After a nearly month away...

I'm back!

The first week in June, I concluded my Ethics class and my Critical Thinking class for Eugene Bible college, and that weekend we went to Seattle for Susan's graduation.

The next week in June, I organized and led the annual VCC Youth Garage Sale. That weekend the weather was perfect, and we netted a little over $1200. Half of that goes to the CHIC fund.

The third week in June we packed like mad, and that weekend moved to our new home four minutes away from church. Now, instead of driving 13 miles to work, school and church, we are finally in the neighborhood. Special thanks to Bethel and her mom for lunch, Kent, Stan, Pete, Karen, Brent, , Janet, Paul, Jim, Joyce, Carina, Kaylee, Garry, and Wes for all your help with the move.

The fourth week of June we opened boxes and made trips to St. Vinnie's (too bad we didn't have time to completely clean things out before the youth garage sale, so we wound up moving everything and finishing the job on the other end.) That weekend Steve's cousin Deb came from Phoenix to spend a few days with us before going on to visit a friend in Bend. We took her to Florence and the Oregon Coast where she enjoyed exploring the tidepools. Then we took her to Sahalie Falls which were deafening, given the late snowmelt.

June 30th was our 29th anniversary, so after dropping Deb off we had a lovely dinner, saw Wall-E and spent the night.

Since the first week of July we have continued to dig out from the boxes; Steve got the gas line hooked up so we could grill; we ordered and had a glass door installed for the master shower; we bought and Steve assembled a Suncast shed;we bought and Steve installed a new dishwasher; I put up new curtains; we fetched the truckload of plants that Janet had so kindly been babysitting for us and brought them to their new home in the backyard; we are having the house wired tomorrow.

Finally, I began teaching my first online class, "Ethics" for Northwest Christian University on July 3. Less than a week before I received a crash course in Moodle, a free open source software that NCU uses instead of Blackboard. Of the two hours alloted for my training, it took my instructor and two programmers 45 minutes to figure out how to get me onto the NCU system. That should tell you something about how things have been going since... : o

I have 13 students. Most are here in Eugene, three are elsewhere in Oregon, one is in Colorado and another is in Maryland. It is both exciting and quite strange. I desperately miss the fact-to-face dialogue with the class. From one point of view, online courses are the apotheosis of nominalism. We are all so separate; each student doing his required work like an ant carrying his food to the anthole. Our online discussions so far have not been very exciting.

From another point of view, though, it is like a tutorial. No one can just sit at the back of the class and let others do the talking. I hope that after this initial experience I will be better able to master Moodle, and get some ideas for becoming a better online teacher. Never having taken a class online myself, it is rather odd being in the position of creating and teaching one. I need to find others who are teaching online and learn from them.