The Blog of a Chronic Content Creator
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of a telephone call. I live in a region where many people still believe that the only way to get action on anything is to call someone, which leads to many, mostly in the younger generation, having extremely awkward phone etiquette. Both Karey & I often …
Continue reading “The Lie Destroying America: If It’s Important, They’ll Call”
Our learning management system asks us to write an “About your Instructor” page for our students. Here’s Fall 2023’s – I think I’ve reached peak “This is who I am”… I was born last century, the only offspring of artists who both never had the opportunity to complete a college degree. From an early age …
We’re at the end of the Summer II term, and I’m reading term papers. It has made me think about the biggest issues I see with student writing today. So here is my list, in no particular order, of my biggest pet peeves. If you are a student in one of my classes, this is …
Continue reading “Dr. Westfall’s Writing Pet Peeves (a.k.a. How to Write a Paper I Won’t Hate)”
I teach a variety of courses where I give comments to students that I sometimes like to re-use or modify for the next semester (Typically combining with a tool like TextExpander). Recently I created a course with about 25 different assignments, and I wanted to be able to download all of the submission comments. But …
Continue reading “Download All Canvas Submission Comments In Bulk!”
A colleague and I are creating a Discord server to discuss psychology and all things related (Technology, community, academia, culture, etc…) We’re hoping to use it with our students, and our colleagues and friends. If you’d like to join in, head over to https://go.jonwestfall.com/psychout and jump in. Right now just a few channels in there …
Each semester I teach General Psychology, I do an activity where I ask a series of True/False questions to determine if my students believe some of the biggest “myths” of the field. Recently I asked our excellent Graduate Assistant to pull the previous semesters (5 in total) and report the percentage of people who got …
A few days ago, my MacBook Pro had to go on a quick trip to Texas for a doctor’s appointment (a.k.a. Some service work on a misbehaving main board). With my “spare” MacBook mostly used by my wife these days, I figured “I wonder if I can survive on my 2018 11’’ iPad Pro and …
Dear Student in Fall Twenty Two Time to Start School, It’s True! Your Weird Prof Mentioned His Site You Went There One Night And Found This Poem – Woohoo! Welcome student (or wanderer on the Internet), I’m glad you found this post. I try to make one of these every so often, in case students …
What exactly is unhealthy? It probably definitely isn’t BMI (Body Mass Index). In this post I discuss a different number – FFMI (Fat Free Mass Index) and discuss if it should be the standard I judge my own journey on. Recently I’ve started thinking about different metrics that are used to assess your level of …
I use Siri fairly often when walking, biking, or just when my hands are busy. One of my frustrations is that Siri hates playing the music I ask for. I used to have a playlist named “Essentials”, and I would frequently say “Hey Siri, shuffle Essentials”. That didn’t work 99% of the time – she’d …
Continue reading “Listen Siri, I Didn’t Ask for John Sanchez!”