I’m exploring tonight Andy Williams’s interesting book 1-Hour WordPress: 2024: A Visual Step-by-Step Guide… I am reading it on my iPad using the Kindle app, but writing the blog on my MacBook Pro. This will definitely be a work in progress!
Stay tuned!
Pictures above are of my big sister Connie Sue:)
Taking a break from trying to keep up with ChatGPT as a learning tool and revisiting an archive of David-in-Carroll-Land blog pieces.
Rediscovering some things I wrote a few years ago as I continue my relearning of what WordPress can do. The text below was written at the end of October 2018. Oh, how naive I was!
This last year as a university professor poses interesting challenges to time management and prioritizing. I underestimated how much time (and disruption) would be caused by ALMOST having a Milwaukee World Series, mastering new MAC and PC operating systems, accepting the opportunity to become an APS Wikipedia Fellow (essentially taking a weekly course), teaching a class I hadn’t taught for two years on one weeks notice, creating a newly taught Wikipedia component in my course, migrating from David-in-Carroll-Land to Curious-David-Redux, and protecting time for family, fun, and friends. Despite the headlines, life is good. so much to learn.
This semester I have begun to discover to what degree I have underestimated the value of Wikipedia and the degree to which it has matured since it first was created. I now better understand why it ranks so highly among learning tools on Jane Hart’s list of top tools for learning. Belatedly I am beginning to respond to Mahzarin Banaji’s 2011 call for action to harness the power of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia provides excellent resources (and online support) for incorporating Wikipedia assignments into courses.
Maybe next semester I’ll turn my attention to Wikipedia’s history of Carroll. It needs some updating and i have 40 years of documented facts:)
It has been an interesting number of learning years since when I studied Latin at Howland High School in Warren, Ohio.
I’ve outlived many of my best teachers but am continually blessed with opportunities to learn from and with those much younger than I. One can indeed, with patience and compassion, teach an old dog new tricks. I regularly learned valuable lessons from Robin the Newf even when she was ailing.
Surrounding myself with bright young student assistants has always proven for me a valuable source of learning.
I continue to learn much from observing, listening to, and playing with my grand-nieces and nephews. They so often make me smile, laugh, and give thanks.
Greg Schneider, my business partner and his wife Jane, continually provide me with opportunities to grow, to learn,to think and to share my areas of expertise while benefiting from their wisdom, experiences, and business acumen. And I learn from Greg about fishing on North Lake during our annual celebration of our partnership!
In preparing for a Fall semester research seminar, I am reading a number of books dealing with aging, brain fitness, and maintaining brain health. My preference is to read scholarly works based upon good science. I also tend to trust detailed thought pieces from say, The New York Times (e.g. this one) or this piece from The New Yorker “Mentally Fit: Workouts at the Brain Gym.”
How, though, could I resist the book Keep Your Brain Alive which claimed to have 500,000 copies in print and which promised me opportunities to discover the secrets of “neurobics?”
Katz & Rubin’s (2014) Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss & Increase Mental Fitness was fun to read. The authors are witty, playful, and creative. Chapter 2 gives an accurate, very elementary explanation of “how the brain works.” The research they cite, however, is “classic” and outdated. Their “Neurobics” concept (“experience novel and unexpected things and enlist the aid of all of your senses”) is common sensical but there is no body of research supporting the efficacy of the exercises. Save your money and get the gist of their ideas by visiting their web page here.
Still clowning around with transitioning to WordPress.org from WordPress.com. I am helped immensely by the physical presence and attendance to details of my student research assistants.
As I move closer to publishing some ebooks, I am going to experiment with different capabilities of WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org. Forgive any confusion I cause as I fumble a bit.
Books I hope yet to finish reading and writing reviews for this semester:
1. The Sharpbrains Guide to Brain Fitness (2013). Thanks to Alvaro Fernandez for helpfully responding to my drafted notes of the 2nd edition of his book. I look forward to seeing the 3rd edition and to attending the 2018 virtual summit.
2. Happiness is a Choice: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old (2018)
3. The End of Old Age: Living a Longer, More Purposeful Life (2018)
4. Two Weeks to a Younger Brain. (2015)
5. Keep Your Brain alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss & Increase Mental Fitness (2014)
6. Not Pink (2018). More can be found here about colleague Pegg Kasimatis’s new novel
I am over 50 years of age though when with my students I forget and am closer to their age:) I am very impressed by recently released Global Council on Brain Health reports dealing with brain health for adults ages 50 and older. Among those I have so far read are those dealing with nutrition (found here), social engagement (found here), sleep (found here), physical activity (found here), and cognitively stimulating activities (found here).
That most recent detailed report draws upon the expertise of thirteen specialists from four continents and from gerontology, neuropsychology, neurology, neuroscience, psychology, public health and speech-language pathology who met and agreed upon ten best-science-based consensus statements summarizing the impact of cognitively stimulating activities on brain health. The report’s appendices list the participants, provide a glossary with carefully defined terms, share the discussion questions framing the deliberations, clearly explain differences, reveal disclosure statements of potential conflicts of interests, indicate sources of funding, and provide selected references. I find these reports understandable, well-written, full of practical and actionable advice, myth-busting and extremely important. Definitely enriching food for thought.
Once I have tearfully witnessed Commencement, I don my invisibility cloak. From the perception of many persons used to finding me ubiquitous, I disappear from the Net. Summer is a time for being outdoors, for travel, for gardening, for playing with children, for taking advantage of our living on North Lake and for being mentored by Leo the Great Pyrenees.
Here are prior expressed summer ruminations when Robin the Newf mentored me.
After last semester I pretty much dropped off the Net for a couple of months (due to an unreliable home networking situation) and spent time reading printed books, hard copies of magazine subscriptions and paper newspapers. I highly recommend it. I am convinced that online reading is a different experience. I look forward to reading Naomi Baron’s latest thoughts on this.
Here are books I found well worth my having read:
I presently am finishing Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and am looking forward to reading Ann Morgan‘s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe when it becomes available in the US in May 2015. Before then I plan to read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
Tomorrow, after my classes, I’ll invite my students into my office to take any books I have read. It always pleases me to see them walk off excitedly with some pleasure reading.
What books do you recommend that I read? That I encourage my students to read?
For the past 40 years I have taught a course called Statistics and Experimental Design required of Carroll Psychology majors. Here is a brief description of HOW I teach PSY205 (click the “HOW” link).
Below is a first draft of an ebook I am writing with the able assistance of some Carroll students. Each hyperlink below is a “module”. Thanks to Alison, Arianna, Tia, and Lizzy (each of who is in graduate school or will be in the Fall) for helping me create this draft. I plan to “publish it” using for the first time Pressbooks software. I share this work in progress at this time welcoming feedback. I also have made it available to my present students for end of semester review
