It’s “O Week” (Orientation Week) at university. Today was the first day. The place is full of new faces, and some more familiar, with the return today of the second-year acting class about to tackle a production of Mad Forest Caryl Churchill‘s terrific play about the 1989 Romanian revolution. It also happens to be my
Continue reading ...Another from the archives and my feelings about meetings haven’t changed. One of the things I don’t miss about university life is the endless round of meetings, poorly prepared for in most instances, and time-wasting. We’ve come a long way in thinking about how to be more productive of time and effort since then. These
Continue reading ...It’s been a week of mulling over approaches to teaching during the coming academic year. I’m keen to try my hand at preparing a rubric for one of the projects in a performance-based course I teach. Met up with rubrics and the way they operate a couple of years back at the VASTA (Voice and
Continue reading ...Christmas is over for another year. Can’t say I enjoyed the rampant materialism of the “ka-ching” factor: all-night trading, nightly bulletins trumpeting how much had been taken at the cash-registers etc. The quiet time I spent at home with my son seemed oddly, and wonderfully out of step with what was, and is happening elsewhere.
Continue reading ...I didn’t believe I could wind down as fast as I have in the past couple of days. It’s Day 2 of the month off, and I’m energised, engaged, and having f-u-n. And what I’m playing at is reading and learning-new software and how to drive the new Nikon D40, a sweet camera if ever
Continue reading ...End of the academic year once again, and this week has seen us gather as a staff to discuss where we’re at and where we’re going collectively as a Department, and individually as workers within the group. Two and a half days of navel-gazing, planning and wishing on stars resulted in a surprisingly consensual assembly.
Continue reading ...Another update on a post out of the archives. Sadly my Jurassic Christmas tree did not survive the dry heat of a southern Queensland summer. It is a glorious tree and deserves to be known about by more Australians. Now for some time I have been feeling extremely guilty about the way my bush garden
Continue reading ...This was the first-ever entry of Spinning a Learning Web, my personal blog. In a sense it marked a change in my thinking about what a blog might be. It went on to change too as the months and years went by, but it’s nice to see what gave me the impetus back when. This
Continue reading ...