Expository Writing as Digital Citizenship

Its a new semester, and I am teaching two sections of upper-division expository writing. I am excited to return to a previous approach: blogging as composition. Last time I tried this with freshman we and we were quite pleased with the results. Here's what this semester's course description looks like:

This course is an attempt to reimagine writing instruction, moving away from 20th century models based on print scholarship and toward 21st century models of digital citizenship. My premise: the purpose of the contemporary university has to be more attentive to maximizing new communicative tools, including blogs, wikis, aggregators, bookmarks, and networking technologies.

Traditional writing classes, especially those “academic” in nature, instruct students to write for imagined audiences. Unfortunately, in practice, this is rarely the case—students end up writing for “a general conversation of mankind.” For many complicated reasons, cutting edge writing instruction has denounced writing for this universal / incorporeal audience. Yet, few alternatives present themselves to instructors: who can students write to? Can authentic audiences be a part of writing instruction?

This class is my experimental answer to this question. I am refiguring the way we teach writing. This semester you will be writing to an audience of your choosing—but you will have to demonstrate to me an authentic relationship with this audience. You will be entering into a discourse community, participating in its social conventions, and reporting back to the class on its values, purposes, and intrigues.

To explain: this will be a course on blogging. This is not to say that this will be a course that uses blogs. I am proposing something a bit more extensive than that. I am proposing that blogging will not simply augment the material of the course, it will compose the material of the course. Playfully, composing blogs will be the expository exercise.

Simultaneously, we will be reading, discussing, and (of course) writing about the viability of blogging as an approach to expository writing. We will discuss the goals and purposes of the traditional expository class in relation to your experiences in this class. We will use a contemporary academic argument handbook, They Say, I Say, assessing whether the values of academic prose translate into blogging. In their work, Graff and Birkenstein argue that “rote instruction [has] indeed encouraged passivity and drained writing of its creativity and dynamic relation to the social world” (xv). This class, then, can be understood as an attempt to revitalize and reprioritize writing. I am looking to teach a form of writing that is creative, dynamic, an integrally tied to your social world.

This work will culminate in a discussion on the broader conceptualization of blogging within our social sphere. You will use your experiences as a blogger to respond to the contemporary debate concerning the rigor and value of blogs.

This course will be run as a creative writing workshop. I imagine all of you will be writing on different topics (and entering into different communities, crafting different voices, different styles of blogs). Our class sessions, then, will be dedicated to providing peers with meaningful and helpful feedback (critical in its least pejorative sense). You should be prepared to share your work, ideas, and thoughts in a respectful manner.

The course, then, is an extension of my previous semester: on the purpose of higher education. I am further attempting to move beyond the Ruins of the Enlightenment institution, the knowledge factory, and toward something more social, democratic (?), and connected.

Blogging as Composition

Since I'm another of the mad scientists who birthed this approach, I'll throw in some quick reflections. For those who don't know, three colleagues and I piloted a new approach to introductory composition this past fall. 80 students were divided into 18 groups based on student interests. A full list of topics is available here. Students used pseudonyms to protect their identities. Now were interested in publishing something on this, so let the inventive process begin.

