My Blog Is Actually Useful to Me

Frequently, I wonder about the value of blogging. I vacillate between feeling that keeping a blog is a good “pre-writing” and thinking activity and feeling that keeping a blog is an elaborate procrastination exercise. I suppose it is a bit of both.

This morning and this afternoon, I started thinking/remembering that I need to plan for a grad class I’m teaching in the fall called “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice.” It’s a course I’ve taught several times before, but I haven’t taught it in over a year and it is a course that I knew I needed to update. So, as part of being productive and procrastinating simultaneously, I looked through about a year’s worth of blog entries, trying to remember what it was I came across that I thought might be useful for that class. I found it a really helpful exercise. I realized that in the course of a year or so of “surfing around” and occasionally jotting down some comments on different sites that I have put together a big chunk of potential readings for the class. And I also realized, as I was looking through this stuff again, that I had kind of forgotten about some things that I ought to include in the revised version of the class.

I’ll still have to pick out some books to use for the class (I think I’ve just about done that), there will still be a course packet, and I still have to work out all of the assignments. But a lot of that goofing off with the blog looks like it might tangibly pay off this fall.

Okay, no more entry here– back to grading.

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