Spring Chores
Posted on April 1, 2007
Filed Under Birds, River Notes | 1 Comment
Haven’t been playing here in the sandbox all that much lately. I think grading 115 student papers online over the last two weeks made me less than eager to sit down at the keyboard, thus the few posts, mainly reactions to political stories from the NY Times. That, & something that looks strangely like spring seems to have occurred here in the north country. There is still snow in the shadowed north side of the shed & down in the ditches along the roads, but the maple sap is running & the days have been in the forties & into the fifties. Yesterday, I got out in the yard & started picking up deadfall down by the river. Today I cut back the cone flower & black-eyed susan stalks from last year. Over the winter, birds pick the seeds out of the dried cone flower heads, so I leave them standing. There is fresh growth already coming in around the bases of the plants. Looks like a relatively easy week at school coming up — the brief lull before the rush of the last three weeks & finals — so if it doesn’t rain too much, I hope to get out to work in the yard a little every day.
The lawn, such as it is, needs a little repair. Over the winter the chipmunks created an elaborate system of tunnels just beneath the surface of the snow, leading to & from the base of the bird feeder. We don’t have any suburban hangups about a perfect lawn, luckily, but I still need to rake some dirt into the grooves they cut. And we’re putting in an order of a bunch of serviceberry & nannyberry starts from the extension service, which we’ll pick up later in the month, so there will be that to do as well. We’re going to plant those over the old dump area out back where each winter new shards of glass, old cans & other pieces of trash work up to the surface. We figure if we cover it in shrubs & hostas we can kind of entomb it like nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.Indoors, I have to get serious about putting my Understanding Vietnam course online for Summer Session. I’m using Blackboard for the course because that’s what the university has b ought, but I don’t like it — clunky editing & a stupid interface. As far as proprietary educational softwares systems go, I’ll take Turnitin over Blackboard any day. And Turnitin began simply as a way to prevent plagiarism, only after that was successful adding online grading, student collaboration, and discussion areas. Give me a weblog & Turnitin & I could teach a course completely online. Oh, well, at least my taxes are done.
Comments
One Response to “Spring Chores”
Joseph,
Just so you know, you are not the only person who thinks Blackboard is not easy to use. There are other CMS/LMS out there that are. One is Scholar360, the company for which I work. You can check them out at http://www.scholar360.com/tour.php. I’d love any feedback!
If your university ever wants to get something EASIER to use (and less expensive), we’re available. Who knows? Maybe you could be the hero at the university for saving the professors from the hassle of Blackboard AND saving the administrators money. (They always like that.)
Cathy