Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 29, 2011 Deadline October 2011 Issue Artists Gather Online: The Valley’s Virtual Art Colonies Not long after the first artist used charcoal and ground seeds to create the first cave painting, the first critic arrived on the scene. Having stated a mastodon could create better artwork, the critic then left the artist alone in his cave. I am certain that within months, a handful of prehistoric artists met around a fire to reassure each other that critics were simply Neanderthals without any artistic abilities. Over the following centuries, artists gathered in various places. Among the more popular settings where author’s met were cafés, restaurants and unemployment lines. Being an artist has never been easy and it is only occasionally profitable. It’s little wonder that artists need to gather and commiserate. After gathering, artists find themselves reenergized. The support of your creative peers makes it a little less terrifying to expose...

I'm taking a short break from designing my Blackboard shells for both an on-campus and online course because I'm exhausted. Don't let anyone try to persuade you that online courses and courses with online content are somehow "easier" to prepare and to deliver. The time and energy required is substantially greater than the effort to prepare a traditional university course. Universities need to consider this time and energy more accurately. The minor stipend I receive for creating an online course does not reflect the time I invest in the effort. I definitely believe there are more benefits than negatives to providing online content to students, including extra content for traditional on-campuses courses. But, we have to admit that effective online delivery is time-consuming. The reasons for this are many; I can address a few now: 1) The course management software itself requires time and effort. Everything online is simply more time consuming. The benefits in...

I'm preparing for the 2011-12 school year, which this year means learning new software systems, university philosophies, and everything that goes along with any new job in today's connected world. I hadn't really thought about the comparisons until this month, but I am noticing how my issues at work aren't that different from those of my wife at her office. Group scheduling and management software varies from okay to horrible. I've used several different "groupware" platforms. The new employer uses Novell GroupWise — at least until school starts. Right before school starts the university will be switching to another platform. Not the best of timing, but that's reality in any organization. The university is also migrating to new learning management software, new Web servers, and a new collaboration platform. What could go wrong? It's strange how dependent we've become on our networks. My wife and I have struggled with synchronizing calenda...

Internet Sacred Text Archive (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 1, 2011 Deadline September 2011 Issue Virtual Theology: Comparative Religion Goes Digital Among the books in my personal library are several shelves of religious texts and scriptures from a variety of world religions. While most of my library consists of various Christian and Judaic texts, I also own a number of Qurans; Hindu Vedas, Puranas and Bhagavad Gita; some of the Buddhist texts known as Buddhavacana Sutras and Pali vinaya; and other texts from different faiths and philosophies. My preference for physical books for reading does not extend to research. Not that long ago I would have a concordance on hand to cross-reference words and phrases within a Bible or other scripture. There are concordances for Qurans and Sutras, but like Christian Bibles, the concordances differ by translation. If a poem, novel or other literary work referred to something from a religious tradition, I...