This is my attempt at live-blogging Teaching Month, which I keep referring to as Teaching Week and is actually two and a half weeks of events, so the term 'month' is loose to start with. I'm at the Vice-Chancellor's Invitational Lecture - I hadn't originally planned to come as I wasn't invited, but then I was informed that it was the Vice-Chancellor who was invited, and now I'm here it looks like the invitation was from the Vice Chancellor to a guest speaker - this year the speaker is A/Prof Geoff Meyer from Anatomy and Human Biol, who from the introduction sounds wonderful and very busy!

The lecture theatre we are in now was the site of Meyer's first lecture as an undergrad, and he emphasises the importance of inspirational teacher in his undergraduate and postgraduate experiences - that collegial examples can bring out the best in you - that support and partnerships are crucial in making visions happen

Meyer teaches histology (anatomy under the microscope) - we had a moment of audience participation, with Freddo Frogs as a reward (bribery with chocolate always seems like good practice in teaching to me!) - and he places this discipline in context of related disciplines and applications. Traditionally, histology was taught in laboratories and practical classes, using prepared slides and microscopes etc. As student numbers increased, the resources from this mode of teaching and learning were inadequate - though computers could be added to the resources, and Meyer agreed to take up the challenge of reformulating teaching to adapt to this situation - which required a visionary approach.  He, in partnership, developed a programme called The Human Body, evolving through student feedback. The programme has similar content to a textbook (though hyperlinked) and the ability for students to interact with the image through a simulated microscope, pointers to specific areas, a quiz for each section and other features. The benefits of the programme for students were that they could continually testthemselves and get feedback, which improved their final exam results. Students could also access the programme anywhere - thus freeing up lab space, staff time and resources.

Meyer teaches at UCLA as well as UWA, and there have been a range of partnerships between UWA and UCLA developing from and around this relationship.In a 2006 Teaching Fellowship, he examined the effect of replacing lab classes with just use of the programme and students were generally successfully able to identify slides - so there was both qualitative and quantitative evidence for the programme's value in producing learning outcomes.The programme/learning system came to be well known in the field and in demand, so how to let other people use it? A UWA Pathfinder Grant, help from the OII and consultants came up with the conclusion that the system could be marketed - both for its content with a publisher in the area, but also that the structure could be used in other image based areas. Thus Meyer's work fits into a broader shift to e-learning and electronic publishing. Meyer was offered a publishing contract - he flags issues about copyright control (author vs company - particularly given the image based nature of the work), rights, licensing - and so the need to get expert advice from university lawyers etc and make sure that corporate vision matches yours and so Meyer ended up creating his own publishing company (studying and supervising in business to gain knowledge and skills) called Histology-online.com Pty Ltd. To promote and market the company/resource, he's added blogging to the traditional strategies! (Yay for the teaching/research/blogging nexus). Google Analytics is a useful tool for tracking the reach and effectiveness of the site and identifying potential markets where students/colleges are looking at the site - so being proactive with marketing follow-up. The financial stuff about running your own business and sightly worrying tracking of users I'm afraid I tuned out on (one day I will get over my aversion to monetizing, but not anytime soon).

The future? Meyer is looking at new markets, such as India. This expansion can also promote the university - general awareness and as a postgraduate destination. Meeting customer needs through customising, and to develop instructor access to suit courses and specialisation, also uploading lecture notes and other resources - so also engaging with competitors such as textbook writers/publishers . This can also encourage collaborative teaching and learning. Moving away from lectures - other ways to convey information, prioritising interactivity (such as the histology monopoly games where you accumulate knowledge rather than real estate). Moving away from slide images to 3D images and animation to build new partnerships and new ways to experience learning.  

My thesis examination results (and examiners comments) arrived - to me - today. It was a pass with minor revisions. While this is very exciting, and worth celebrating (which I fully intend to do later this afternoon after I've been a good disciplinary citizen and gone to the seminar), I'm feeling a bit ambivalent and wierded out. Something to reflect on and come back to later...

