Category: Uncategorized

Heads up, folks. It's time to Jet.

No, I'm not referring to the legendary Jet magazine, founded in 1951 by John H. Johnson. That would be cool and interesting and educational in its own right, but I'm afraid I'm talking about something much more mundane.

As we announced back in December, we're moving our "CAT FooD" newsletter to the JetPack platform. That's transition is almost complete. Your receipt of this message indicates success — assuming it came to your email.

Yes, our inboxes are clogged these days, but email remains the best way to stay in touch for certain things. We hope timely info from CAT+FD is one of those things!

We didn't make this change lightly, but it should offer several advantages. For one thing, it gives you more power to customize exactly how often you get your newsletter delivered. Also, it integrates more seamlessly with our publishing platform, WordPress.

What do you have to do? Nothing! If you were subscribed to the old newsletter, we've already added you directly to the new newsletter. In fact, an email version of this post should come directly to your inbox. You should get it twice, actually: once via the new system, instantaneously using JetPack, and once via the old system, overnight using MailChimp. We'll shut the automated MailChimp newsletter down after this one last post. It will be strictly JetPack after that.

Having said all that, there are a couple things you could do to make sure you continue to get the newsletter smoothly.

• The new newsletter comes at you from CAT FooD <donotreply@wordpress.com>, so you could add that address to your contacts, in order to keep it from getting flagged as spam.
• Speaking of which, if you didn't already get this post via email, that may have happened. Please check your spam filters and folders, and if you find the CAT FooD newsletter languishing there, please be sure to mark it as legitimate.
• If you're using the "Focused Inbox" in Outlook, you may find the newsletter in your "Other" tab. And maybe that's just where you want it. I mean, that's entirely up to you. If you'd rather see our newsletter in your "Focused" tab, you can move it by selecting Move > Always move to Focused inbox, so that our future messages land in the Focused tab. Read more about this from Microsoft.

Again, those steps are optional. We envision a smooth transition. The only potentially confusing issue that we foresee might arise if you already subscribe to some other WordPress.com newsletters. That scenarios probably only applies to a handful of subscribers. We're happy to work with you to resolve anything that comes up on a case-by-case basis.

The end of the spring semester, 2024, marks the completion of the first year of CAT+FD's pilot program to support part-time instructors at Xavier. As you know these teachers do excellent work here in teaching, scholarship, and service, and they increasingly make up a significant portion of our teaching rosters.

This semester I had the pleasure of meeting and working with some of the continuing part-time teachers, some of whom have been at Xavier for many years. Though this cohort needs less support, they have valuable experience and insight to offer us all, and I was particularly pleased by some members' decisions to drop in and check out our programming.

This more experienced cohort includes Albertina Walker, who represents the Institute for Black Catholic Studies, Daniel Curley, who brings a wide range of prior work experience to his teaching, including a stint with the federal government, and Kesia Walker, who has worked for 20 years in public health.

We also had a solid roster of new or newer teachers come through this term, including Bonnie Katalenich, formerly in the private sector with LabCorp, LaTeshya Martin, who previously worked in the Attorney General's office of Mississippi, and Emily DeWet, cultural anthropologist with teaching experience at Notre Dame and U.N.O., who is teaching exclusively within the XCOR at Xavier.

A big thanks from CAT+FD to these amazing teachers. It's been my pleasure meeting and working with them. Please join me in thanking them for their work here, and I hope that in the fall we can bring even more returning and new part-time instructors into our support cohort, so that we may all benefit from their skills and expertise.

In the meantime, we had one teacher complete the program and earn the certificate this semester. This teacher went above and beyond in participating in our program, and it was an absolute joy to have her on the sessions, consistently  brining insight, curiosity, and positivity to the table. This teacher is Melissa Lea!