1. Quantity, not quality. This might sound like blasphemy coming from someone who is earning a Ph.D in rhetoric and composition, but I think revision is a waste of time with first-year writers. Or, at least, the way revision is currently taught. While upper-division writers might benefit from refining an idea for scholarly or professional presentation, introductory writers need more experience with the generative, inventive process and with structuring an idea [including incorporating and contextualizing sources]. Certainly, there is a need to revise during the composing process, but requiring complete rough drafts that go through a revision process is (in my opinion) a waste at that level. I also believe rough drafts are counter-productive to teaching writing as a way of learning: students generate The Draft and are then hesitant to explore opposing positions, tangents, or to reconsider the structural arrangement of their writing. Essentially, this blogging course required students to produce three short rough drafts a week. The experience they gained outlining and structuring an idea showed marked improvements to their writing over the course of the semester.
2. Workshopping Works. I've never been a big fan of peer review with introductory composition- mostly because the comments students receive then to focus on grammar or are ambiguous and less-than-helpful [i.e., "this needs to flow better" How does that help anyone?]. With this course, every Thursday worked as a workshop day- I brought in posts and we read and critiqued them as a class. I provided students with specific tasks--underline the best sentence, circle the least effective sentence--and we discussed them as a class. I asked students if they thought this was an effective use of class time; they consistently responded "Yes" because, while they might not have learned what to do, they certainly felt they learned what not to do. This reminds me of an argument for peer review Donald Murray made way back in the 70's- students benefit from exposure to prose similar to their skill level. At some point, after reviewing 20 papers or posts, students internalize what doesn't work. And then they don't do that anymore. Brilliant.
3. Make Sure There's a Community, Make Sure There's Real Interest, Make Sure There's Something To Do. By far, the more successful students were those who entered a community in which they were already invested. And a community which aims to DO something- posts became a kind of reflection on activity. Cooking, skateboarding, sampling, watching horror movies. A simple word for these activities: hobbies. A better word? Passions (in the best case scenarios). These groups regularly produced engaging writing. What to avoid? The next time I teach this I will absolutely disallow "Being a College Student." Why? First, it doesn't have a cohesive online community- different schools offer blogs on college life, but these posts leaned toward being repetitive and predictable. My students in these groups were strong writers, but it was difficult to come up with topics for posts. If I did soften my stance and allow this one, it would have to be more like a journalist role: reporting upcoming events on campus etc. The other thing to avoid? Something general like "humor." While this might be a great topic for upper-division students, asking first year writers to compose 1000 words a week on a theoretical topic [what is humor?] is quite difficult. It is much better to ground them in something they do, something that a bunch of other people do, something upon which they can write reflectively.
4. It Fucking Works. To echo my colleague, the marked improvement to student writing was at times staggering. This quantitative, student-centered approach to instruction made my students better writers. I'd link to a bunch of posts from the beginning of the semester and a bunch of posts from the end of the semester, but since a few of my former students read my blog that doesn't seem right. For now, you'll just have to take my word on it. But I know that after teaching this class, I don't think I could ever teach freshman composition any other way. It just fucking works.

Review Writing for Amazon

Today we want to look at a few Amazon.com book reviews for Tapscott and Williams' Wikinomics in order to generate a sense for what distinctive features good reviews contain.

• Donald Mitchell [April 6th, 2007]
• Bradley Gessler [January 15, 2007]
• M McDonald [December 28, 2006]
• Rolf Dobelli [February 23, 2007]
• David Brett [ February 9th, 2007]
• Manny Hernandez [January 20, 2007]
• Robert D. Steele [January 17, 2007]
• Laura K. Turner [January 12, 2007]

We're going to read each of the reviews above and try to see if we cannot discern some structural principles for reviews on Amazon. As we read each, I want you to:

1. Write the purpose of each paragraph in the review, paying particular attention to the first and last paragraph
2. Note how the reviewers frame their ethos or incoporate personal information into the post
3. Pay attention to what specific details from the book reviewers tend to cite
4. Pay particular attention to how the reviewers offer criticism

By the end of class today, we should be able to generate a pretty good primer on review writing.

MLA citation

Using the MLA guidelines provided by Purdue's OWL lab, please construct a MLA works cited list for the following material:

• The Henry Jenkins reading from the coursepack (book title: Convergence Culture).
• The Stephen Johnson reading from the coursepack. (article title: "Emerging Technology")
• This blogpost
• This webpage

Crash Course on Academic Writing

I like to frame academic research by looking at Kenneth Burke's famous passage on the unending conversation of humankind.

I also want to discuss three terms from classical rhetoric: ethos, pathos, and logos.

logos Driven

Unlike your blog writing, which is a mix of argument, exposition, analysis, and entertainment, academic writing is more strictly argumentative and analytical in nature.

You might present a theoretical lens for a discourse community (from our readings, for instance) and then analyze how your community does (or does not) meet those criteria. This will help create a sense of purpose and necessity for your paper (which will help you write your introduction... speaking of which...)

Write your introduction last. For those of you (like me) who need to write temporary introductions, fine. End it with a "training wheels" sentence such as "this paper examines (argues, explains, explores, details, compares, assesses, etc)." I still use these kinds of crutches while writing drafts. But delete and rewrite this introduction when you are done. We'll talk more about academic introductions next week.

MLA Citation

I am asking you to provide evidence for your claims and characterizations. You'll want to point at specific blog posts, but you want your passages to be of a reasonable size. In other words, quote what is necessary-nothing more, nothing less.

Plagiarism is the highest academic crime. Err on the side of caution. If you borrow a term from a blog or reading, make sure it is clear that the term is not your own. For instance:

Stephen Doheny-Farina calls upon the research of Robert Bellah to clearly distinguish discourse communities from lifestyle enclaves. According to Farina, the former involve a measure of "interdependence" between community members; the latter are merely collections of hobbyists and enthusiasts (50).

