Today is an anniversary I’ve commemorated before: it’s the anniversary this web site/blog (take your pick) got its start as the Wave Equation Page for Piling. It’s been twenty-four years since I put the first pages on GeoCities, and it’s been going (with spin-offs) ever since. It’s time for a little looking back, and some looking forward too.
The year 2020 was traumatic for just about everyone but it was a good year for this site. It was even a better year in that most of the traffic to the site came from outside the United States (that trend has continued into 2021.) This is in spite of the fact that my students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga mostly access it from within the country, having no small part in the visits/page views for the site. (I say mostly; a few actually did so from outside the country, as they were forced to continue their coursework from overseas due to COVID.)
One of the long-term goals of this site has been to disseminate knowledge about geotechnical engineering to where it’s needed most: to developing countries which need to build their infrastructure and bring a better life to their citizens. In the first decade of this millennium, it tended to dominate the field, but realistically this is no longer the case. Nevertheless it remains an important resource in a shifting internet, and in a field where social media cannot (or at least has not) replaced the open internet.
One thing that has helped this change–and the long-term value of this site–has been the growing educational component of the site in Soil Mechanics, Soil Mechanics Laboratory and Foundations classes. I have taught consistently at UTC since 2009 and have put up most of my educational material for these courses on this site. The COVID pandemic only accelerated that; I taught this past academic year completely online, which necessitated putting the lectures onto YouTube. This means that one can take entire courses (except for the homework and tests) on this site, or use this material as a facilitator for online courses.
That leads to the next announcement: I am retiring from full-time teaching at the end of the month. There’s a lot of academic “inside baseball” in that, but I will revert to adjunct teaching after that time, as I did before my full-time appointment in 2019. I will continue, Lord willing, to teach in the immediate future, and also plan to continue to build this site with new educational materials of all kinds, both for the courses and for the documents that have been a hallmark of this site from its earliest times.
As always, thanks for your support, or as I say at the end of all my videos, thanks for watching and God bless.
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