I’ve been totally swamped the last week or so with all sorts of different life and school things lately (thus my lack of blogging here). For one thing, I’m behind (though getting caught up) with my online teaching. For another, I’m being paperworked to death because I’m applying for promotion this year, which mainly means putting together a report and a thick binder of materials to make my case. So that’s why I haven’t been around here lately.
But I decided to try to do a little blog reading at least this morning. Here are a couple of links to things I found, some stuff to read later, some things that were interesting, etc.
- Collin has a post here about reading/re-reading John Trimbur’s 2003 article “Changing the Question: Should Writing be Studied?” He links to posts by a couple of others thinking about this stuff too. About a month or two ago, I wrapped up my very small part of a collaborative editing project of a forthcoming issue of Composition Studies that discusses what a writing major might look like, and I’ve got a meeting later today about changes we want to make to our own undergraduate major in writing. So to me, the answer to Trimbur’s question (without really reading what he had to say or even too closely what Collin et al have to say) is “yes.” Of course, what’s more interesting is why the answer is yes, and that’s why it’s worth reading Collin’s, Jeff’s, and Donna’s posts.
- Speaking of things I don’t have time to read right now but I’ll have to come back to later: Bitch PhD posted her MLA presentation, something that I wrote about here a few weeks ago.
- Via Anne 2.0, I like this post, “The Most Tiresome Cliché in Technology Today,” which is “Make it easy enough for my mom to use.” To quote briefly: “I doubt any of my three kids will ever say that. They might say ‘make it easy enough for my dad to use’ because in our house it’s dad who’s the more technologically clueless.”
- The new issue of Kairos is out, and, just browsing the TOC, I can see one (possibly two or three) articles to include in my current online graduate course. More things to read later.
- John Walters says there’s a bunch of audio in the Ong collection available online now. Something to listen to while I’m reading these other things I’m going to read later. Actually, this might also be a good thing to have for teaching Ong, too.
- And finally, I relate quite a bit to Jeff’s YouTube surfing efforts.
Oh, and in the spirit of somewhat random YouTube sites and academia mashed together, I give you Derrida talking about writing: