I WANTED TO ESCAPE the echo chamber of social media so I started reading more away from the computer. I also needed to plan better slide decks for new academic modules so that motivation pushed me towards printed texts too.
I'm headed into a new semester with big plans to get ahead in the five academic modules I teach on two campuses. Two modules are new to me, meaning I must sort out reading materials for the next 15 weeks before classes resume in mid-January. I use a combination of course outlines on Moodle, short quizzes on Socrative, slide decks on OneDrive, and master content on OneNote. Moodle links into all of the assets. Many of my students sync their laptops or handsets to the OneDrive material when they're using free wifi on campus and that keeps them abreast of the learning material when they're off the grid in their bedsits in County Tipperary. It's important to get ahead with the material because the required textbooks can be expensive--the one cited in the Management of Information Systems module lists for $239 on Amazon (or $93 to rent it for the semester). [1]
I made an audiolog while thinking about this blog post and cited two sources of paid digital content that I really enjoy: Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review. [2] WSJ's political commentary is more sophisticated than that offered in Irish publications--and better informed in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election. The Harvard Business Review gives me insights about management and innovation that often provide topics discussed in Irish chat space several weeks after HBR publishes the topics.
You can tell a lot about someone by their bookshelves. I have hard cover book on four separate shelves and I've read several dozen in my collection more than once, counting the first reading from college assignments some times. I've continued a deep interest in military history by purchasing The End by Ian Kershaw. [3] It's a book that unpacks the power structure that existed in Nazi Germany. Some of those structures support Isis today, making Kershaw's scholarly and intelligent analysis very timely when reading about evil organisations in current affairs.
I'm more than halfway through The End because I'm jumping into the footnotes and index to dive deeper into locations where I lived and worked in Germany during the 80s. That's a time period worthy of some deep revelations on my blog. I wish I had more time to spend sharing those stories.
1. Laudon and Laudon -- Management Information Systems, New York: Prentice-Hall, 2015. ISBN 978-0133898163
2. Audioboom -- "Planning a Waterlogged Jog", December 28, 2015.
3. Ian Kershaw -- The End: Germany 1944-45. ISBN 978-0-141-01421-0
