I know I have not been blogging for a while, but I have been really busy working on a new project that took up a large part of my time. So, between my new project, teaching, and raising a young child blogging fell to the side along with other fun activities, but now that it is complete I am planning to go back to blogging especially since I will be working from home until the end of the semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic giving me more time to reflect and write about my teaching.

I realize that it is a strange time to be announcing the beginning of my new endeavor since we are all preoccupied with the CONVID-19 pandemic, but I have been working on it for such a long time and it is finally ready so I don’t want to wait. I think that if we all stay positive and focused on life after the pandemic things should get back to normal sooner rather than later. It is also a way to divert my attention from the fact that our lives will forever change and 2020 will be known as the year of the coronavirus pandemic. For me I want 2020 to remind me of the year Ithaca began.

I named my website Ithaca because I wanted people that visit my site to feel that they are beginning a learning journey. To quote from Cavafy’s Ithaka poem “As you set out for Ithaka, hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery.” And that is what I want people to experience on my site. I know that it is a lofty goal but that is what I am hoping for.

My site’s full name is Ithaca Educational Solutions and it was born from my capstone project i.e. thesis that I wrote 7 years ago while I was completing my master’s degree in Instructional Design at the University of Massachusetts Boston. At the time I did not know that I would create a site that would house so much more than the material that I used in my project. The reason this project began was that I uploaded my capstone project to academia.edu and many would come and follow me and ask me to create a course so they can learn the material I had designed. So, after a lot of requests, I decided to create a course but then it became apparent that it could not be taught at the university, as a result, I come up with something more than just a course and just like that the journey of creating Ithaca began.

Now that I have completed it, I am ready to share Ithaca with you and the world. Ithaca Educational Solutions is me and all of the knowledge and experience I have gained throughout the last 25 years of my teaching journey. It is dedicated to all things business writing and business English.

I hope you go visit Ithaca Educational Solutions and take a look around: https://www.ithacaedu.net/

Katherine

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