Dynamic Subspace

Tag: Planning

  • Project Board at the University of Liverpool

    a felt covered corkboard with three columns of index cards pinned to its surface .

    I mentioned this to my students the other day, but I wasn’t able to find a photo of what I was talking about. Now I have, so I’ll show it to them in class tomorrow.

    This is my project board while I was an MA student at the University of Liverpool. My monk’s cell had a felt-covered corkboard that I repurposed as a project scheduler by writing upcoming work and ideas on 3″ x 5″ index cards and pinning them into one of three columnar categories: Course Work, or assignments and readings in my classes; Commitments, or work product deliverables like writing a book review or preparing a conference presentation; and Thinking About, or projects and ideas that I was considering but hadn’t committed myself to yet.

    This board was the key to my academic success at that time, because it gave me a way of tracking the work that I had coming up and I could see at a glance from my desk what needed to be prioritized to keep my output going.

    Over time, the board became quite full of index cards. It was always satisfying to take a card off the board when that task had been completed.

    Using a daily planner or a calendar app can serve a similar purpose. Whatever method and tool that works best for you, make a commitment to stick with it so that it can keep you on track for success.

  • Ideas for Expanding Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT)

    isometric view of an rpg dungeon with creatures moving around and an ethereal green flame in the background
    Isometric RPG dungeon image created with Stable Diffusion.

    Yesterday, one of my top students visited my virtual office hours on Zoom to talk about their research paper. During our conversation, he made impassioned arguments that I add chapters on Video Games and Table Top Gaming to Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT), the OER textbook that I published earlier this year and am teaching with for the first time this semester. He’s right–it does need coverage of those topics not just for completeness but also because it’s how many students make a deeper connection to the genre (with television and film often being an introduction). It’s something that I plan to work on when I get a chance.