In further proof that Mondays are my day for attempting maintain delusions about myself as simultaneously domestic goddess and organised and enthusiastic member of the university community I've started up a soup club for Monday lunchtimes. For those of you who haven't been brainwashed since an early age to the strange rituals of teachers, this idea comes courtesy of North Woodvale Primary and my mother. Soup club involves designating a day of the week as soup day, then gathering people willing to cook and consume soup. I'm informed that multiples of four work best - one average soup batch feeds four, and with each person taking a turn at being soup provider, you only have to cook once a month. (By changing soup for salad in warm weather, this scheme can work year round). This is my first attempt at such a club, and so we are starting small with four members. I was the inaugural soup provider, and choose an apple-free soup recipe from The Rest of the Best, a cookbook brought back from Canada by my aunt. I don't know if it's the cold weather there that forces them to characterise their national cooking with strange food combinations ('Oh look, we're snowed in' 'That's okay, I can put together this apple juice, canned artichokes and fennel and make soup') but to my eye, some of the recipes are more for reading than cooking. Nonetheless, and despite my chronic inability to follow a recipe exactly as stated (it's improvements, really), the red lentil soup was a success.

Red Lentil Soup

Chop one brown onion (fairly rough chopping is fine) and saute until golden (or if you are me, get distracted by cutting up plums for stewing until the onions are about to burn, then stir vigorously). Add 3 cloves of garlic and a stick of celery, both chopped finely; two carrots chopped to your size of preference; about 1/2 a cup of sundried tomatoes chopped as much as they will let you (or, if you have a Canadian style properly stocked pantry, 1 can of chopped tomatoes - I, being non-Canadian, had to improvise with picnic leftovers); and two fresh bay leaves (dried is fine if you don;t have a shrub and are looking for reasons to justify its existence) and saute for two minutes, seasoning with black pepper. Add 1 cup red lentils, 2 cups vegetable stock, 3 cups water (this is unusually precise for me) and simmer until the lentils are tender (the recipe said 20 minutes, I let it go for as long as it took me to make a potato, spinach and ricotta bake which may have been in the vicinity of that time). Stir in some fresh chopped basil and either serve, or leave to cool, put it in a water-tight container, refrigerate, and remember to bring to uni the next day.

In this I speak as someone who migrated to Endnote part-way through my thesis, and mostly taught myself how to use it: get Endnote for the start, and learn how to use it effectively!

The HSS Library offers an introductory class on using EndNote software to manage bibliographies. The class 
is two hours long. A range of session times are currently available in late March to Mid April:

Friday 28th March - 11.00 am - 1.00 pm
Wednesday 2nd April - 10.00 am - 12 noon
Wednesday 9th April - 10.00 am - 12 noon
Tuesday 15th April - 10.00 am - 12 noon

Email hss-ref@library.uwa.edu.au to secure your place at one of these sessions.

It's Tuesday, and that means it's my day to be a free-range academic. (The condition of having an office of my own was giving it up for tutor consultations one day per week). But I'm not only free-range in terms of physical location at the moment, I also get to roam intellectually. Tuesdays, as a non-teaching and thus Whitfeld day, let me exit the restricted focus of teaching and head out to pastures new.

 At the moment I have an article sitting beside me that I have to finish a report on, a stack of print-outs and a DVD of Season 1 of Lost to reshape into a lecture, a few call for papers to look into and start playing with ideas for abstracts,and the very very rough beginnings of a draft for an article that I want to add at least a couple of paragraphs to by the end of the day. Also scheduled for today is a Communication Studies seminar and and IAS public lecture later in the evening. I have to admit to being a habitual seminar/lecture attendee, in part because as a postgrad I found they gave some structure to my day, and now, post-thesis, because hearing someone else thinking through and idea helps me jumpstart my own brain, even where the subject matter and/or theoretical framework  it totally different to my area.

