media

Welcome to the relaunch of ProfessorPope.com!  This is the third iteration of a blog I started in 2004.  Originally, it was just professorpope.com — a personal blog I used as a type of journal, talking about whatever was going on in my life.  It chronicled the last few months of graduate school, our move to South Carolina, and the beginning of my career as, well, and actual professor (assistant professor, to be technical).  As I would often comment on philosophical and educational matters on the blog, I told my students about it.  Gradually, professorpope.com transformed into a classroom tool.  I used it to post powerpoints and other material for my class.  It proved very effective that way, helping keep my students on track and allowing them to access material if they missed a class.  As that purpose became more prominent, my writing about other things gradually tapered off; I didn’t want work and “non-work” to become too intertwined.  That led me to create a blog at blogspot (professorpope.blogsopt.com).

I felt I did some good writing on the second iteration of the blog, but it never really took off.  I often committed the cardinal sin of blogging — failure to frequently update.  I never had more than eleven posts per month and rarely got comments.  It languished.  But I felt it’s absence. Or rather I felt the absence of an outlet for my non-academic writing.  I write a lot for my job, but that’s understandably constrained by the parameters of that job.  I write about ethics and assessment, not about how reading the ranger class description in the 4th Edition of D&D made me realize the game wasn’t really for me anymore.  I really wanted to write about the later sort of stuff, so I did two things — talk to my brother about revamping professorpope.com and adopt a daily writing regime.  Both have been fairly successful, as one will hopefully witness as the blog unfolds.

This iteration of professorpope.com will hopefully be a little more focused than previous ones.  I won’t use it for class, though if my students find their way here, that’s okay.  And it won’t be just a journal.  It won’t be just a narrative of events.  Instead, I hope to make connections and commentary, to illustrate features of the world — and myself — from whatever prospective it is I can provide.  One thing I have noticed as an emerging theme in the writing I have done this summer is the past and popular culture.  My own past, our cultural cannibalism of our media past, and the intersection of those two things.  That will likely continue as a theme here, as I am coming to realize I can’t get away from my own history and mass media seems bent on making me relive the books, movies, and other popular cultural forms of my childhood in some sort of mutant form (see new JC Penny Breakfast Club commercial for horrific example).

So here it is, the new professorpope.com.  Leave comments and poke me with sticks.