Thoughts on Teaching – 3/4/2012 – Ending another grading weekend
Another grading weekend comes to a close. I entered the weekend with the goal of grading 70 exams. I had 16 in my first half of American history online class and 54 in my second half of American history online course. I hit my goal and got all of them graded. It was a two-essay exam, so I graded 140 essays over the course of the weekend. They weren’t bad overall, with the first half essays being really good. Of course, the sad thing about them is that there are 30 people signed up for the class with only 16 of them even taking the first exam. So, I lost 14 before I even got to the first major grading assignment. The second half class was more mixed in results, but I had some really good essays out of it.
It is interesting to see how this works this semester, as this is the first time that I have done an essay-only exam. Usually there are multiple-choice as well, but I have become more and more disillusioned about multiple-choice and whether it really tests much of anything. So, this semester, I decided to cut the multiple-choice cord and jump into essay only. I am pretty pleased with the results, as I don’t see anything too different in the overall results in grades. It does highlight those who do not put in any effort more, as you could hide behind the multiple-choice before this point, whereas now if you have not prepared for the essays, you will not do well. So, I think the experiment has been a success. I’ve tried so many different ones, but this is the first time I’ve really come out of an exam and felt that the people who knew the material did well and those who did not did poorly. If a test is not supposed to test that, then I don’t know what it’s worth.
I have an even bigger experiment in my last sections of grading. My hybrid class exams were take-home exams. They were also two-essay exams, but they had a week to work on them and turned them in to turnitin.com. I’ll get my first look at them when I start grading that part tomorrow. So, I’ll report back to you on that.
Thoughts on Education – 2/28/2012 – Blogging in the class
I’ve been meaning to do this post for a bit, but my grading has distracted me from other things.
I attended a webinar last Thursday on the subject of blogging in the classroom. It was led by two authors of blogs and attended by several others running blogs in the classroom. In this case, the focus was history, and I found the fantastic blog Teaching United States History through the chat. We bounced around ideas among the 15-20 people active in the webinar, and I found it productive and academically stimulating. The primary discussion centered around how blogs could be used and how they could be evaluated as part of an assignment. I can’t say we came to any profound conclusions, but I enjoyed the time there and hopefully have made some contacts in the broader blogging community out there. I wish I had more time to devote right now, but I’m just able to get out these short posts right now.
So, here are some of my thoughts on blogging.
- As I’ve been exploring the “flipped” classroom idea, the question keeps coming up of how to evaluate the students. Weekly quizzes are an obvious way to get the students to do the work, but I’ve never really felt that quizzes truly evaluate much more than basic recall. LearnSmart through McGraw-Hill is a bit better, but at its heart, it is still a quiz. I also don’t really want to get weekly papers from the students, as I’m the one who then gets to grade them. So, something ongoing like a blog could be ideal.
- There is a danger with a blog that is not well defined. I tried wikis that were worked on over the course of a semester, but 90% of students did them all at the end of the semester. If I did not have weekly requirements for the blogs, most students would not do them until the last minute. And, if I have weekly requirements, then I’m back to grading something from every student every week.
- I like the idea of an informal blog for the students. It would be required but be open ended in what they write. But then, would they post well? Would I get what I want out of them, or would they turn into a busywork exercise of the students?
Just a few things I’ve been thinking about. What do you think?
Thoughts on Teaching – 2/26/2012 – A grading weekend
OK. I’m cheating on the date a bit here, since it just turned past midnight here, but I will probably get a Monday blog out, so I went ahead and put this with a Sunday date.
Just a note here as to why I haven’t posted all weekend. It’s a grading weekend! I took Friday off from grading after working through assignments last week, but Saturday and Sunday were full-on grading extravaganzas. For any of you who teach out there, you know how it is. I spent a good 8-10 hours each day working on my grading. My mom, who also teaches at a community college, sympathized this morning, although we have opposite schedules on our big grading times. Her strategy is to get up earlier and earlier in the morning to grade, whereas I just stay up later and later grading. This weekend, I stopped grading after 10pm each day, and this week is going to be similarly busy, as I have a lot of grading left to do. That’s the problem with setting up the class to have three major turn-in points for the students, as it means that when each of those points hit, I have around 2 major assignments from each of my 180 students to grade. I typically try to get things back to my students within a week from when they gave them to me, but that’s not going to happen this time. I am actually on the week after schedule so far, but I can already tell that I’m going to fall behind that schedule very soon, as there simply are not enough hours in the day to get things back that quickly. But I will keep working and keep the students notified of my progress, and that should be ok. I’ve noticed that, as long as you are honest about when the assignments will be graded, the students don’t mind not getting their work back for a while. It’s only when they have no idea what’s going on and when they are going to get anything back that they start to freak out.
