Monday, October 01, 2007

H-Net: A Humanities Resource

H-Net describes itself thus: “H-Net is an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web.” While this is not strictly a composition or English related site, it has many resources and is well worth exploring.  The stand-out facet is their job guide.  They ask for a donation to keep it going; please consider giving.  Coming up second are their various lists that publish articles after peer review. 

Sunday, September 30, 2007

So You Are Writing Your Vita…

So you decided to update your vita.  Where do you start first?  You start with the CV Doctor.  Then you keep the tips in mind as you revise.

Remember, just like writing, vitae are a recursive process!

Saturday, September 29, 2007

If You Write Your Vita Now, You’ll Love Yourself Later

If you don’t have a vita, you should start one—even if you’re not planning, necessarily, to look for another job.  Why?  A vita chronicles your experience and describes your expertise.  At the very least it shows you how much you know and helps you reflect on how far you have come. Doing that lets you see options for where you might go or what kind of professional experiences you might want to add to your life.  Also, a vita is an important professional document, one you might need for any number of reasons including: to look for other positions, either as an adjunct, full-time adjunct, or tenure-track; to use for a graduate school application; as part of some grant proposals; if you seek review or author work with an educational publisher; if you desire to become a speaker or consultant; and so much more.  The longer you wait to begin your vita, the harder it is to create because the more you have to do from recall.  The best step is to start a vita early in a career.  But if you haven’t started one yet, the next best step is to start one now.

Here’s some useful vita advice:

Start it when you are not in desperate need of it.
A vita can take hours or days to …

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Friday, September 28, 2007

Dr. Dorie Goldman on Adjuncting at a Community College

When issues of contingent academic labor hit the media, it is almost always about adjuncts working at four year universities.  Many adjuncts, however, work at community colleges. Similarly, when graduates look at career and job search information, often they find material that is focused on tenure-track positions at four year schools.  While this may be the ideal for many in the field, it is not the whole picture.  Thousands upon thousands of us teach part-time at community colleges around the nation.

In order to provide some clear, honest, and useful information to adjuncts—and potential adjuncts—about the community college job market, I requested interviews with several individuals who do the hiring at these institutions.  This first interview is with Dr. Dorie Goldman.  As the District Academic Chair of the Communications Division, Dr. Goldman hires part-timers and adjuncts—people like us—to staff the three campuses, three satellite centers, and two skill centers for Central Arizona College, which serve approximately 12,000 students.

You spend a great deal of time hiring and working with adjuncts.  What is the greatest benefit you see adjuncts bringing to their students in the classroom?

Adjunct faculty often bring a wealth of teaching experience from other places (thus they bring in great new ideas) and/or experiences from outside academia that are beneficial for our students. The students …

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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Blog of the Week: September 26, 2007

Jason Heath goes into a detailed analysis of the actual costs of being a freeway-flying instructor by examining the not-so-hidden cost of travel.

Dennis Baron on Blogs

Dennis Baron’s Web of Language delivers reliable, humorous, and sometimes controversial commentary on language in the news.  A thirty year veteran of teaching, Dr. Baron is currently a Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He was kind enough to agree to an email interview about Web of Language, blogs, and aspects of adjuncting.

You have been writing and publishing Web of Language for several years now.  How do you see this as contributing to your professional development?  Or do you do this for personal pleasure and satisfaction?

I’ve been doing WOL for just over a year.  I have always looked at—and commented on—current issues in language, writing about them in more traditional forms of academic research (scholarly books and articles) and also in other forms designed for more general readers, such as op eds, and so blogging is a logical next step. But I initially did it as part of a project on the impact of technology on writing.  I wanted to see how blogs worked, so I could write about them.  And language was something that I could blog about.  I continued to do it because I can’t help myself—it’s become a passion.

The role and value of web-based writing—especially in blogging—in professional development does not seem very …

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