So I shall breathe in the fresh air, and get back to work.
 

There's a phrase in Allucquere Rosanne Stone's The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age that has kept popping into my head lately: 'The machines are restless tonight'. Stone goes on to think through the implications for how we think about machines and their agency and the colonialist overtones of that phrase, while I, of course, was more concerned about the effects on my cooking when I had to go switch off the fridge alarm that went off for seemingly no reason in the middle of the night last night for the third or fourth night running. Detective work in the light of day (not by me) suggested that the freezer was over-full and so not sealing properly, hence the alarm and (just when I was craving it) very runny mint ex-sorbet. So I'm offering up the recipe to the universe in the hopes that the machines will fall into line and allow a refreeze for this evening.

Mint Ex-Sorbet

Chop and squish thoroughly two and a half cups of mint leaves (it helps to have mint bushes going feral in your garden). If you have a food processor and the machine are cooperating, use that - otherwise, resign yourself to a mortar and pestle and several batches of squishing. Stir mint into 1 cup of sugar syrup (make sugar syrup by adding 1 cup water to 1 cup sugar in a saucepan, heating until you create a supersaturated solution - or less geekily, until all the sugar dissolves - and allow to cool) and add juice from 1 lime. Pour into flat container and put in the freezer. If the freezer cooperates by working, stir to break up where the edges are starting to freeze after half an hour, another hour, and whenever you remember a few hours after that. The taste is pretty strong, so either eat just a little, use as a topping or accompaniment to something else (should go nicely with fresh pineapple), or dilute by putting a tablespoonful into a martini glass and adding vodka.

Just a quick recipe before I head home to cook dinner. Part of my resolutions for this semester is bringing healthy lunches to uni, which I generally suck at unless it's leftovers. However, planning ahead to make salad is another option, slightly complicated by the fact I prefer cooked over raw vegetables. So here's my step-by-step plan for workday lunch:

Firstly, get some feta (I like smooth feta, such as Danish feta or goat's feta, in memory of the no-longer available best marinated feta ever from the Shenton Park supermarket). Cut up the feta into 2cm-ish cubes, finely slice one red chilli and two cloves of garlic, tear up a fresh bay leaf and a handful of thyme, and grab ten or so whole black peppercorns. Layer into a glass jar, then cover with olive oil. Leave in the fridge to marinate for a week or longer (a week is as long as I can hold out). On the weekend, buy a bunch of English spinach and a butternut pumpkin, and at some point during the weekend roast the pumpkin (cut up, cut off skin and seeds, toss with olive oil, minced garlic and herbs, roast in 190-200 degrees oven for one hour or until starting to brown at edges) and strip the leaves off the spinach (rinse thoroughly and then dry thoroughly). In the morning before work, toss the spinach leaves, pumpkin and feta in a container. If you want dressing, shake together the oil from the feta with white balsamic vinegar. If you are more naturally healthy than I am, feel free to add other vegetables to the salad.
 

Bruscetta is my favorite summer food. It's perfect on days when it's too hot to bother cooking, and you need something flavorful to tempt you into eating.

Recipe: Chop up tomatoes into small cubes. I prefer roma tomatoes, just on the edge of over-ripe, with the seeds scraped out and the skin still on. Feel free to vary according to your personal tomato preferences. Chop up spanish (red) onion as finely as you can stand (I'm a wuss, and usually stop cutting when I start crying), ideally finer than the tomatoes. There should be equal quantities of tomato and onion, or if you want to be sociable, use less onion. Finely chop one-three cloves of garlic (depending again on sociability, and the type of garlic you use - less if it's fresh, purple garlic, more if it's the tasteless, white, imported stuff). Tear up a handful of basil leaves (my garden is currently exploding with basil, so I'm using more at the moment in a vain attempt to stop the plants going to seed), add a generous flavoring of salt and pepper, and a dash of olive oil (enough to moisten all the ingredients). Mix it all up, then spoon onto a slice of bread (crusty Italian style bread is good, sourdough is best) and place in the grill until golden on top (not burnt). For variations, add a final topping of goats cheese or torn-up proscuitto.

