Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week 47
I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 47 is the week of 2024-11-18/2024-11-24. (And I’m publishing this a full week later than I usually aspire to for a weekly round-up like this!)
PhD Program Progress of the Week
The biggest update this week is that I’ll be doing my second teaching internship next semester! My PhD program requires two supervised teaching internships (or externships, although internships seem more common).1
This internship will let me work with Dr. Curt Whitaker on teaching an asynchronous online Gen Ed course on ecocriticism, or how human relationships to the natural world have been represented through literature. My pedagogy-related readings with him will also focus on how instructors can adapt their assessment strategies in light of GenAI.2 I’m really looking forward to it!
Viewing, Listening, and Reading
Interstellar
Perhaps it was because I had ecocriticism on my mind, or perhaps it was because we actually decided to start watching a movie early enough to choose a long one, but we finally watched Interstellar for the first time.
Although it’s not already on my exam reading lists, there’s a strong chance I’ll end up writing about it in my dissertation or somewhere else, as it’s a very clear example of framing “information” in deeply humanistic ways.
Mean Girls (2004) & Mean Girls (2024)
We also managed to watch both the original Mean Girls (2004) and the 2024 movie musical version. It’s fascinating to see who returns from the original cast (hey, Tim Meadows! yep, Tina Fey, too!), as well as how much more inclusive the writing and casting have become. Thankfully, there are far fewer fat-shaming jokes. The songs, performances, and choreography are all wonderful additions as well. And—omg—because we’ve been living under a large boulder the size of a small boulder, I did not realize who Auli’i Cravalho is until after we finished it. Such a delight to see the voice of Moana in a live-action production!
Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza
- Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies: A Quickstart Guide is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece that, as the authors write, “extends on our disciplinary knowledge in rhetoric, writing, and composition studies, digital rhetorics and literacies, computers and writing, and technical communication”. It’s well worth your time, whether you embrace GenAI or eschew it.
- The thing about the Kobayashi Maru is a great slice of criticism presented as fan fic. It probably won’t make much sense if you’re unfamiliar with the Kobayashi Maru training scenario that’s referenced throughout Star Trek series… but if you’re interested in representations of military thought or instructional design, the episodes that reference that training scenario might be great places to start with Star Trek.
- Hannah Alpert-Abram’s Finding Your Purpose workbook crossed my social media at some point this week, and I’m grateful for it. I’ll probably be working through this workbook throughout the month of December. Did I mention that it’s 🔓Open Access with a CC BY-NC license, so you can read and share it as well?
Site Refinements of the Week
Inspired by Thomas Rigby’s It’s Hard to Give Recognition blog post, I’ve added Tinylytics to my site.
It’s taken a bit of tweaking with Liquid code logic and page layouts to get the “kudos” feature to show up appropriately, but it feels well worth the time.
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We also put together proposals for each internship, giving us authentic experience writing in the “academic proposal” genre that’s otherwise quite rare to come by for humanities scholars. ↩
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I’ll likely make a separate note for my internship reading list soon enough. I’ll try to remember to update this post if I do. ↩
Kudos
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