About this Website: The Role of the Professor

Article by Steve N. Jackson (v. 1)

A professor, it turns out, has some important duties to perform when they get elected to hold that position. It may seem that we are just teachers who wear tweed coats and hang out in coffee bars giving our opinions about things we are not qualified to discuss, but the reality is that we have a role to play in society that has been defined for nearly one-thousand years, and that is to discover (or rediscover) information and make it available to the world at large. To support that, and to keep a professor from becoming outdated in their thinking to the detriment of their teaching, the university gives a professor time to explore a wide range of topics and interests, as long as they coincide with the subject matter they teach. For me, that amounts to around ten hours a week.

Most of my ten hours of research involves working with students making movies, websites, games, or photographic exhibits, that are beyond the capabilities of a time-limited class. In essence I use my research to teach, not only myself, but my students who gain resume material which helps them get jobs. At the same time my students and I are usually making media for the community: local organizations who need a video or a website can get the media they need while allowing my students a chance for real experience. My students will usually follow up their professional experience by writing about what they learned and what it meant - the first step on their own path toward developing their own research that may one day land them in a role of a professor.

The decision to take my long standing fascination with French rifles and turn it into a website was attached to my desire to provide an example to students of a working practical website that used only the technologies they will learn in the introductory convergent media class. Many of my classes are attached to websites where student work is displayed for the world to see, and then the work on the website from a previous group of students is used to teach the next group of students, but this website is actually an example of what level of experience a student is expected to have obtained after their first web design class. For these students I could have made a fake website, but since I already wanted to write on French rifles, combining the two was a perfect excuse to provide a service to the community, discharge my duties to do research (in the form of creative output), and show students a very basic site design that they could duplicate in a single quarter of diligent effort.

So a website of this sort has many reasons to exist. It provides a sample for students making their own websites. It provides a place where people in the community who are interested in these unusual pieces of physical culture can get some information on them. And finally, it provides a historical resource that will allow future historians a place to start when seeking their own answers to the question of the French rifle and how it related to the politics and history of the 18th - 20th century. The website itself is not suppose to be encyclopedic or to compete with specialized works by eminent historians such as Dr. Daniel Herman (whose book Hunting and the American Imagination is an important example of how history can allow us to understand culture) or Jean Houn (the author of Proud Promise, the definitive work on French autoloaders through 1979.) Instead it is suppose to be a starting point for further inquiry.