Background: A growing number of educators have started exploring student-centered approaches to improve students’ learning and satisfaction with courses and programs. While prior research shows a positive impact of such strategies on student …
Attending regional conferences is one of the most exciting parts of my job. I always leave with so much inspiration from the work of the many amazing scholars across the country. This year, the Southern States Communication Association conference was held in Nashville from April 5th through April 8th, so I didn’t even have to leave the state!
One of my favorite things about the SSCA conferences is its relaxed atmosphere and the opportunity to engage with so many welcoming people.
A survey of campaign communication by candidates for the US Democratic party presidential nomination. Candidates interpersonal interactions while "working the crowd" at campaign events were analyzed using conversation analysis and compared with existing research on introduction sequences in everyday contexts.
Update: as of 2019 I have switched to Linux and no longer use this script. I have no reason to believe it has stopped working, but I make no guarantees.
I am a big fan of AutoHotKey. It lets me make a lot of parts of computer interaction faster and easier for me. My most recent project was to make it faster and easier to switch between virtual desktops on my Windows 10 computer.
At the end of every semester I find that there are several things that I want to file away as important lessons for the future. I don’t know that I’ll use a categorical breakdown in the future, but I have broken down my list this semester into general lessons, lessons about teaching, and lessons about writing. They are, for lack of any better scheme, in alphabetical order. Here is my list for this semester:
I’m back on a weekly schedule, and loving having a bit more consistency. The students at my university are on Fall Break for Columbus Day, but I am working through it. Don’t worry, I took my break on Friday. This is just the price I pay for taking my day off a little bit early.
Projects The C-SPAN conference was amazing during the last week. I met Angela Garcia there, which was really cool.
So these have started to feel more like a monthly roundup rather than a weekly one, but I’m honestly happy as long as I’m fighting the good fight. My students are settled in, fall is in the air, and the kids are thinking about Halloween now. The federal government even managed to get a budget through without shutting down, so I’m feeling pretty good.
Projects I am presenting my C-SPAN research at conference next week.
The month of August just flew by between preparation for and the beginning of the first semester. My students are getting ready to give their first presentation next week, and I am starting to get into the swing of a routine. I enjoyed labor day weekend, and managed to make some significant progress around settling into the new residence, so that has done a lot for my peace of mind.
I haven’t done as much work on my dissertation over the summer up until this point as I had hoped that I would, and I’m glad. I needed some time to decompress and it has been hard to focus on work when so many more important social changes are coursing through the country. It is hard to focus on the importance of my small corner of academia when so many innocent (or at least not sufficiently guilty) people are being literally shot in the streets.
The research team recorded an entire week’s worth of class meetings of three courses at four times during the course of the semester. These class meetings were recorded in video from four different angles. This resulted in a very large amount of data (approximately 200 hours of raw video) requiring about 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of storage space. The audio portion of the video was also rendered out and compressed into MP3 format files for ease of use and analysis when research questions can be answered without video.