Make sure you provide a context for your quotes, you need to transition into them. Don't expect a reader will be familiar with the material you are quoting from. Think of Burke's metaphor of the parlor--you are taking your reader for a guided tour.

Although it might seem obvious to you, make sure you offer some kind of content summary after a quote. Don't assume your reader will read the quote in the same way you do--you want to direct their attention / offer them a specific gloss of the passage.

Your paper will be accompanied by an MLA works cited list. MLA works cited lists follow a million obscure formatting rules. It makes no sense for me to try to explain all these rules up front. I will simply direct you to Purdue's OWL lab's materials on MLA formatting. The OWL will provide guidelines for both citing sources in your paper and formatting a works cited list.

Voice and audience

One of the hardest things for first-year students to get a handle on is the proper voice for academic papers. You don't need to be overly stuffy, but your writing should be more formal and less conversational than the writing you do on your blog. Try to avoid sarcasm. Try not to be overly enthusiastic. Your goal is to present a credible and confident (but not arrogant) speaker who is talking with (rather than "to" or even worse "down to") your audience. Don't beg, don't demand. Reason with your audience. Try to anticipate objections and offer counter-arguments.

Its hard to describe who your audience is: but think of it this way. You are writing to a sophomore at another University. They have never taken a course at Purdue. They have never met you. They are educated, and willing to read your paper. They may or may not agree with your arguments, but they are certainly not hostile.

Reputation as Ethos for the Responsible Netizen

I picked up the quizercise from Karl Stolley (who, I am pretty sure, just adapted Janice Lauer's "writing opportunity"): every Monday, before we begin discussing the week's readings, I ask students some kind of question that calls on them to connect the reading to the larger goals of the class. This week, I opened with a discussion of the importance of MLA citation (since I had caught a few students liberally borrowing material without proper citation). We had read from Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs for class that day, and I asked them the following: focusing on a specific passage or idea from Smart Mobs, explain why an English teacher might discuss the importance of MLA citation before discussing Smart Mobs. Circular? You betcha! But I like giving them these kinds of meta-questions, just to see how well they are beginning to understand my underlying aspirations for the course.

Often, I write answers to my own quiz questions--though I give myself some liberties to stray off-topic (I give my students the same liberties, essentially they have ten minutes to prove to me that they have done the reading!). Here's what I wrote in response to my own question:

In Smart Mobs, author Howard Rheingold suggests that the most productive social networks develop "bottom-up" measures for establishing authority and filtering out free riders. He writes:

Self-monitoring is part of successful grassroots collaboration, a kind of many-to-many surveillance by mutual consent. If governance is to be democratic rather than Hobbesian, maintenance of social order requires technologies of mutual control."

We can think of citation as a kind of surveillance system constructed by the mutual consent of scholars and researchers. Through citation, scholars pay respect to the intellectual work of others, acknowledging contributions even as they criticize oversights. And, although MLA standards might at times come off as Hobbesian, we should remember that these standards change in response to new technologies through grass-roots practice (right?)

The digital world makes it quite easy to bypass such grassroot intellectual systems. As such, many Universities and academic institutions are turning to more top-down, rigid structures to ensure reputation (such Turnitin.com) or outlawing the use of digital environments altogether (such as the movement away from Wikipedia and digital sources).

I strive for a different solution. Rather than ignoring the pitfalls digital technologies engender, I seek to face them heads-on, discussing the epistemological and ethical challenges digital environments place on our intellectual traditions. Specifically, I believe that citation of web sources encourages students to be responsible, reputable net-i-zens.

End response. That's been sitting in a text-edit file on my desktop for a few days now, I figured rather than saving it to a corner of my hard-drive, I'd just shoot it out on the interweb. I've got to write my letter of application for my job market group this weekend, so perhaps I can revisit some of those ideas...(the current draft I have, which is terrible, discusses my dissertation, approach to new media, and approach to teaching in terms of fostering cohabitation and linking classical and contemporary theory to practice).

Class notes, tech day, week five

Today we are going to work on integrating you a bit more into your online community. So, we're going to use del.icio.us to explore your community.

1. Log into your del.icio.us account. Make sure you have your "post to del.icio.us" or "tag" button (we'll be using that one today).
2. Next, I want you to add me to your network, this way you can see what I'm posting, and I can see what you're posting.

Next, we're going to do some Google searching for good blogs, well, great ones actually. I want you to find five to seven resources in your area--at least four of which are blogs. As you find them, post them to del.icio.us.

Once we have a collection of sites, we're going to set up Google Reader accounts. Google reader is a kind of RSS feed. This will help you to see when your blogs are putting up new posts.

Using these technologies should help you generate ideas for posts and to integrate yourself in the community. You can always link to a story, offer a paragraph of summary, and then give some analysis / reaction--this is what many blogs do (and what Johnson was referring to with his rainforest metaphor).

Week Three, Computer Session

As you put the finishing touches on your mission statements, I want to turn and start thinking about your first individual post. And, in doing so, I wanted to offer examples of the kinds of posts, taking note of their structure. One thing you'll notice about these posts, as you will notice about all interesting posts, is that they always do more than summarize. They all involve summary, but they also do something else to invite audience participation.

Here's a list of different kind of posts:

• X is more important than most people think because of Y
• X makes me wonder about Y
• X should be applied to Y
• X is significant because...
• the best X of all time
• the top ten X (and whY)
• You probably don't / I just learned about X

For a detailed example of X should be applied to Y, lets examine a post from Collin Vs. Blog. This blog typically deals with issues in rhetorical theory, but also occasionally offers insight into popular culture. Here's his recent post Pricing Oneself Out of the Market. Here's a great example of X idea should be applied to Y. In this case, Collin offers a nice, succint description of a new television show he has been watching. He then details a specific theory proposed in the television show [that less often sells more]. He then uses this theory to argue that NBC has dropped the ball regarding the sales of episodes on iTunes.

For an example of a top ten list, here's a recent post at 40 Acres Sports.

For an example of X is significant because, there's a good example over at FireDogLake.

For an example of You might not know about X, check out a sample post from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site.

What we don't want to see in your posts is straight summary! Good posts do more than summarize, they contextualize, compare, contrast, expose, critique, defend, or offer insight. In other words, they present some kind of argument.

Project One

Below is the first post assignment. Forgive the sloppy presentation, I'm cutting and pasting from Word...

English 106 Fall 2007 Project 1: Mission Statement as the First Post

As I have brought up several times, your first major assignment is due next Wednesday, 12:00 noon. The assignment itself is short and sweet, but we are looking for a rich yet compact first post for your blog—somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 words (one page single-spaced).

Your first post should address the following questions:

• What's the goal of the blog?
• What will it cover?
• How will you structure your blog? What will a post look like? What is your methodology?
• What will people find on a first visit, and what will keep them coming back? Who is the audience? Describe the audience specifically (i.e., “college students” is not specific enough. “Purdue students” is not specific enough. We are looking for a characterization of your ideal audience. Who are you writing to?
• What is the personality of the blog as a whole? Think in terms of adjectives (practical, sarcastic, energetic, apathetic, enthusiastic, hesitant, etc.).
• What roles will the individual team-members assume? Will team members have unique voices or roles? What will distinguish you from each other [note—your first post might end with short bios of each member]
• How will you build your credibility? How will it compare to other similar blogs? What blogs inspire you?

You may answer these questions in whichever order you wish. If you can think of ways to describe your blog that are not covered by these questions, feel free to. Remember to contact your instructor early and often if you have questions.

Remember that you are also responsible for the following:

• Giving the blog a new title (Settings > Basic)
• Giving the blog a new URL (Settings > Publishing)
• Giving the blog a new template (Template > Pick New Template)
• Creating a link list with three links per member (links can include resources, other blogs you are trying to emulate, etc)(Template > Page Elements > Add Page Element > Link List

Good luck!

106: Week Two Computer Lab

Today's class will seek to introduce you to your blog, some of the features of Blogger, and to the basics of HTML that you will need to compose your posts.

Creating Your Blogger Account

All of you should have received an email invitation last night to join a Blogger blog. Find this email.

In order to join the blog, you will have to create a Google identity. Some of you might already have gmail accounts, and therefore already have a Google identity. MAKE SURE THAT YOUR GOOGLE IDENTITY CANNOT BE TRACED BACK TO YOUR REAL IDENTITY. Sorry to scream, but its very important to us that you remain anonymous. Do not create a user identity that involves your real name or your Purdue name. For instance, I have four online identities:

• marccsantos: I use this identity for web design discussions. I want people to know my real name and identify it with my comments and my work
• mcsantos: I use this identity for academic discussions and for Purdue accounts.
• santosis: I use this identity primarily for social groups
• insignificantwrangler: this is actually my primary online identity

For this assignment, I might use either of the latter identities. We'll walk through this process in class.

Blogger Features

One reason we chose to use Blogger in this class concerns its numerous available and accessible features. We're going to play with a few now.

