The start of year two

Classes started last week; it's hard to believe that a year is over (and my last year is starting)— that went quickly. No classes for me this quarter except independent studies, and I'm TA'ing Roderic's Social Analysis of Computing course for undergrads. It's sort of a light-weight version of the class I took with him last year; lots of readings working to question the assumption that technology is uniformly useful and beneficial. I'm looking forward to re-reading some, and there are new papers in the syllabus, too.

I have two academic goals for this quarter. The first goal is to proceed through advancement succesfully. I have a working plan on the content I want to include, and I've started developing a presentation stub; I'll aim to have that occur in late October or early November. The second goal is to produce a working outline of a thesis proposal. I have a very good idea of what I want to argue in my dissertation, and I'll take this quarter to sketch out (in proposal form) what I intend to say and how I will present the argument, and a schedule for next year.