Just Another Day…

Well today wasn’t a very exciting day, but it was pretty typical–here’s how it went.

I spent a good chunk of the morning in my home office reading and commenting on a PhD written comprehensive exam. The exam was on the field of rhetoric and composition and I was a last minute reader sitting in for a colleague, so it took most of the morning to get through.

I was up on campus for a 12 noon meeting with a PhD student about her independent study. She has spent the semester reading and thinking about online writing instruction and is in the process of working on her final project, a syllabus and course site for an online version of Iowa State’s freshman writing class ISUComm 150. The student was struggling with some design issues in Moodle so we spent some time looking for plug-ins and mucking around in the code a bit to see if we could get Moodle to do what she wanted to do. (We were moderately successful.) We also spent some time talking about the outcomes she was looking for from this class and defining ways in which the technologies she is using will help her and her students meet these outcomes.

I then headed off for the comprehensive exam committee meeting where I spent a bit over an hour with my colleagues going through the exam. (Exam passed.)

After that meeting I headed right into another one with the chair of my department to discuss some issues that have arisen with the internship program I coordinate for our undergraduate major in professional writing.

I then had a chance to catch up on some email, which included a follow up with a press and a back and forth with my research partner, Liza Potts, about possibly putting together a grant proposal for a book project we’re working on.

I headed home about 6 pm and scooped up my two Irish Red and White Setters and went out to the local public hunting ground for an off leash run for them and a walk for me.

I was home and back at my computer at 8 PM for a class Skype call for a graduate online UX course I’m teaching. We talked through the last project I just finished grading (site maps and task flows) as well as the next project: wireframes.

So now it’s about 9 PM and I’m going to try and put in about an hour or so on the white paper for the Level 1 Digital Start Up Grant Liza and I received to run a workshop about developing a digital dissertation depository.

And that’s about it. It wasn’t a very exciting day–and it’s not quite over yet–but it’s definitely been a fairly normal day!