In all of it, I must say that the grading went well. I did my usual of holing myself up in the back bedroom for both days, putting on either music or movies and just pounding out the grading. I graded roughly 50 essays each on Saturday and Sunday, graded using a grading rubric in turnitin.com. Also, today, when I finished up the second set of 50 essays, I then had to grade the discussion forum participation for each student and figure up final grades. For this assignment, I had the 2 essays and a discussion forum that figured into the grade for the online class. The first essay (the longer one) counted 40% of the grade, while the second essay and discussion participation were 30% each. So, at the end of my grading time this evening, around 10:45, I posted all of the grades up for those online sections.
And, of course, just as a note for all of those who think that teaching college is some cushy job, no, I don’t get paid anything more for working all weekend. Yes, I could just give all of my students multiple-choice tests and not have to worry about weeks like this (as this grading session will at least last through next weekend, if not longer), but I strongly believe that my students should write and need to write a lot. Yes, I teach 6 sections. Yes, I have 180 students signed up for my classes. But each of them will be assigned to write at least 20 pages for me over the course of the semester, and many will do a lot more than that, as my published word counts are only minimums. Most students will find that completing the assignments in the minimum word count is very difficult, and for many, I will read up to twice that much from them in the semester. Although I might curse myself while I’m in the middle of grading these things, I hope that by getting them writing and thinking and by providing them with feedback to help them improve, I am contributing to their further education and growth. Maybe that’s idealistic of me, but there’s still a little idealism left, even after 10 years of teaching.
Thoughts on Education – 2/12/2012 – Is Technology the Solution?
I haven’t had much time to sit down and think about education since Thursday. It’s funny how the weekends slip away from you. I do have a big backlog of articles after having not done them on either Thursday or Friday, so I’m going to stick with more reviews today. I haven’t quite figured out what’s a good mix here, more of my own stuff or more article reviews. Of course, even in the article reviews, I am including a lot of my own thoughts as well. Right now, I’m doing article reviews when I get 4-5 articles I want to look at. However, I do look at so many places for information through the week, that it is honestly quite hard not to have that many articles to examine.
Using Technology to Learn More Efficiently
OK, so to start, just ignore the large Jessica Simpson lookalike on the page there, as distracting as her stare is there. I was interested in the article from the title, which is what gets me to save most of them for review later. So, often as I’m sitting down here to write about them, I am reading them for the first time as well. Sometimes they are so irrelevant or don’t do what I want that I simply don’t do anything with them at all, such as this one today. This one almost got a delete as well, but the concept is at least interesting, even if it links up to an older style of learning that I don’t want to encourage in my own classroom — flash cards. The article profiles a company that is digitizing flash cards and remaking them to encourage better retention and more honest use of flash cards. The more compelling idea is the creation of a schedule and the push for accountability to the students to complete their work. As the article notes, this is really an attempt to reduce the unproductive cramming before an exam and open up a broader studying schedule. However, the ultimate limitation here is the students. They are the ones who have to make the decision not to cram at the last minute, and I have a feeling that the students who would do this with this program would be the same ones who would be least likely to put off all of their learning to the last minute anyway. Still, I’m all for accountability, especially if it could be integrated with that idea from yesterday on using Google Docs to gauge student progress. So, maybe as a tool that an instructor could put together and release to the student, this could work.
The Gamified Classroom (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
“Today, students are expected to pay attention and learn in an environment that is completely foreign to them. In their personal time they are active participants with the information they consume; whether it be video games or working on their Facebook profile, students spend their free time contributing to, and feeling engaged by, a larger system. Yet in the classroom setting, the majority of teachers will still expect students to sit there and listen attentively, occasionally answering a question after quietly raising their hand. Is it any wonder that students don’t feel engaged by their classwork?”
