Monday, January 4, 2010

Ah, 2010

The New Year is officially underway. Two thousand and ten. Or, I suppose, Twenty Ten. I am not sure who gets to decide what the proper way to say it is. But no matter. It is upon us and I think it is going to be a great year. There has been much talk about the past decade and how is was the decade from Hell. I have to admit that it was a rough decade and I do think things will get better in the next decade.

It is nice having these cyclical patterns to time - weeks, months, years, decades. They give us a way to structure our time and have built in points of reflection and improvement. I have resolutions for the New Year as I do every year. I am a big fan of reflecting on a time cycle; seeing what when right and what went wrong; and having a shot at improving it next time around. In an earlier post I mentioned how I do this each semester.

Over break, I made substantial revisions to the two classes that I will be teaching in the Spring. I also made some further progress on a book that I am writing entitled Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology. I have decided that when I have the first draft of the book completed, I will make it available on my website for free. I think more academics should do this. The whole publishing business has gone so far off track that it can only be justified as an alternative to nothing. However, making things available for free on the Internet is probably a lot closer to the original ideas of freely sharing scientific and scholarly knowledge. So, I will give it a shot and see how it goes.

I am looking forward to 2010 how ever you pronounce it and will come back at the end of the year and reflect on whether or not it met my expectations.

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