Dr. Melissa Lea has been an adjunct professor of psychology and neuroscience at Xavier for three years.  She has taught Introduction to Psychology, Physiological Psychology, and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Previously, she was a tenured faculty member of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Assistant Dean of Student Success and Academic Advising at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.   Trained as a cognitive scientist, she has researched person perception, specifically the perceptual influences that affect familiarity and name recall.

Dr. Lea works as an academic advisor for the School of Psychological Sciences at The University of Northern Colorado.  She has a passion for working with first generation, transfer, underrepresented minorities, and Pell grant eligible students.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Lea on her certification, and thanking her for her excellent contributions to all that we do here.

Thank you all, and have a great summer!

Jeremy Tuman

Last week, I wrote about my experiments with Google's Takeout service (get it?) to move some (but not all) of the documents on my XULA Google Drive to my personal Google Drive. As I noted, Takeout works best, in my opinion, for very targetted exports and migrations. This week, I want to talk about a related but also separate concern: YouTube videos.

As you probably already know, Google owns YouTube. Xavier's switch to Google came not long after I embraced inverted teaching, often called flipping the classroom. I've been posting videos of lectures (20 minutes or more), mini-lectures (usually between 10 and 15 minutes), and micro-lectures (less than 10 minutes [ideally less than five minutes {according to Bart}]) for several years now and have over 100 on my YouTube channel. (Those definitions are my own, by the way.) So when I learned about our planned migration from Google to Microsoft, I worried about what would happen to my YouTube videos. My understanding is that our videos will not be removed from YouTube. Anything we have uploaded to our Xavier-based YouTube accounts will remain where it is, meaning it will be accessible and, if set as publicly accessible, included in any relevant search results. However, since my Xavier-based Google account will no longer be active, I won't be able to access those videos as the channel owner, meaning I won't be able to edit them or delete them. They will be frozen in cyberspace.

I'm not going to focus here on how I might continue posting videos for my students. Maybe that's a topic for another blog post (although I seem to be running out of time for all these blog post ideas). Instead, I will focus simply on how I plan on maintaining full control over the videos I have previously created and posted to YouTube. Once again, please remember: What follows are a few things I've tried out of personal concern and curiosity, things that I thought I would share with my colleagues, in case they have similar concerns. Just to be clear, CAT+FD is not involved in the Google to Microsoft migration, and we are not advising any actions by faculty and staff.

Did you know that Global Cat Day was celebrated this weekend? It is a day when "advocates around the world join Alley Cat Allies as [they] lead the charge to save cats from being harmed and killed." Given that this blog is dedicated to providing CAT FooD (for thought), we thought we'd celebrate in our own special way by having some door blog prizes.*

To say thank you to our XULA subscribers, we did a random drawing for a mug. Congratulations to Dr. Patience Obih (Pharmacy) for being our winner! We also want to recognize our newest subscriber, Dr. Chen-Hui Lo (Languages)! We appreciate your dedication to your professional development, and we will be delivering your mugs soon.

Thanks to all our subscribers. We are hope you continue to find this blog timely and useful.

*A special thank you to Dr. Mark Gstohl (Theology), our incoming Associate Director, for having the insight to celebrate Global Cat Day this way.

The opportunity to work at CAT-FD as the Faculty in Residence for new faculty support was really exciting.  That is partly because I had experienced the friendly and caring atmosphere around CAT-FD for a long time myself.  At the beginning, I attended CAT-FD workshops only if I thought I really lacked the knowhow that a workshop would provide and I knew that I badly needed what I would learn there to teach or work with students.  But later, my purpose of coming to CAT-FD was a mix of the drive to learn something new and also the desire to meet and get to know the CAT-FD staff and attendees during those events.  I think the understanding that I will always have a good time at CAT-FD got progressively stronger as my time at Xavier went by.  I am so grateful for the relaxed and mind-clearing experience that the CAT-FD staff impart to me all the time.  CAT-FD welcomes everyone all the time and you will find it home too.  I especially hope that the new faculty would start working with CAT closely from the beginning of their time here.