This, again, goes back to the issues I’ve talked about in several other posts, especially the last one. If we are talking about student engagement, then I think we are failing with the lecture model, especially to the most current generation of students, which is who this article series concerns. I just have to look out at my own classes on lecture days to see the problems, with maybe 1/3 paying active attention, 1/3 paying occasional attention, and 1/3 completely disengaged from the material. Of course, is gamification the answer? Of course not. But can we learn something from this educational trend? Very likely. Perhaps it can bring in greater engagement and even foster creativity rather than rote learning.
The role of technology can both help and hinder learning. The article refers to a number of ways that technology can help engagement, through having the students involved in project based learning and higher levels of engagement, using both apps and clickers. What is interesting is what the author sees as one way that technology is reducing that engagement as well, the smartboard. I’ve not seen that criticism before, as the smartboard is often held up as one of the prime ways to engage students. “Unfortunately, our classroom is often filled with technology that only exists to better enable old styles of teaching, the biggest culprit being the smartboard. Though it has a veneer of interactivity, smartboards serve only as a conduit for lecture based learning. They sit in front of an entire classroom and allow a teacher to present un-differentiated material to the entire group. Even their “interactive” capabilities serve only the student called upon to represent the class at the board.” I have been suspicious of smartboards as a save-all, but I had never really been able to figure out why I didn’t like them. I find this argument compelling. From my own point of view, they seem to just be a new version of the chalk board, offering nothing more than you can find with the method.
“In schools, our students should be using technology to collaborate together on projects, present their ideas to their peers, research information quickly, or to hone the countless other skills that they will need in the 21st century workplace–regardless of the hardware they will be using in the future. If we’re just using tech to teach them the same old lessons. . . we’re wasting its potential. Students are already using these skills when they blog, post a video to YouTube, or edit a wiki about their favorite video game. They already have these skills; we have to show them how to use them productively and not just for entertainment. This is where Gamification comes in. Games are an important piece of the puzzle–they are how we get students interested in using these tools in the classroom environment.” I agree. Ha! What I always tell my students not to do, present a big quotation and say they agree, but I guess I’ll hold myself to a lower standard than them. Still, I think this is an insightful look at the problems with just throwing technology at the problem. You can’t just hand teachers technology and expect them to transform everything. Technology is not the solution, although effective teaching with effective technology could be part of the solution.
The last two Parts of the series deal with how this might take place in practice. I’m not going to go through all of that here, as the information is diverse and hard to summarize. So, check it out if you’re interested. I think what is most interesting is the push for self-pacing and self-motivation for students. Tying completion to rewards beyond simple grades and pushing the students to do more. This is an interesting idea, but I do wonder if our students are ready for this. That is always the problem with these articles, that they project these things into an ideal world where students are not motivated because we aren’t motivating them. Yet, the real problem is often much more complex. Our students are as varied as can be, and the reasons for motivation or lack of motivation are varied in the same way. How do you motivate students who are working two jobs, taking care of kids, sick, taking care of sick family members, in school only because their parents think they should, in school only because they think the should, and so forth. In other words, when students aren’t required to be there, such as at college, how does this push differ? Something to think about.
The loss of solitude in schools
And, I’ll close for today with an opposite view. Here, the author is warning against the push for project-centered education, one where we emphasize interaction and group work over individual absorption of material. She makes the case that education is inherently a solitary process, where we engage with and absorb difficult material until we learn it. As she says, the emphasis on group work and interaction produces students that “become dependent on small-group activity and intolerant of extended presentations, quiet work, or whole-class discussions.” In other words, they forget how to learn on their own.
She also notes that the push away from the “sage on the stage” can be just as damaging for students. “Students need their sages; they need teachers who actually teach, and they need something to take in. A teacher who knows the subject and presents it well can give students something to carry in their minds.” I have never done much with small group work, so I can’t say one way or another how this works. I have generally done either lecture or discussions. I don’t know how to evaluate small group work, and so I have not done it. Perhaps this is short-sighted of me, but I just don’t know how to give a grade for group work that is not just on the end project. In other words, how do you hold everyone accountable? I know, from talking with my wife and remembering my own experiences, that group work is inherently unequal and very frustrating for those who want to do a good job, as they generally end up doing most of it. I don’t want to put students in that position, and have never been much for this idea. I could be convinced otherwise, but I am skeptical on the idea of small group work. I know that many of the changes I’m looking at making involve small group work, but I just don’t know what to do with it.
