I’ve been too busy and/or distracted with a host of other things (school and life both) to write anything new or original here lately. But I still have been reading some other blogs and I thought I mention a few items of interest:
- “Let the carnival commence.” Collin has started the long promised discussion of Wayne Booth’s book The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. I think I’m going to try to read it at the gym while riding the stationary bike– it will give me a break from the treadmill anyway.
- “Teaching Writing, Collaboration, and Engagement in Global Contexts: The Drupal Alternative to Proprietary Courseware.” These are the slides from a presentation by Charlie Lowe, Samantha Blackmon, and David Blakesley at a conference at Purdue. I don’t know if Drupal (or open source software, for that matter) is always “the best” solution. But I do think that when universities adopt one “course in a box” platform, especially the CMS software that aren’t particularly flexible (things like WebCT), they paint themselves into a corner.
- Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff has a post where she ponders what texts she would pick for a first-year rhetoric or composition course. She writes about the distinction between “composition” and “rhetoric” (which I sometimes agree with, and which I sometimes think is a pretty artificial one), and contemplates what texts she would use if she could use anything. Personally, I’d use the book I’m writing. And along those lines, one other thing left out of the formula here are textbook companies and the weird relationship that scholars in the field have with them.
- From Johndan “datacloud” Johnson-Eilolia, I learned that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself and that the Powerbook 100 was named the “#1 gadget of all time.” Like many undergraduates (including Johndan), I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book that was actually passed around on my dorm floor. I also saw a “talk” that Thompson gave at the University of Iowa when I was an undergraduate there; really, it was more of a drunken press conference than a speech. RIP, Hunter.
And my first laptop was a PB 100. I think I’ll have to see if it’s still in the basement or not…