This was the brainchild of years of working as a university professor as a sort of supplement to the normal contact that I had with my students. Often tiems I have views on topics that we don't discuss in class and i wanted to not only be able to share those thoughts but I wanted a place where that content was under a more direct form of control. Facebook, Instagram and other social media ofer a sort of filtered ability to present ideas. While for some people this is the perfect venue to share specific bit or links or what have you, I needed somehting where I could not only control the content but the method of delivery. Everything about this page is somethign I had to sit down and work through, from the basics of how to cort information into a user interface to what kinds of information to publish and how to moderate discussion. I wanted to have some really granular controls, things like fonts and colors and widths of menus. I also needed some macro control over how to sort my blog entries, and when to edit them, whetehr I would allow direct discussion or whether I needed to turn comments off on things.
I wanted to put my CV up so that potential employers could see it as well as to show others what my skills are and keep a running track of how logn I've been doing this kind of work. But I will freely admit the idea of the CV was born more out of a professional nessecity than any particular desire to show students or other visitors just how long I've been a teacher.
I also wanted to build a repository of extra credit assignments that would create a more extensive repository of assignments students could choose from. One of the problems I have every semeter is a student who wants a few extra points and gavin to try and invent work that is both meaningful (and useful to students learning) as well as being topical and timely. This repositiory will continue to age and will also be able to have more variety than I could ever offer at any given moment. I can sort it by course and let old assignments hang out with more contemporary materials, I can create work from any topic area and simply allow it to remain as an option.
I want to emphasise that this site is my work, the blog in particular is going to be an excercise in saying somethign and then continuing to work through issues. This isn't "the company line" or the views of any particular department that I work for. I wanted to say things that might be unpopular and either hone my arguments or maybe even keep a record of how my thought process changes over time. The site has a tagline here "Virtute et labore" which is the clan Cochrane motto, it's latin for "By labor and virtue" and this site is an extension of that idea. I always strive toward virtue, I may not always be virtuous, but through labor I hope to always be getting better at it.
I remember as a debater I was always going off half-cocked about some idea or theory and then debating hard to win a round witht hat idea. It took me a few years to really sit down with some of those ideas and either refine them into a more realiztic form or to adjust or abandon them upon further examination. That time in my life was a relatively fearless time, a time when I was happy to simply charge forward. I used to quote a Khalil Gibran piece "March on. Do not tarry. To go forward is to move toward perfection. March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life's path." I believed that at the time, that it was always this sort of forward momentum that made progress. I still hold that quote to be important, I think that dwelling in the past is generally where despair comes from, that review of one's past actiosn breeds either a form of pride that is unhealthy or a type of sorrow that draws our life away. But that has to be tempered, it is not a blind march toward the neverending horizon. I pair that idea with Socrates famous dictum at his trial "ὁ ... ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ" which we translate as the maxim "The unexamined life is not worth living" . That statement is as much about accepting death as anything but since I am far from being killed for impiety I look instead at the examination of life as being the central purpose for living it.
Ok, real talk, that was nerdy and academic. But it's no less true for being so. I imagine that idea of balacing always trying to move forward rather than being stuck in neutral (or god forbid reverse) with the drive to know both myself and the world around me is at the heart of what great thinkers do. Be they philosphers like Gibran and Socrates (though I'm an Aristotle man myself) or be they men of science like DeGrasse-Tyson and Tesla (okay, Tesla was also insane but I still love him). Actually maybe ther is some of that divine madness involved in my way of looking at the world. That one cannot really know anything until one casts oenself fully into the unexplored and finds thier way to knowledge. I definitely feel like I try to take new ideas as a blank slate and start by applying what I think I know of the world to them, but as often as not I take ideas that are alien to me and simply try to chisel away at the stone like Michaelangelo unti the truth reveals itself.
Have I rambled too much? Probably. I will continue to explore ideas like this over in the blog section.