If you're still in summer holiday mode (or attempting to recapture that feeling), serve with a chilled, quaffable (but decent) red wine. 

Just over one week ago, I submitted my thesis for examination. The last month was a final flurry of filling up the gaps in writing, clarifying the expression, smoothing out the argument into (hopeful) coherency, and the endless finnicking of reference checking and formatting. I certainly wouldn't recommend this sudden immersion with a tight deadline approach to anyone wanting to retain their health and sanity, but still, it got the job done. Now, I'm deliberately not thinking much about the thesis in case I jinx the examination somehow.

Luckily, I've got plenty to think about instead. I'm coordinating a unit in Communication Studies this semester - called Cases Studies in Communication - which looks at cultural policy, creative industries and the intersections of theory and practice generally. The most urgent task is putting together the unit reader and unit outline, so I'm currently speed-reading my way through the relevant material to get a more solid understanding of the field. I'm also starting to think more substantially about the next research project, on the use of new forms of media to construct forms of medievalism. I've given conference papers on Victorian medievalist photography as afirst step into the project, but now I need to take time to define what I want to accomplish, the scope of the project and the best way to go about it. On a more frivolous note, I'm also planning to go to lots of Festival events in the next month - doing my bit as a consumer of creative industries. The rain today is also a reminder to stop reading through seed catalogues and start planning garden plantings going into autumn.

Writing a thesis is often as much about deciding what goes out as well as what goes in. One frame for deciding what goes in is to divide up your material into three categories: things that are 1) imperative, 2) good or 3) nice for your reader to know. And if the material isn't imperative, then perhaps it can go.

However, that kind of ruthless editing can leave you bemoaning the hours of work on something that doesn't make the final thesis cut - that is certainly the case with me. So I'm sharing an out-take from chapter three of my thesis, which looks at pulp science fiction magazines in the first half of the twentieth century. The material either summarises information available elsewhere, or falls into the 'nice' category - interesting, but not directly engaged with the arguments in the chapter. 

On 20 February 1929, Gernsback went into receivership and Amazing was sold to B.A. Mackinnon, then through another few companies to end up under the control of Macfadden Publishing in August 1931. Amazing survived the Depression, continuing regular monthly publication, though the Amazing Quarterly was only released irregularly. Astounding was more deeply affected by the Depression than Amazing: publication dropped to bi-monthly after June 1932, ceasing after January 1933, before a final one-off volume in March 1933.(Ashley, 2000, pp.76-77) The Depression influenced the content of the magazines as well as their publication. For example, the story ‘Two Thousand Feet Below’, in which the descendants of an ice-age tribe trapped in subterranean spaces plan world domination using heat rays and flames throwers, requires the united response of the US government, armed forces, and captains of industry to defeat (Astounding Stories, June 1932 pp. 311-335; September 1932 pp. 34-62; November 1932 pp. 191-219; January 1933, pp. 346-364). While this story can be seen as an estranged exploration of contemporary issues and the need for a multi-facet response to the Depression (the New Deal), other stories from the same era were more direct. Laurence Manning’s ‘The Moth Message’ (Wonder Stories December 1934) depicted the remaining descendents of an Atlantean mining colony left behind on Colorado mesa top after the end of Atlantis who are eventually persuaded to release their huge accumulated stash of gold bullion – which the narrator suggests will be use to relieve Great Depression. This story proposes a straightforward fictive redress of contemporary problems: Atlantis’s past legacy will ameliorate America’s current crisis. 

Ashley, M. (2000). The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950. Liverpool, University of Liverpool Press.  

In short, make your presentations a little more like a play or a film.