Anyway, enough for today. Please let me know what you think or if you have any responses to the ideas I’m presenting, as I don’t want to be working in a vacuum on this.
Thoughts on Teaching History – 2/9/2012
We had a presentation today from one of the major publishers, and in the process, we had an impromptu conversation about teaching history as well. It got me thinking about my own assumptions about teaching history, so I thought I needed to sit down and work out some things here.
What got me going was something that I have already encountered before and that really irks me, that history teachers at the college level can’t manage to cover the material that is in the assigned history course. We split up our American history course at 1877, but I seem to be the only instructor that actually tries to cover the time period of the course. As far as I can tell, the rest of the department usually gets to around 1850 in the first half of the course and to about 1950-60 in the second half. To me, that is outrageous, but I seemed to come off as some sort of traditionalist fuddy-duddy (if that’s really a word) for raising the idea that we ought to teach the period that we are assigned to teach. I cover the first half of American history to 1877 and get to 2001 in the second half of the course, and I just assumed that should be what everyone should be aiming for. Instead, everyone else seemed to be perfectly comfortable with the fact that teaching American history that covers a certain period of time does not mean that you have to actually cover that period. And the easy acceptance of that has me thinking if I’m somehow wrong in my own thinking. I remember having surveys that didn’t complete the time period going all the way back to jr high/high school, when we ended in around 1850 and started up in 1877, meaning that I did not have anything on the Civil War or Reconstruction. In fact, since I didn’t have to take the surveys, I didn’t actually take a course that covered that period until I took the actual Civil War and Reconstruction course at Rice. To me and my fellow history majors, this always seemed like a big joke that a person couldn’t cover the finite ground of American history and bother to actually complete the course, and I made that a priority in my own teaching that I would always make sure that the students got the full coverage. And this is not just because I feel that they should hear about everything, although that is something that I do believe, but that I think that if students are going to understand how history is relevant to their lives, you can’t just take a few bits here and there and leave out the rest and expect them to get a full picture of how the history of the country has affected how their own world is today. Yet, I seem to come off as naive in my department for believing that actually covering the Civil War and Reconstruction period or the period after 1960 is somehow relevant and something that the students should have as part of their course sequence. Some of them do argue that they cover all of it because they do assign all parts of the textbook and quiz them over the chapters that are not covered in class, but that seems to be a quite limited argument at best.
I was reminded that the current state standards for history don’t actually say anything about the subjects we are supposed to cover, but instead look at communication, social relations, and other aspects. So, maybe I am the one that is backward. If nobody but me believes that you should actually cover the material, then maybe I am the one who is wrong here. So, as I said to start here, I’m trying to think about why it is that I believe in full coverage in the survey. To me, it is just what you do, so it is hard for me to get my mind around not completing the course, so I am having quite a bit of trouble here. I especially am troubled by the fact that when others don’t complete the course, and I then get them, I am referring to material that they are then unfamiliar with, as they didn’t get that coverage in another course. But that is a fairly irrelevant argument really, as we all teach the class in different ways, so the emphases will always be different from one class to another. There’s also the argument that if we are more concerned with teaching critical thinking, writing ability, and the like, then the actual specifics of the subject we teach is irrelevant. But then, what am I doing teaching history at that point. I’ll just teach a critical writing and thinking course with a few historical examples instead and call it a history class. Is that where I’m supposed to be going? If that’s the implication, that the actual history we study is irrelevant to the teaching process, then I have really been doing it wrong over the years. When I say that I want to move beyond the lecture and flip my class, I am not talking about ditching the history all together, but that seemed to be the implication today, that you should just do your best to cover the material, but that the intention of turning the students into thinking people afterwards was more important than covering the material. I don’t know if I’m characterizing what I heard incorrectly, but I am just troubled by the implications of it.
Here’s an illustration of what I find a problem. This is from my syllabus, where I lay out the course objectives for my first half of American history course:
Course Objectives for HIST 1301
- Students will understand the following historical themes:
- colonization of the New World
- formation of the English colonies
- development of a unified colonial America
- creation of a revolutionary ideology
- development of a slave system
- creation of a national identity
- development and changes in religious, cultural, and social identity
- development of a divide between the North and South
- causes of the Civil War
- consequences of Reconstruction
- Students will understand the development of an American nation and how it is relevant to the world they live in today.
