THATCamp Community College 2016 Session #1: Possibilities Of Interactive Student Handbooks

Session one was run by student president Christina Cover…

Christina moderating the session. I am so excited to have students involved with our THATCamp.

Christina moderating the session. I am so excited to have students involved with our THATCamp.

  • A big theme for this session is “campus connectivity.”
  • Discussion of print handbooks. Lots of frank comments from students in attendance from them.
  • Are handbooks written at too high a level? Who is the audience for them?
  • If an interactive handbook was made, a glossary would be useful.
    • Example: Students still use the phrase “guidance counselor” in college
  • A digital handbook needs to be heavily hyperlinked.
  • A call for digital handbooks to come originally from a group of students and then go “up the ladder.”
  • Digital handbooks could be “focus grouped” through different student communities.
  • Could there be a video instead of a student handbook or even a series of podcasts?

Charity Book Drive Results

Since the semester ended, I have had time to catch up on cataloging books donated for the book drive I do at RCBC. Since 2012 I have done a book drive at work. The past few years, work on this has slowed a bit as it has become harder to find places to take books. Sadly even schools and libraries are beginning to turn away books. I have moved to doing more focused and targeted donations. 

Since 2012, we have donated 1,254 books to various schools, churches, charities, and universities. I am really proud of the work we have done and the giving power of RCBC. 

CIN109 Film Journal: The Divergent Series: Insurgent

Film #2: The Divergent Series: Insurgent, 2015

  • I managed to dislike this film even more than the first one. There are some fantastic actors in this film, especially Kate Winslett, but the plot is terrible. The plot is such a ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff of much better film series like The Hunger Games and Harry Potter. Also, now that I have seen it, every time a YA film calls someone special, or whatever, I will forever think of The Lego Movie.
  • I do have to praise how normal it is in this film's universe for women and people of color to be in power. The protagonist is just assumed to be as competent as any other character in the film without any, that I can recall, question of it. There is, however, some weirdness with age in this movie. In real life, some of the child/parent pairings are only a few years apart from each other. I am not naive to how Hollywood works, but c'mon.
  • As the Silver Screen Queens podcast notes, the ending of this film is so frustrating. I hate how they go to show what is outside the...city?...but then pan back for the swerve ending to the film. What is out there!?! Maybe show that? I know it is alluded to earlier, but actually seeing it would prove to be a much stronger ending. Generally, this film drags on in a lot of parts and ending by showing something outside would have been significantly better. 

CIN109 Film Journal: Ex Machina

For the American Cinema class I teach, I ask students to keep a film journal of recently watched movies. I decided to keep one as well in the spring. I will post the entries as times go on.

Film #1: Ex Machina, 2015

  • This was probably the best film I saw all summer. It took me awhile to really break down my thoughts on it, but then I realized that this film is arguably a long treatsie on how we, and especially men, are socialized to think about women and their agency.

  • I think a strong argument can be made that we are socialized to think of women as a form of, in a modern sense, manipulatable artificial intelligence. Women are often thought of as infantile, silly, and superficial. In my LIT208 class, we read a lot of essays about suffrage where men, and some women, argue against women voting (and being educated too) because they are not bright enough or "made" for it. Some even go as far as to say that women will just vote with their feelings and could be manipulated easily (men definitely never are though!).

  • But real women are not an AI that can be reprogrammed. A few years ago, I taught Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives in my LIT206 class. We had a fantastic discussion of the novel that was based around how society often, at the same time, puts women on pedestals but also thinks of them as manipulatable objects. The film adaptation of Levin's novel (the first one, not the more recent one) highlights this rather well. Alongside of this we had read some of Freud's writing about women's sexuality and his fear of women having agency. This film really shows those fears of agency quite well. The AI protagonist in this film is able to manipulate the men in the film because they think if they help her, they will get something out of it. She then uses them, leaves, and gets what she wants without them.

Worth Reading: Spring Break Edition

I spent a lot of time over spring break clearing out bookmarks and saved articles from Instapaper. Normally I post this list when I get to ten, but here are twenty articles worth reading: 

Honors College At RCBC

I have been a part of the honors program committee here at RCBC for the past two years or so to create an honors college. Not only have we opened up applications for the classes, but I can happily announce that I will be teaching the first ever honors section of Composition II in the fall. I am really looking forward to this opportunity and already have some ideas for how to proceed with the course and will post more about them in the summer.