Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Category: Blog
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Advice for College Teachers Moving Online Quickly
A lot of teachers I know and love (including one I live with) are scrambling right now to rapidly transition their in progress face to face classes to online instruction. I don’t teach college classes anymore, but I’ve spent more than a decade helping college teachers improve the learning experience for their students and currently…
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2017: My Year in Reading
This is the first year that I’ve really made an effort to keep track of my leisure reading. One of my goals for the year was to read less internet-based news and more books, and I think I was more or less successful, though some months were better for reading than others. In the end,…
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My October and November Reading
In my last reading update, I mentioned that I had read the first book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. Since then, apart from reading for my dissertation, that’s pretty much all I’ve read. I just finished The Yellow Admiral, which means that I’ve read 18 of the 21 books (one left unfinished at the author’s death) in the…
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Adding Interactivity to Web Annotation
For the past few years, I’ve been working to improve how content experts at my university can write, develop, and publish open educational resources. Early in 2016, I published my own set of core principles for an authoring & publishing tool. I first began developing these principles in the summer of 2015, and after comparing…
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The last years of J.B. Jackson
Passages from William Langewiesche’s Inside the Sky interspersed with quotations from John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s own writing on landscape. Normally typeset passages from Langewiesche, block quotes from Jackson. * * * To his neighbors he was known simply as John, a patron of the community, yes, but also a profane and wizened old man who…
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My January and February 2017 Reading
Books My leisure ‘book’ reading continued to slow over the past couple months, and I haven’t had as much time for this blog, so I’m going to roll my January and February reading recap into a single post. Here’s what I read for pleasure (i.e. not for work or for my dissertation) in January and…
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A Guide to DIY Podcast Recording
A little more than two years ago, my friend Dave had an idea: he wanted to do a weekly podcast called “Off the Chain,” on which he would talk about things he thought were off the chain: chiefly, his love of Vin Diesel and terrible action movies. I couldn’t care less about Diesel or action…
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Making a Personal Website: A guide for grad students and other academics
I currently work as an educational technology consultant at a large Midwestern research university. Most of the people I work with are humanities/social science grad students or faculty. One of the most common questions I get asked is how to build a website. I’ve heard it so often, helped so many friends build quick, simple…
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2016: The Year in OER at UW-Madison
2016: The Year in OER at UW-Madison OER STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK On an institutional level, the big news at UW-Madison in 2016 was the publication of the Open Education Resources (OER) page and strategic framework (pdf) on the Educational Innovation (EI) website at the beginning of the Fall 2016 semester (full disclosure: I was a co-author…
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I’m Getting Married!
Thought I often avoid the personal when writing publicly, I felt too much joy not to share this: Thanks to Sam Crowfoot for taking the photo.
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My Initiation Into Fantasy Football
It’s been more than two months since I’ve last written on this blog. A lot has happened. I’ve moved, twice. I’ve aged (by which I mean I celebrated my birthday). I’ve taught an 8-week composition course for incoming Freshman athletes (11 football players and 3 hockey players). And tonight, in about 30 minutes, I’m about…
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“Happy Geeks”: A Story by Steel Wagstaff, age 16
This past week I started teaching an introductory college composition course for a group of incoming UW student athletes. It’s a small group, just 14 male students, and most of the group are football players. For their second writing assignment, I gave them an essay that I wrote was I was around 16 years old…
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Distressing Changes to Wisconsin’s Mining Laws Proposed
From Monday through Thursday of this week, I toured the state as part of a “Place-Based Workshop” put on annually by The Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’ve been one of CHE’s Graduate Student Affiliates for a few years now, but this was the first CHE Place-Based Workshop that I’ve…
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Eyewear (Rec Specs) and Professional Athletes
The weather has finally turned in Madison. It’s still fairly cool here, but the snow is long gone and the grass is back, and the ground is hard enough for running and cutting and all the other things you need to do to play soccer outdoors. Finally. This week has been the first time I’ve…
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On Patience and Non-attachment
I have long believed, in theory, that patience and non-attachment were complimentary and essential virtues and that I would do well to cultivate both of them. In practice, both are difficult, elusive, and have not always felt desirable or worthy of recommendation to others, particularly to those who suffer injustice. I have been thinking about…
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Beck & the Greatest Music Video of All Time
As a teenager, I was wild for Beck. It started with “Loser,” a song I liked so much when I was 12 that I bought the Mellow Gold album and started collecting everything else I could find by the musician. I think that the larger opinion of Beck at the time was that he’d probably…
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On Earth Day
Today is the 41st annual Earth Day, one of my favorite days of the year. Today I want to tell part of the story of its origins, its importance, and why I treasure the values that underlie its celebration and observance. Earth Day is the child of former Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson (see additional bios here…
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The Origins of 4:20
I should state right at the outset that I’m not a pot-smoker. Never tried marijuana in any form, actually, nor does the drug have any real appeal for me. Nevertheless, it was frequently invoked as an inside joke between my best friend Jack and I all through high school. We made thousands of ganja references,…
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The Last Thing To Go
I play basketball on Wednesday nights. Pick-up games, at a church building in Madison, five on five, really nice courts. So it’s on my mind today. I’ve played basketball ever since I was a kid. I’ve always been into sports, and have always liked playing them more than watching them. Commercials don’t help–I abhor them,…
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To be a Carer
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the medical profession, and more broadly, about health. I’m not certain why, particularly since I haven’t been ill lately, and we tend usually to think of health and healers only when our body is not well, when we are in pain, when health eludes us. So I…