- Students will learn how to analyze historical evidence for validity, reliability, and bias.
- Students will understand how to use evidence to prove an argument.
- Students will understand the concept of historical significance, allowing them to put an event, idea, or person into historical context.
- Students will learn how to write coherent, well-thought-out material that presents their ideas and evidence in an organized manner.
- Students will be encouraged to question the standard assumptions of American history and use the history studied in this course to evaluate the place of the United States in the world today.
So, in what I understand about what I am trying to do in teaching American history would remain largely the same. I’d just lose 9 and 10 from the first learning objective (and pieces of the others as well). Is my course lesser because I don’t cover that material? Am I doing my job if I don’t cover those parts? I think so, personally, but, again, I seem to be in the minority. This whole thing makes me very uncomfortable. As one of the instructors in the room today said, there may be 17 chapters in the first half survey, but he only does 13 of them because he spends the first month going through the idea of “what is history” with the students, and that the time he has left over only allows him to get through Chapter 13 out of 17. When I objected to this, I felt like I was belittled because I found it important that the instructors cover all 17 chapters. But that’s really not it, it’s not that I think all 17 chapters are important, and I leave out a hell of a lot when I do teach a survey, as we all do. But, when these are things that I have identified as fundamental to what the students should do in the course, then I can’t help but question whether I’m wrong or what.
I’ll have to come back to this when I have had more time to think about it, as I’m still a bit bewildered at the moment.
Thoughts on Education – 2/4/12
I haven’t had a lot of time to sit and think about education. Not because I’ve been doing other important things but because I have exactly not been doing other important things. I tend to try and take some time off when I get the chance during the week, and the last 24 hours or so was that. The time off will vanish as I get closer to my first big set of assignments due in about a week and a half, but right now, there’s time to take a break in the week every once in a while. So, I’m blogging now with regard to the articles that I have saved up over the last couple of days.
I liked this blog post a lot regarding the tempering of optimism that initially comes from teaching as you realize how difficult it is to retain that feeling that you are going to change the world. William was warned by a professor of his in grad school that each year “the students seemed lazier, the job of teaching them harder. And much less rewarding.” He, like so many of us thought that we could make that difference and be different as well, but then, he was confronted with the reality of the situation, captured well in this paragraph:
“The pedagogue in me gently corrects students’ misconceptions. The educated person in me shakes his head and laughs at such fundamental misunderstandings. But sometimes, the part of me who has to grade the papers — the part of me who is conscious of the 14-hour workdays, the amount of effort I’m putting into this job of educating these students — wonders ‘Is this really what I ought to be doing with my life? Is it possible to really make a difference in these lives?'” I would imagine that any of us in teaching has come across that many, many times. We get astounded at the ways that students can mess something up, at the base ignorance that is out there. We share the funny stories with each other, and we shake our heads. I do it all the time, it seems. And, as we say, it seems to get worse year by year.
Again to return to the post here, he says, “‘I had so much respect for my own professors,’ I tell myself. ‘Yet these students seem to be mocking my efforts.'” But then he actually goes back and remembers what he did in classes, skipping, not paying attention, scraping by at the last minute on papers, not really studying for tests, etc. and thinks that maybe we just see it differently because we are in the position of authority and that it was just a situation of us forgetting or willfully ignoring what our fellow students (and us) were really like back then. I think I was good, but I can remember slacking off and doing things I shouldn’t do in class. It’s just that those things are obvious in a different way now, with technology, etc. Back then, if you doodled on your page or something like that, it wasn’t as obvious you were doing things you shouldn’t be doing. Now, we see a laptop or cell phone and we automatically assume that they are not paying attention.
So, what am I trying to say about the article? I’m not exactly sure. I liked reading it and could easily identify with it. Does it help explain anything? I don’t know. I always try to avoid saying the students get worse every year because I fundamentally don’t think that’s true. In the historical sense, I think that the real issue is that we always have that glow looking back through rose-colored glasses that things were better in the past (even if only last semester!) than they are now, and we willingly forget what things were like when we were in their seats.
