Teaching: Teaching schedules for us grad instructors came down last week, and I’m actually teaching two upper-level elective courses in my research area. In the fall I’ll have “Rhetoric, Technology, and the Internet” (usually taught by one of my advisors, but he’s on leave next semester), and then in the spring I’ll teach “Internet Communication: Tools and Issues” and another section of my beloved “Scientific and Technical Presentations.” (If you’ve never taught a presentations course and get offered the chance, do it. They’re so much fun.)

So that’s two new preps, but oh, the possibililties. I’m particularly excited about what might be done with Rhet, Tech, & the Net, and the syllabus has been bubbling away in the back of my mind for the past bit. There’s a bunch of stuff to weed through to get it together, as always, because I started squirreling extra articles and sites away for it months ago when I began to campaign to teach it.

Media: A few months ago, I talked to a Canadian reporter about women in the blogosphere. I don’t know why in the world they called me, other than the fact that I’m a female Internet researcher who blogs; maybe Clancy was out of pocket that day or something. (I pointed them her way, as well as toward Flea, Feministe, and the Pew Internet & Life Project. Regardless, the final article ended up using me as a primary source with a side of Flea and Pew.) Women’s Feature Service, a feminist wire service, picked the article up a few weeks ago as “Feminising the Blogosphere.” Only the excerpt is available on the site (no anchor links), and I’m not sure if any other media outlets picked it up or not. I should find out about that.

Yesterday, the post I wrote about exam paranoia was linked by IHE’s Around the Web. This feels strange, since my usual sense of audience has now been sort of exploded. But that’s what the Internets are for, hey hey.

Gallivanting: Last year, New Research for New Media was a closed conference here at UMN, and it gathered together everyone across the university who was doing new media research. It looks like it’s turning into an annual event (now separate from NRNM), and we’ll all be conferencing again in early September. My colleague Brenda Hudson and I will be talking about our current study on negotiation of identity in health-related, dynamic, digital texts, which is part of the grant I’m working on in the Med School this summer. This requires no gallivanting, of course, except a ten-minute drive over to the Minneapolis campus.

Then, in November, several of us will be on a panel on classical Greek authorship at NCA in San Antonio. This is the next push on my paper on Hellenic conceptions of originality (which Becky has been so encouraging about).

Reading back over this, it looks to me like I’d really best get these exams done this summer so as to have time to focus on other things once the semester gets rolling. Which would mean I really need to sit still and read. Hmph.