On Again. Off Again. Up Again. Down Again.

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leskoBy P.D. Lesko

Our Facebook page is picking up speed. Users are beginning to comment, and make their “likes” known. All of our Nation Blogs are linked to Twitter. In the first two weeks, 160 people found us on Facebook, and enjoyed the content enough to “like” the page. As I wrote in a previous entry, on Twitter, sign-up has been slower. We’re still hovering below 100 followers.

Last week was a bit of a disaster, because the server on which the AdjunctNation Web site is hosted failed completely. Our site was up. Then, the site was down. Then the site was up again. Then, the site was back down again. Finally, for the better part of a day, AdjunctNation.com was completely inaccessible. First, let me apologize to those Site Pass holders who were unable to access the contents of the E-Zine. When the site went down, we were in the midst of posting new E-Zine content. We finally did get the new E-Zine content posted, and I hope you’ll enjoy it.

I was particularly interested in the piece about “laptop-itis,” a term coined by Kevin Carneiro, assistant professor of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. I’ve certainly had twinges, and I’m sure many of you have, as well. Fortunately, the piece has some tips to help those who use laptops extensively do so in ways that can help you avoid laptop-itis. (To read it, you’ll need a Site Pass, or if you already have a Site Pass, simply login and enjoy!)

As I wrote in a previous entry, and posted to our Facebook page, I am still looking for a few good bloggers. Kat Kiefer-Newman has been writing twice monthly for our “Juggling 101″ blog for several months. Her latest entry entry is titled, “When Your Past and Present Collide in the Classroom.” Kat writes:

For some reason, a lot of my high school graduating class has moved from my city into the rolling farmlands right next door. This rural town is home to one of the colleges I teach at. Because of this exodus, nearly every semester I meet the son or daughter of someone who knew me when I wore enormous shoulder pads, bras on the outside of my cut-up t-shirts, and had bangs so high that my daughter once asked me if I had a Mohawk. Who among us doesn’t have proof of their bad hair and fashion decisions made at 15, 16, and 17? However, it’s tough to overcome said choices when people from the past keep popping up to tell on me. Just when I think I’ve lived down my Cindy Lauper fixation, an entire new crop of students pops up who’ve been regaled by their parents with stories about, yes, me.

Kat is going to begin contributing weekly, so look for her posts on Fridays.

In her blog The New Adjunct, Melissa Miller posted an entry titled “Over-Preparation is the Foe of Inspiration. Yeah. Right.” The phrase refers to a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte. Evidently, the General was a fan of the spontaneous. Not that he didn’t plan, mind you, he just preferred not to over-plan.

Melissa writes in her entry,

Teaching in higher education, however, has been a crash course in trying to figure out the balance between over-planning and under-preparing. My greatest fear while teaching my first course was that I would not have enough material or enough talking points. Would I get the timing down correctly? How would I pace myself? Does this get easier? Luckily, I had classroom experience, but standing in front of fifth graders and teaching a room full of college students was a whole different ball game.

You’ll notice photos of both Kat and Melissa on their blogs, along with short bios. Coincidentally, both hold Ph.D.s., a fact I didn’t know when I hired them. Kat, true to form, sent along a bio. that left me grinning. She writes: “In her spare time she plays in her organic veggie garden. (And though she will never admit it, she also enjoys reading trashy vampire novels.)”

As opposed to the literary vampire novels, such as Bram Stocker’s Dracula?

If you are on Twitter, click here to follow AdjunctNation there. You’ll get tweets when the newest blog posts go live, usually daily. Check out the AdjunctNation Facebook Fan Page, as well. If you like the site, and are a Facebook user, visit our Facebook page to read more about our writers, readers, bloggers, contributors, content, and keep up-to-date with AdjunctNation.com as we keep up with you and higher education.

 

As always, thanks for stopping by AdjunctNation.com, and if you have questions, concerns, comments, suggestions or just want to say hello, drop me an email (pdl @ adjunctadvocate.com). I always love to hear from the members of the Adjunct Nation.

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