I think, also, that we are too willing to blame technology for the problems today. The methods of slacking and not paying attention and not doing work have changed, but I’m not sure that the amount of those things have changed all that much. I think that’s the point of the post more than anything else, and I have to say that I agree. I invite technology in my classroom, with the full expectation that students will use it and abuse it. I do this because I also think that it can enhance the classroom, although I’m still working on ways to ensure that it does more of the latter than the former. I just think that outright bans on technology are wrong-headed and punishing in ways that may not be intentional or expected. My wire, for example, has been using her laptop in class to record her teachers’ lectures so that she can listen to them later. And she really does listen to them later. Yet, she has a teacher now that keeps her from doing that by banning technology. So, here’s a student who not only is going to listen and take notes but will even go back and listen several times more to the material, and she can’t at this point. Just a single example, but I think blanket bans end up hurting as much as they help. (And, cue stepping off of the soapbox . . .)
Difference Engine: Let the Games Begin
Interactive Textbooks. OK. I want to see one. Where can I find a true interactive textbook? One designed for college students, whether in my subject area or not? This is the big promise of iBooks and all of the stuff Apple is doing. Now I want to see it. Do I lack patience in this, yes! I want change and I want it now!
Here’s what The Economist says about it: “Done properly, interactive textbooks offer not only video tutorials, more personalised instruction, just-in-time hints and homework help, but also instant access to assessment tools, teaching resources and the ability to network socially with students elsewhere. Using tools for highlighting and annotating virtual flash-cards, students can select information within the text and store it for later revision. Searching public databases, direct from within the textbook, is also possible. At school, students can sync with their teachers’ computers, to hand in their quiz results and homework for marking.” Of course, the question is, will it be “done properly?” And, if you provide those options, will students use them? That’s the big question that always comes up with new technology.
So, again, I want an interactive textbook now. I want one set up for college history. I’ll run a class test on it tomorrow. Let’s get this moving, as I think it has a lot of potential, but if we just screw around, that potential will be lost.
By the way, since it is mentioned in this article (and just about everywhere else), has anyone tried using the Khan Academy? With college students?
What Higher Education Can Learn from Video Games
I like the idea here, but the article is a bit shallow on ideas. I like the idea of “gamification,” one of those ideas floating around now of including games in the learning process to make students more engaged. This is probably because I like playing games so much myself. I like the idea of using something that a lot of people already enjoy doing, playing games, and harnessing that energy to a learning environment. How this could be done for a more ethereal subject realm like the humanities and social sciences is not all that obvious, and how you would assess learning in a gaming environment is even less obvious, but I am intrigued by the idea.
To me, this is the most interesting reason for it: “Compared to traditional, lecture approaches learning where students sit passively either in a classroom or training boardroom to learn the workplace procedures by memory without any real-life interaction; game-based learning lets individuals learn the facts by testing (via practice and failure) until we commit it, not only memory, but also understand the howís and whys of our success in a real-life situation.”
5 Foundational Principles for Course Design
Two very interesting ideas out of this one, ironically enough, neither of them is at the center of the article.
First comes from the first paragraph, which grabbed me immediately. “The big secret amongst many of us who work in online learning is that we are not all that wild about online courses. Sure, we think online courses can be great, and can fill an important need, but what really gets us excited is learning.” Undoubtedly true. I did not get started teaching online because I thought it would solve all of the world’s problems or bring a real new and different way to my teaching. I did it because that’s what was required of my job. I think I’m pretty decent at teaching online, but I will be the first to admit that there’s a lot I don’t know at all about it. I always feel like my online courses are experimental, and I am never very satisfied with them. Of course, I feel that about my regular courses as well, so that’s not a very good comparison.
I then found the end of the article to raise an interesting point along this very line. The article goes through how you put some principles together as you try to create a new online course. It advocates 5 principles, as stated in the title of the article. They’re nothing spectacular and woefully under-explained in the article, but I found the final paragraph to raise an interesting point that I have talked with others about: “To my knowledge, this sort of detailed course proposal and course delivery review and support methodology is not standard in most of our on-ground classes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could somehow diffuse these resources and methods throughout our curriculum?” Yes, exactly. We think all the time about online classes, and we have a whole evaluation setup for them at my community college. Yet nobody evaluates the content and presentation of our face-to-face classes in the same way. We see much more scrutiny in online courses, and the question raised about why is one that doesn’t get asked often enough.
Anyway, I think that’s good for today. I’ll see what crosses my computer in the next day or so to see if I have more articles to talk about or if I will move on to another subject tomorrow.
Thoughts, Ideas, Ramblings, and Other Things 