I passed my exams today! This blog was really helpful for me as I worked through my thoughts and readings, so in that sense, it’s served its purpose, but my hope is that I can make it more than an exercise in solipsism. With that in mind, I’m thinking about how this blog might (or might not) change going forward.
In the immediate future, probably not very much will change radically. I still have a tremendous backlog of books to write about, and while I won’t write a post for each of them, I’ll at least pick out a few that I think are particularly good or useful and do a post on them similar to the ones I’ve done so far. Hopefully anyone who’s found those posts interesting will get something out of that.
I know my posts on teaching SF got a lot of traction, so I may continue to write about pedagogical issues, as well. I won’t actually be teaching again until the fall, and even then it will just be as a writing instructor (i.e. not teaching courses of my own design), but if anything strikes me (or if I continue to think about teaching outside of the courses I’m actually teaching), I’ll try to write something up. Additionally, I think I’m going to try to write up a general post about my dissertation proposal (since I have to defend that next week), and the process of writing that. I personally had no idea what a proposal was supposed to look like before I started writing this one, so hopefully a post going into the dissertation proposal as a genre would be useful to others who are similarly puzzled.
In other words, my plan for this blog is basically to make it a more general blog about academic issues surrounding my field. I know there are already a billion other blogs doing the same thing, but in terms of what I want this blog to do for me, personally, I think the encouragement to write consistently will be good as I get into the dissertation writing phase, and – like with the exam readings – it will give me a place to jot down inchoate thoughts before I forget them.
If YOU have something specific you’d like to see on here, dear reader, please please let me know! Comments are open, and I’d love to hear from folks so I’m not just shouting into the void! In any case, I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day (for those of you in the States), and until next time, keep reading sci-fi!
Academic Androids 