Posts from — August 2006

Check it out!

“The skies of Saskatchewan are magic.”

I couldn’t agree more….

Bon voyage!

Ummmmm…. I’ll say no more. watch

Office hours for this fall are 3:15-4:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 1-2 on Wednesdays. All office hours will be held in my English office (321 Old MIll)

As I prepare to teach another batch of incoming freshmen (fresh people? I’m still not wild about these American terms) this year, I’ll be reminding them of some of the advice Cheryl Saban offers in her latest blog posting at the usually great Huffington Post.

ALISTAIR MACLEOD

‘This may well be what the “writing life” signifies; that it is a life of comunication which helps us to recognize the great within the small and makes us feel less lonely than we are.’

You can find my syllabus for this fall’s version of English 180 here.

I had a nice chance earlier this week to give a brief presentation to the latest round of faculty and staff taking the UVM Center for Teaching and Learning‘s “Blogging Your Course” workshop. One of the main things I always try to get across is that if the participants are only thinking about using blogs for their course(s) they’re missing out on what i think are the biggest effects blogs can have on their academic lives, something Fred Stutzman summed up really well this past week in a post called “Blogging: Academia’s Digital DIvide“.

I talked on Wednesday about the importance of reading blogs, something I’ve talked about before when speaking to new bloggers at UVM, and we also got everyone started using RSS readers so that they could understand how feeds work and see some of the great potential of RSS.

Starting to read blogs and creating your own personal/professional blog, to me, will have a far greater impact on one’s daily academic life than creating course blogs. Blogs are a great teaching tool and these days I can’t really envision myself teaching without a blog for each class, but if I had to choose one or the other I’d ditch my course blogs and keep my own one running.

Glad to see a good review for Bon Cop Bad Cop, which was the 17th highest grossing film in North America this past weekend despite only being in theatres in the province of Québec. How Canadian of me is that, eh? We’re 17th! We’re 17th! Seriously, though, I’m really looking forward to this movie. You can find the French trailer here. Interesting to see the differences between them.

Looks like great fun, and as soon as it hits DVD it will be standard fare on the bus every year when I take my students to Ottawa. For now, we’ll have to content ourselves with Strange Brew.

It’s a start! Now, if only I can convince UVM to start a curling team….

Here are some interesting stats I found about curling the website of the Canadian Curling Association:

Curlers in Canada

872,000 people play curling in Canada

– 487,000 (56%) are regular curlers (10 or more times per year)

– 128,000 (15%) are occasional curlers (3-9 times per year)

– 257,000 (29%) are socialcurlers (once or twice)

What can I say, UVM? 872 000 Canadians can’t be wrong…

This blew me away, too:

Watching curling on TV

3,573,000 Canadians watch curling on TV

886,000 watch curling 4 times+ per month

483,000 watch curling 3 timespermonth

697,000 watch curling 2 times per month

1,507,000 watch curling once a month

3 573 000 is more than 10% of all Canadians….

If this piques your interest, this page has everything and more (and even more) that you ever wanted to know about the history of curling.