I am traveling to Panama from February 15 to April 8, 2010 with a group of students as part of an Innovative Academic Initiatives program at Truman State University. I am running this program with a biologist, and we are staying at La Mica Biological Station at El Cope in Cocle province, close to the Omar Torrijos National Park. As a historian, I'm not exactly sure what I'll be doing for close to two months at a biology research station and in a national park. I'm taking the students to Kuna Yala for a couple days, and then going on my own (or maybe with a small group of students) to Volcano Baru National Park in Chiriqui province. If I can get away, I'd like to do a bit more traveling, but mostly it sounds like we'll be stuck pretty close to home. I'm bringing along two books to review as well as drafts of two articles and one book that I can work on if those editors ever get back to me with the required revisions. Otherwise, I have a hard drive full of archival documents that I'll slowly work through, and I'm bringing along a big heavy external hard drive full of my old videos that I've been wanting to edit down into something usable in the classroom.

I'll blog along with the students at http://air.truman.edu/panama/. Blogger is changing how they let me access this blog, so this might be my last post here. Perhaps I'll try to recreate it at http://blog.yachana.org.