

I definitely did not grow up a beach girl. Given that I lived in Colorado, I guess that’s not all that surprising. But I am a convert. There’s something about sitting on the sand, watching and listening to the water, talking lazily that I really enjoy. I do worry about the tanning issue — I’m whiter than Casper and don’t want melanoma, but that’s why God (or his humans) invented sunscreen. There are few places I don’t feel like I should be doing sixteen things at once — and the beach is one of them.

We’re in the library computer lab today doing research on “issues related to Afghanistan”  and different genres of media — a topic and method I have left intentionally broad. Students keep asking me, Caitlin, and Meghan — “Now what exactly am I supposed to do??” and I keep turning the questions back to them — what do you think you are looking for? What is a good blog? How do you know your resource is a good one?

I think there is this assumption by faculty and students alike that when you get to college you can just “go do research” on a topic. This usually involves going to Google and using the first couple of hits. But good research is something else entirely. First of all, sometimes the first hits under Google aren’t good ones. The question of whether or not you should be able to use Wikipedia is still out — and how do you evaluate other sources when .org can be purchased and at least at one point whitehouse.com was a porn site (whitehouse.gov is the actual site — and I haven’t checked in many years if the other one is still porn so maybe it isn’t anymore).

Real research means using different search engines, finding something in one place and checking in other places to see if it is true, triangulating different resources — online news, blogs, video with “traditional” newspapers or television news. What about talk radio? What about cable news shows? Who or what is a valid source and why should we check — if it’s out there, can’t we trust it? What are the sources and means of production of information now?

These are big questions for anyone to wrestle with — and beginning college students, and busy college faculty already have a lot on their plates. Now we’re talking about shifts in the nature of information and learning between when faculty were students and their students’ sitting in front of them and that almost means retraining yourself all the time in what’s out there, how to trust it, what to think. No easy feat, especially in the dog days of July.

And why do so many sayings relate to dogs, anyhow? : )

Well obviously I have left this blog to go all to hell — I started teaching the summer prefreshman course and then promptly got sick — went from a 2 day migraine into a stomach virus. I thought of the terms “sick as a dog” more than once — and of the many, and varied things we have seen Willa throw up. For a couple of days there, I was giving her a run for her money and I HATE throwing up. But enough about that.

The summer course is going really well — I have a great group of students and two really strong TAs with interests in teaching and subject matter. Both are more organized and together as undergrads than I manage to be most days. I definitely think my own style blends disorder and design — hence the fact that I managed to finish a doctorate with the amazing ability I have to lose things like my iPhone that I loved so much (I’m still thinking it might have fallen out of my bag at the Denver Airport and someone picked it up. Shiny electronic things like those have legs, they do).

So Caitlin and Meghan are keeping the class on track and I am getting better (and trying to juggle an article almost ready to send out with an IRB continuation and wishing my own GA worked for me all summer). I need three heads and six arms. Or something like that. I guess I’ll have to work with caffeine for the time being and get back into the rhythm of teaching and researching and advising as my working summer gets under way.

Here is the post I asked them to do.

Complete the following sentence: Reading is…

My life

My favorite escape

Sometimes my demon (triggers migraines, I have too much reading to do)

A way to learn to see the world

A way to learn more than just what we’re taught