Showing posts with label Goals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goals. Show all posts

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Starting the Sabbatical

My first sabbatical in 20 years begins this fall quarter. I am beginning this blog for a couple of reasons: one is document what I do during the sabbatical, the other is to get the experience of blogging because I believe it could be a useful tool for my classrooms.
I have great ambitions for the next 4 months. I have a contract with Pearson Publishing for a textbook on beginning database. I want to bring that book as near to completion as I can. I also want to catch up with some new software. I have a VM with Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 beta 1. I want to see what I can learn about the Entity Framework, and, perhaps, Azure development. (Azure is about "Cloud Computing." I want to figure out how you connect to a database when you don't know where it is.) I might also explore some free database software, particularly PosGres SQL which I have ignored in the past. In addition I want to do some curriculum development and redesign my website.
In a different direction entirely, I want to work on my poems and stories. I have, in particular, two very long poems I want to complete. I may look into self publishing for those or just post them on a web site. I also have a half dozen short stories in various states of incompleteness. I would love to finish them and send them out. And, brewing in the back of my mind for a long time now, I have played with an idea for a novel.
This is probably all too ambitious, but I really don't want to waste this time.
I don't expect anyone much to read this blog. But if you want to know what I have been up to, it will be here.