Clint Gardner

Here's what I wrote over on the old College server I've been using for my WordPress blog for years now:   While my academic blog has not been the most active creature in the sea, I still wish to maintain it. The server on which the blog currently sits is getting fairly old, however, and there are no plans to replace it with a new one. Given that it holds our record-keeping database for the SLCC Student Writing Center, I think I would prefer to free up some space on the server and move my blog off site to a blogger.com blog. At least in moving to blogger, I won’t be forced into upgrading WordPress ever week or so (I’m not kidding.) Maintaining PeerCentered on blogger.com has been relatively worry-free, after all. The new spot is clintgardner.blogspot.com . Eventually I will auto-forward from this page to it. I’m still contemplating being all ego-maniacal and buying up clintgardner.org while it is up for grabs. Long may she wave. And yes, I do notice ther...

I have sadly neglected The Undersea World for far too long. I promise to update soon, as I have many updates and many ideas to post. I will say, however, that I'm honored now to serve as Secretary of TYCA. TYCA is a great organization and it will be great working with everyone for the next three years. I am also am honored to be giving the keynote address at the upcoming Arizona Writing Centers Symposium sponsored by Arizona State University in February. I'm going to be talking about the benefits of peer tutoring.

Well the summer certain was interesting. Not only did I find out I was elected as TYCA National Secretary, but the building the SLCC Student Writing Center was subject to a reverse flood. In other words, the roof leaked. A leaky roof, however, sounds rather benign, like throwing now a few pans to catch errant drips. The flood we suffered, however, was more like the house in movie version of Fight Club . Suffice it to say, I was rather busy with physical things to post any update here. Talk about an Undersea World! Perhaps I am prescient? I'll write more about the TYCA job later.

Unfortunately, my old and beautiful Undersea template was vunerable to hacking. I've found a new one which allows me to post my own images in the header image. It is a functionally stylish template, but my goldfish image does not convey the breadth that the other one did. Oh well, at least it conveys the limitations that I often feel.

It seems proper to bookend my rather sporadic blogging by posting a binary title for you. In any case, as you might imagine, I've been rather busy this first month-and-a-half of spring semester 2008. Mostly I've been dealing a great deal with class stuff. I've been out of the classroom for nearly two years due to professional, campus, and Student Writing Center commitments, save working with tutor education, and I was feeling a bit rusty at first. It wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing--I am pretty diligent, some might say obsessive about class planning, but I did feel a bit out-of-sorts since it seemed all new to me again. In all I was a bit nervous about that feeling, but then I fell into enjoying it again. I also realized I needed to review my teaching style to reach this particular group of students. They are a bright group who have an interesting perspective on things. In any case, that's why the long silence. In other news, I've gone a...

The second "season" of the PeerCentered podcast begins with where we started, at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW). NCPTW 2007 was held at Penn State and was hosted by the Penn State Center for Excellence in Writing . I hope that this season will feature more contributors. Harry Denny from St. John's University Writing Center in New York expressed interest in the podcast, and perhaps some of the people now contributing to the PeerCentered blog from the Boise State Writing Center will want to participate. There is a lot of potential for PeerCentered either as a blog or a podcast . I think I am going to make it my priority after I finish up as IWCA President this November.

The new writing tutors at the Boise State University Writing Center are carrying on quite the dialog over at PeerCentered . It has been a few years since PeerCentered has been as active as this, and I'm not sure it ever had such a cogent discussion of peer tutoring before. I hope that it will keep up for the whole academic year and that more folks get involved.

"How many side projects to I really need?" I thought to myself while riding the train in to campus today. " I mean my hell! Do you really need another blog?" I've been wanting to fiddle around with WordPress more lately, given that it is the system that is currently in use on writingcenters.org . And I needed an index for my account on the Student Writing Center's web server, Bessie (there is a history behind that name that I will explore at some point on UWCG.) I've been meaning to develop my account on that server given that all my previous professional work was removed from our old Student Writing Center web site because of a change over in how the web server works and general Community College policies. I find that people ask me questions that could easily be answer by a site like this, and I want to organize my work in ways that help me to understand it and, more importantly, remember it! I am anticipating that any reader who would stumble up...