The Graduate Research School is calling for applications for the Postgraduate Writing Retreat to be held in 2008. The writing retreat will take place on 4-8 February, at UWA’s Albany Centre, and includes both time for individual writing as well as opportunities to develop writing skills and receive feedback. 16 places are available for students, with costs for the retreat, accommodation, and transport to be covered by the Graduate Research School. Students wishing to participate must apply by Monday 10 December. Further details, including application forms, are available at

http://www.postgraduate.uwa.edu.au/events/writing_retreat

That's the official blurb: unofficially, I just like to point out that the writing retreat means

• getting out of Perth to somewhere cooler in the middle of summer
• having a whole building - including a ghost - to set up for your writing space
• time to write without everyday interference
• access to people whose job it is to help you write better 
• did I mention the getting out of Perth?

It's been quite a while since I've posted about my research: in part, because I haven't been posting much at all, with the demands of full-time work and thesis writing fitting in whenever I find the time and energy, but also because I don't want to add to the negativity around the process of thesis writing while still reporting honestly on my own experiences. Thus, silence. Today I've been tireder than usual - the mistake of trying to have a life somewhere in the weekend - but for me tiredness also seems to clarify things in a strange distanced way. I'm staring down the barrel of just a little more than two months to submission, and still a lot of work to do. My abstract is heading out into the universe today, while I have six months of a future planned the rest is still unsettled, and a house move is on the horizon. So I'm tired, and I'm stressed, and I have hours in the middle of the night where I hate my thesis and want to hit myself over the back of the head but still, as I insist to all the students I work with, my research does matter. I need to hold onto the passion that I felt for it somewhere along the line, and I need to convey that - to myself, to my examiners, to the universe at large.

What does my research do? It complicated things. While this might not sound like Nobel-winning stuff, to my mind, complicating things is the job of the humanities and social and cultural studies: to insist that people are messy, that history isn't singular, that we always say both less and more than we mean, that reading is an act of transformation, that trying to pin things down just creates more things. My thesis looks at one sub-genre of science fiction - the lost race story - and argues that recognising its presence in science fiction unsettles previous critical accounts of the development of science fiction. It helps to connect up science fiction to writing and reading practices in the Victorian period, while still showing how the pulp science fiction magazines of the early twentieth century were where the genre was first really articulated. Looking at lost race stories shows how pulp science fiction ambivalently negotiated the radical social and technological shifts of the period: that its 'prophetic vision' of the future was in fact underwritten by construction of its pasts. The writing, publishing and reception of lost race stories show how together, these factors created a shared memory of what science fiction was and how it worked: a dialogue both inside and outside fiction texts building a cultural memory of genre. And finally, that even up to the present, lost race stories keep being written and rewritten by science fiction authors, mapping newly imagined spaces through familar narrative terrain.

There's more, of course, but my head hurts enough without going into the critical theory side of things. From long experience, the best way for me to handle the way I'm feeling now is more writing and more sleep. Homewards and onwards.
 

Well, one of my office sweepstake horses did. And that means I have won a pile of (chocolate) gold coins - which, I must admit, is more my style of winnigns than any serious gambling.

It's been a while since I've posted a recipe, so in honour of the event, here's what I brought along for the celebration.

Caramellised Onions and Chorizo Puffs

Brown onions (about 3)
Sugar (whatever sort is in the cupboard)
Vinegar (I use red wine vinegar)
Olive oil
Puff pastry (frozen from the shops - there's no way I'm crazy enough to make this from scratch)
Chorizo sausage

Method: Chop up the onions in a fairly rough-ish dice. Cook them over a very low heat, with a good splash of vinegar, couple of tablespoons of sugar, and a large dash of olive oil. Stir occasionally, and keep cooking until they are well beyond translucent, though not burnt. Let onions cool, while preheating oven to 180 degrees. Cut out 5cm diameter circles of pastry (*** with a fork), then place on each circle a tablespoon of onionand two thin-ish slices of chorizo. Bake for 15 minutes or unitl golden brown, serve warm.