Our Journey, Day 82
Yesterday I launched Lifelong Learners on Substack. The response was positive, which I appreciated. I think I'll post new content to it twice a week, once it gets going. Maybe a little more frequently as it's starting up, to backfill some stuff I already had on Making History that I want to live on the new blog. I won't be "announcing" every repost via emails though, so people should glance at the home-page occasionally to see what is showing up there. As a reminder, everybody gets to see everything for thirty days, then posts shift to the archive.
I'll be back on campus this morning, to teach my US History I class. There was a lot of retrenchment-related activity last week while I was in Canada. The reorganization task force met, as did my department and (I think) the faculty senate. I'm becoming increasingly detached from these events and the discussions people are having about the future of BSU. Not as detached as some: my colleague who is a tenured professor just above me on the roster, who also got retrenched, has sold her farm in Bemidji and moved back to Arizona or New Mexico. She'll be doing whatever she still needs to do via Zoom.
But all this BSU stuff is probably less interesting to readers and viewers than what else I might be talking about. As it turns out, it is to me too. Yesterday, I began reviewing all the daily posts I've made in this Retrenchment/Journey series, since early August. I only got through about a month of them, double-bracketing keywords of ideas I want to pursue, so that they connect to other ideas in this web I'm creating in the app Obsidian. I found lots of passages about [[Open Ed]] and [[Z-Degree]]s. Also about [[note-making]] and the [[Great Books]]. Not so many about [[BSU]] or [[retrenchment]] or even the crisis in [[Higher Ed]]. That's not to say I didn't make notes for those topics, to pull the info together. But I really didn't have a lot of interest in continuing to explore those ideas. Those will probably be the notes in the slipbox that Niklas [[Luhmann]] mentioned, that basically disappear over time by not developing links to other ideas.
So, back to something that interests me more, that I'll probably revisit and expand upon in the near future. As I'm developing the new blog, part of what I'm doing is writing drafts of content that will appear in the next two editions of the Handbook. First, the Reading section and then next the Research. As I'm thinking about that, I'm also thinking about maybe making the revised edition a bit more modular. Not entirely a "choose your own adventure", because I do think a practical guide like what I'll be writing should proceed in a fairly organized way, as people are developing and practicing skills that build on each other. But with a lot of links to peripheral content that explores some of the ideas more fully. For example, the Reading section is clearly going to be inspired by How to Read a Book, and to some extent will be responding to ideas its authors developed three generations ago. For interested readers, I could link to my actual reactions to the chapters reflected in the reading notes I'm posting.
I think it's a bit interesting, thinking about what I say in these responses to each chapter. I'm not really trying to faithfully synopsize what Adler and Van Doren said. Instead, I'm responding to it and commenting; often based on what I would have said or what I plan to say about the topic. I think I did that with my book reviews that I've been posting in the Historiography section of Making History. These are not complete mirrors of the texts I read; they're a comparative (Adler would say syntopical) reaction based on what interested me when I was reading. Since a lot of that reading was for my Comprehensive Exams when I was in grad school a few years ago, the perspective is often related to me figuring out how the text fits into a conversation about history I was pursuing in all the texts I was reading.
There are probably details I missed or ignored in many of those books, that another reader might find even more interesting than the material I commented on. So my reviews are of limited value as book reports, but maybe of greater value as pieces of a developing puzzle. This, of course, could be said about just about anything that anyone writes about books or about events in the past. It's all much more subjective and rooted in the author's interests and biases than we'd like to think. Even when authors sincerely attempt to be objective and comprehensive, you've got to wonder what they might be missing. This is one of the reasons we have so many different sub-disciplines of history.
Back to the point: I think I'll make these discussions I'm having with these other texts as I develop my new content available to readers in linked tangential material. In an ebook that'll be easy. In a print book, maybe less so. But not impossible, if I use short urls or even QR codes. It would be a way of "showing my work" and letting readers not only see the processes I'll be describing in operation, but also reading for themselves and deciding whether they agree with me.