Llanoland

Hey everyone, just a rambling general update today.

https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/year/2025/week/2

Seems that the second week of the year saw me falling off in my listening habits, but still pretty good. I'm recovering from a cold this week so not a lot going on. 

I am thinking of recycling a lot of my YouTube videos for class this semester as I do have a lot of good ones about debate and argumentation. Is it ethical to make students watch YouTube? There are advertisements there. Is it ethical to make students watch ads for a course they are paying thousands of dollars to attend? 

I would think at best we'd have a good video platform at the university level like Vimeo or something that all students could use. I guess we have Panopto, but most students use the Canvas Studio or they just upload the file to Canvas.

Maybe I'm over thinking it. 

https://open.spotify.com/track/3LfZkFQpwt9q2xfXIw2FHC?si=d7ce48ef8ddf4336

We are a week away from classes starting and I'm about a week way from being fully ready. So that's really something.

I'm going to try very, very hard not to care too much about what goes on in there. Offering the best possible class I can and then evaluating evidence presented by students that they are understanding (i.e. forging a relationship with the material) is about all that can be done. 

I'm really wondering if I'm actually going to get away with this 2 sections at the same time = 2 sections for your contract obligation. I really hope so and I certainly expect it to fail but I think I can whip up a mighty fine public speaking course fairly quickly.

It really has to be a spring focused on pumping out some of these drafts. The backlog is too big. The opportunities are there. It just requires a bit less social media and YouTube time. That's really it. Not too much. 

I've been going to the gym; hired a trainer. She told me the smallest caloric deficit with regular short sets of exercise is all you need for massive transformation. Same can be said with writing except the deficit is in other activities you do during the day and short sets refers to typing away (or scribbling with that favorite pen).