Introduction to a long-time (LONG-TIME) online instructor...

The New Year is my favorite holiday of the year, although I will confess that I am not really ready for 2018... my dad has been really ill, and I am thinking that this might be his last year with us, which is a very sad thought indeed (my mother died three years ago). At the same time, I have to say that I am also really proud of my dad: he is 90 years old, but is still a voracious reader and active writer, and he published a new book this summer! If you are a sociology major, you might even have heard of him, Jack Gibbs, or of his co-author, Sheldon Ekland-Olson (who is retired but still teaching at UT Austin): Science and Sociology: Predictive Power is the Name of the Game.

I spent much of the winter break with my dad in Texas, and I expect I'll be making trips to Texas during the spring semester too. Just as many of you value the flexibility of online courses, I do too! In fact, I feel really lucky that I can manage to think about family while also being able to carry on with my job. I love teaching these online courses for OU (I've been teaching online since 2002!), and if needed, I can teach online from Texas... or from anywhere in the world where there's an Internet connection. I actually live in North Carolina and that is also for family reasons; I moved here when my husband retired from OU some years ago so that we could care for his very elderly father, also in his 90s.

So, if you wonder why I don't have office hours on campus, that's why... but you will also discover that I am easy to reach online, and at least from my perspective, it's actually so much easier to get to know students in online classes than in the classroom because we'll be interacting one-on-one through your writing every week. I'm excited to see what stories everybody will be creating for these classes this semester!

I also really like the way that the online world is a very international space where you can connect with people literally around the globe. This spring, for example, I'll be teaching two sections of the Indian Epics class, and via the class Twitter feed, I'll be able to share the latest news and publications from my favorite Indian authors who are active at Twitter like Chitra Divakaruni, Usha Narayanan, Samhita Arni, Kavita Kane, Devdutt Pattanaik, William Dalrymple... and more! You can see the Online MythIndia Twitter stream in the blog sidebar of the class announcements, and I would urge you to check it out: you never know what kind of fun, cool, weird, thought-provoking stuff you might find there.

And, finally, as you might have guessed, I am a serious bookworm, so one of the great pleasures of the winter break for me was having some real time to read (I've making my way through Bibek Debroy's massive Mahabharata translation at the moment... luckily, it doesn't seem quite as intimidating on the Kindle, and now I am ready to read his translation of the Ramayana, which I bought in hard copy since the Kindle was so darned expensive), and also to catch up on TV watching. Yes, I have happily binged much of the holidays away. I am officially a fan of the new Star Trek (when I retire, I want to write Star Trek fan fiction: intergalactic Aesop's fables), and I'm also enamored of Westworld... and very excited for a lady Doctor at last! Be warned... spoilers:

(made with cheezburger)

Goodbye, Doctor... hello, Doctor:

(All the Doctors)