c h a n g e l o g

Field Trip

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 | journal | No Comments

Yesterday I took a field trip to New River Community College in Dublin. It was a nice and relatively fast drive over from Blacksburg. No doubt I benefited from taking the trip when shifts were NOT changing at the arsenal.

I drove around the campus twice before finding a visitor’s space and parking. I didn’t meander far into the buildings, just far enough to find a catalog and some basic information on their Fall schedule.

I’m sure there’s a lot more action on the campus during the Fall and Spring semesters, but I did see a few people, happily going about their business.  I noticed an English instructor’s office, but the door was closed and the lights were out. She was obviously out making the most of the lovely afternoon.

So what did I learn? It’s a pleasant little campus. I found all the glass-walled offices a little too “fish bowl” for my tastes, but there are window blinds. Probably because I had read of the Cho’s newly found medical records in a news story, as I thought on the offices last night, the windows did make me feel a bit spooked. There’s something much more protective about cinder brick walls. I bet I wouldn’t have thought of it if I hadn’t read the story though. I thought nothing of it while I was walking around in the buildings.

I did love that the campus had a large picnic pavillion beside the parking lot. Not a soul was there using it, but I could imagine that on lovely days, it would be a great place to sit and read or grade papers (especially if I can manage to get a wireless modem). It’s good to imagine yourself in the place you want to be, isn’t it?

Focus

Sunday, July 19th, 2009 | My Writing, journal | No Comments

Hello to the three search engines that seem to be my primary visitors. Yes, I know it’s been months since I posted here. I’ve been too busy posting elsewhere, like on Bedford Bits and @newsfromtengrrl. I seem to have an overwhelming problem with focus these days.

I just want to keep up with too many topics and write too many things. In the end, I get nothing done. I may be able to blame NCTE partially. In my jobs there, I had to have the breadth to speak to everything from kindergarten to grad school. When I stop myself and try to step back to pre-NCTE days, I realize I never was all that focused in the first place. I want to do too much. I have ideas and ideas and ideas, but never the time or energy to pursue them all with the attention they need.

Take my posts to @newsfromtengrrl. I am finding stories in the news that touch on technology and education, language arts, teaching literature, and college English. Working on NCTE’s Inbox for all those years has its benefits. In the last couple of weeks though, I’ve posted only a few stories to the news account. I’m having trouble putting in the energy when the posts just don’t seem to go anywhere.

I use bit.ly to track click-through on the article URLs. If I’m really lucky, I may see a dozen people click on a link. The overall average for the 4 months I’ve been tracking is closer to half that. I’ve posted the RSS feed of the posts here on tengrrl.com, on the English Companion Ning, and on the NCTE Ning, but that’s not really influenced traffic from what I see.

What’s missing? Why aren’t the posts used? 

• They get lost in the great stream of "everything else" on Twitter and elsewhere. People follow the @newsfromtengrrl account, but there are so many tweets that come through that I suspect many people just never notice them. Maybe a weekly round-up of the most important stories would help?
• They aren’t promoted enough. If I were to do more with marketing the links, I’m sure they’d get more attention. Or if their feed was included on more prominent sites, the click-through would increase.
• The headlines don’t grab attention. Lots of us scan headlines and click through only a small percentage of the time. Even though I’ve added hashtags to increase the interest of the stories, they may not be compelling enough to entice people to read more.
• They aren’t reliable enough. The stories are posted whenever I have time. Some days there are none. Others they don’t go up till late at night, after all the sane people have gone to bed. And because of this . . .
• They miss the scoop. The links may go up after they’ve already been discovered by folks in the discussion lists and Facebook. People have already seen the pieces, so they don’t click through on my link.
• They don’t add anything new. The hashtags on the posts try to provide some detail on what the stories are about, but there’s no real value added. There’s no commentary or response on the pieces. Just the stories as they are. Nothing on why readers should care about the issues or why they are significant to our field.

I could fix all that If I focused on what I’m doing on @newsfromtengrrl. If I dropped other projects and made these stories my priority, more people would click those links. But I can’t drop the few things that I’m actually paid for, and I’m not getting any money to post these stories on @newsfromtengrrl.

See? The problem is focus. I need to focus on @newsfromtengrrl to make it succeed, but I have too many other things that I need to do. And that’s just one of my projects. There’s work on computers in education, high school language arts projects, my work on designing writing assignments, and my interest in children’s and young adult literature.

I’m beginning to wonder if I just never chose a clear concentration for my work.  Maybe that’s something you learn when you finally settle on a topic for your dissertation. I assume that as you pursue the PhD you choose your area of study and give up all the other things. I feel simultaneously that I need (and want) to explore all these areas and that I really must focus and stop trying to know and do everything. Sigh . . . .

Tags: focus, newsfromtengrrl