Sample the Web

Check out this post:

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while but if you haven’t already seen this brilliant Creative Commons animation, you must. The project was sponsored by Creative Commons Australia. I LOVE the female character’s voice.

This would be a good instructional video to show to students / faculty who don’t yet ‘get’ [...]

Man. I am tired.
I’m starting to feel that my class is over. I still have to average out their grades, but it is done. No more getting up super early to teach until the Fall. On the other hand, I do have a pre-1800 Lit class to prepare for in [...]

I received a phone call from my Dissertation Director yesterday. She likes the track things are currently on and wants me to add a chapter on Dos Passos (which makes perfect sense considering the media issues involved in my topic) and do some slight restructuring. I’m to have a new revised copy of the [...]

I still cannot post for my class. Just got this when I attempted:

500 Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, support@blogger.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have [...]

I run a site for my class via Blogger, but next semester, I’m moving everything over here where I can control it. I’ve tried off and on all day to update the site with recent assignments and notes for my students, but the Blogger servers are inaccessible.

This is cool: Boing Boing: Open access scholarly lit bibliography, with links.

The class observation went well today. There was a panic moment when I and my observing guest walked into class 5 minutes before the bell and there was only one student there (usually about half the class has already arrived by five till). Fortunately, everyone who does show up did show up and only [...]

Tomorrow, my class at Iona is being observed by the head of the English department. It’s a rather hodgepodge class, as I will be handing back rough drafts, talking about the next paper, and going over a grammar quiz with them, but I think it’ll be productive and a good class for being observed. [...]

I just finished grading a stack of papers that has been in need of grading for much too long. Grading is the only part of teaching that I really do not enjoy. What’s odd is that I finished the whole lot of them in under two hours with substantial comments. It’s like [...]

Read this post:

Regardless, I consider very carefully what I say in my public space about the workings at my professional space. (I’m considering very carefully right now, in fact…) And I try to maintain a very clear and fairly narrow scope in the topics I discuss here in general. In my mind, this Weblog has [...]

I’m struggling with coming up with a writing prompt for my students. Tomorrow in class, we will be discussing the issues raised in this essay from the New Yorker, which they have already read and posted about on the class blog. I think the discussion will be a very productive one, based on the [...]

This post over at Boing Boing by Cory might prove useful for a class discussion, focused around how we write in a technological age. Here’s Cory’s bits:

Steven Johnson (author of the fantastic Mind Wide Open and other books) has written a fascinating essay about his new creative process, which involves a suite of tools that [...]

My class’s weblog was mentioned in a post over at Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom today. Pretty cool.
Update: The class blog also appears in the list on this page.

Just cancelled today’s class meeting. Going back to bed again.

This is cool:
Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom on the WSJ: How do you communicate with students who have grown up with technology?
Tomorrow marks the beginning of my class blog version 2.0 (located here), as the Spring semester begins early in the morning at Iona.
I made some changes to the way [...]

Weblogs as pedagogy.
*Reminder: This blog is only open Monday through Thursday so that I can focus on my dissertation. No posts for three days, starting tomorrow.

My good friend, Tara Czechowski, has launched a new LiveJournal community for teachers to share assignments:

write_an_essay - Community Info
Writing good essay assignments is essential to helping students think critically and creatively, to provoking dynamic conversation in the classroon, and to preserving the instructor’s sanity.
The purpose of this community is to allow college and university instructors [...]

From Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom :

Talk about mixed emotions…a seemingly great list of 13 blogging articles from Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing with no time to read them all.

My friend, Trevor, pointed me in the direction of the call for papers for this issue of Lore several months ago, [...]

“Whatever you do, don’t misuse what you believe so that it gets in the way of the truth. That’s so easy to do, especially when so much around us encourages us to.”

An excerpt from Many-to-Many: K5 Article on Wikipedia Anti-elitism:

Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don’t like the Wikipedia. It works without privelege [sic], which is inimical to the way those professions operate.

Despite the misspelling of “privilege,” this comment highlights one of my major gripes about academia, especially in the Humanities. There is a definite [...]