A note of explanation:  I arrived in Toulouse, France on July 1 for a year-long sabbatical stay.  I spent the first 5 weeks on my own, settling into my apartment and learning my way arround.  In the second week of August, the rest of my family arrived.  My wife, Betty, and youngest daughter, Rachel, will stay the year with me.  Betty is also in Psychology and an Associate Dean in the College; Rachel is in the fortunate position of just having graduated from high school, so we offered her an "off year" before college to learn some French and some French culture.  My oldest daughter is one year out of college and will visit 2 or 3 times this year, but will live in Lexington and keep my mind at ease because my 2 golden retrievers were left at home.  With that, this is the first of several blogs that I created for my family.

Fromage and Toilettes (14 Juillet, 2011)

This semester, as part of my Instructional Systems Design Master’s program, I am taking EDC 605: Distance Learning Research and Design. I’m really excited about taking this course, as I think it will greatly benefit the work I currently do in Online Ed. What I’m really interested in is one of the books that we are assigned: Face to Face Communication over the Internet: Emotions in a Web of Culture, Language and Technology, edited by Arvid Kappas and Nicole C. Kramer. I think this is a really interesting topic, as I had never really thought about how emotions and nonverbal communication could affect online F2F communication, using tools such as Skype and Adobe Connect. There are also several articles which discuss race and gender and how these affect communication online. I’m really excited to begin reading this book, and hopefully I will be able to write another blog post once I have begun reading the articles.