April, 2021 Research Update

Amici!  It is now May!

Apologies that this is a bit late, it has been a busy week.  My last lectures were this past week, my students take their finals next week, so the semester is wrapping up.  This has been a tough semester to get through.  Not only am I exhausted by the zoom teaching, it's clear that my students are too.  I am myself very interested to see the literature on online teaching which is going to emerge out of this, but my own conclusions are that first effective online teaching is much harder and requires much more time and energy than is generally supposed and that it is also less effective than is generally supposed.

Assuming my experience is typical - and my sense from colleagues is that it is - this ought to dampen a lot of the enthusiasm for massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other proposals to try to use IT to radically increase the number of students a single instructor can teach.

Other than teaching, this month has passed with a number of things in editorial limbo.  Article II remains in the peer review process (somewhat longer than I had expected), and my article on the All-Volunteer Force for The National Interest likewise is in editing (though don't miss my good friend and former colleague Joshua Tait talking about the intellectual roots of American conservatism in TNI just the other day).  On things which did appear, I had yet another article in Foreign Policy, this time on the deleterious effect of 'warrior-ism' in the U.S. military.

ACOUP crossed a milestone yesterday with the 3,000,000th page view, powered over the line by the recent start of my look at Europa Universalis IV which, while not quite the explosion of traffic that the AC:Valhalla piece was (that remains the most viewed post on ACOUP, though I don't actually think it is one of my best), has still done quite well.  I think that my timing is, predictably, poor however; the news channels for Paradox games right now are filled with bad news (internal restructuring, Leviathan is apparently quite bad), which I suspect makes it harder to keep attention on social media, etc.

Looking forward to this coming month, as I noted last time, I'll be presenting later this month at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History on the impact of the Roman adoption of mail armor.  My plan is to post my paper (which I'll be reading at the meeting) to the Patreon as a special treat for you all after I present it at SMH.  Of course, necessary disclaimers that such papers are generally works in progress (although less so in this case), often somewhat rough and simply cannot cover everything (my time-limit here is 15 minutes, which means the paper, at 2,250 words or so, has to be less than half the average length of my blog posts).

I am also looking forward to running the first Meet a Historian guest post this month after the conclusion of the EU4 series.  It's a fantastic paper on a super interesting topic and I'm very excited for it.

Other than that, I have started moving forward on writing a chapter I agreed to write for an edited collection which will cover elements of the Roman military food supply.  That absolutely must be done my August, so I will have to hustle to get it ready as quick as I can, but it should be very doable.

Unfortunately I don't have a good musing here like I normally do - I've been quite busy and haven't had time to think one up, but I hope dropping my SMH paper here for y'all later this month will make up for it.  Oh, and I am planning on setting up some second tier and the AMA/Q&A style posts with questions posed by you guys that I discussed last month, I just need to actually do that.  I will put up a brief update here when I get around to it.

And that was April.  On to the Summer, with hopefully much more writing time!