• First, from the dashboard, chose to "View Blog." It is possible that a team member from another class has already begun making changes.
• Go back to the dashboard, and select "settings." You'll notice a number of options under the main tabs. The "basic" set of options includes a title field and a description field. Modify those now (remember that for your first project we want the group to create and justify an interesting and original title!). For now, anything better than "Blog #" will do.
• The Publishing tab will allow you to give your blog a new URL. Don't change this until you have discussed the change with your group! Like your title, you should be playful with your URL.
• Chances are you won't be using the Formatting tab right away, but this tab gives you the option of manipulating how many posts appear on one page, time and date format as well as some other advanced settings.
• We're not going to worry about the rest of the tabs under "Settings" today.
• Instead, choose the main tab "Template." Over the course of the semester, we'll discuss more and more ways for you to customize the design of your blog and to add elements, widgets, and functions. Today, I want to show you how to add a Blog Roll and input some entries. You'll want to make sure that this blog roll has at least three entries for each member of your group by the time you put up the first project post.
• When you click the "Template" tab, you should get the Page Elements screen. Here we are going to choose to add a page element
• We are going to add a link list. We'll walk through this in class.
• If time permits, I'll talk about the Pick New Template tab.

Now that we've poked around some of the features of Blogger, let's deal with the nitty-gritty--how to post.

Posting to Blogger

For the rest of today, we'll make a practice post. At the end of the class we'll delete it, so don't worry about writing anything of high quality, we just want to familiarize ourselves with HTML. HTML is the basic code used to categorize content on the web. All content appears between tags that classify it and instruct a web browser on how to format it. We'll be learning the essential tags by answering some simple questions.

First, let's see a list of the basic tags. Tags open before an element and close, using a backslash, after the element:

• <p> x </p> - the paragraph tag, this is the tag you'll use for most content
• <h#> x </h#> - the header tag, numbered according to importance. An h1 tag, for instance, is like a thesis statement--only one per page!
• <ul> x </ul> - the unordered list tag, this "opens" a list, you open a list before tagging list items. When you have finished your list, your close this tag. List
• <li> x </li> - the list item tag
• So, a completed list looks like this:
  <ul>
  <li> Tom Brady </li>
  <li> Joe Montana </li>
  <li> Dan Marino </li>
  </ul>
• <blockquote> x </blockquote> - the blockquote tag does exactly what its name implies: it sets off a block of text as a quote (adjusting margins, color, font, etc.)

These are all the structural tags we'll need today. Virtually every piece of information in your syllabus will fit into the above categories. We can add some semantic tags to our list:

• <strong> x </strong> - the strong tag appears as bold face. Use this for information that needs to be loud.
• <em> x </em> - the emphasis tag appears as italics. Use this for information that needs to be differentiated.
• <cite> x </cite> - the cite tag appears as italics (by default it appears exactly as the emphasis tag). Anything that would receive italics according to MLA citation should get the cite tag (any major publication--a book, a movie, a tv series, an album, etc.). The em tag is reserved for stress and emphasis, not for citation.

Now, let's put some of these tags to use.

1. Write a breif paragraph, using the <p> tag, on the last good movie you saw. Remember to use the cite tag for the movie title
2. Write a second paragraph on the main character of the movie
3. Now lets make a list of three movies similar to the one you watched
4. Now write a paragraph on whether you'd recommend the movie to other people
5. Now lets use blogger to insert a picture. Open a new tab or window and find a picture of your movie on the web. Make sure you click on the image to get its unique URL. Back in Blogger, click on the small landscape image right above the text box you are writing in. Input the URL of the image. Once you hit "Upload," the code for your image will appear in an "img" tag at the top of your post. You will have to copy all this code (unitl the />) and paste it where you want the image to appear

That's it for today, press publish and you can see what your post looks like. You can always edit a post after you post it by choosing "Edit Posts" from the "Posting" tab or by pressing the small pencil icon at the bottom of every post. We'll delete the post you just put up so you and your group can start with a clean slate.

Week One, Thursday

1. Collect writing samples

2. Intro lecture: what is rhetoric?

• hard to define, persuasion
• more than that, rhetoric is social glue-- social conception of knowledge and knowledge exchange
• art of negotiating language in the act of negotiation
• Kenneth Burke: resolving ambiguity
• Final point is all important, as you'll read in coming months, humans tend to gravitate toward certainty. Erase signs of ambiguity, contigency, and doubt. Replace interpretation with natural, fundamental truth. Think Michael Vick-- dog fighting IS evil. But, as Latrell Sprewell points out, we condone and even celebrate hunting and fishing. We eat veal (I love veal). We bet on dog races. This is not to condone Vick's activities, only to point out the contingency of the moral code by which we condemn his actions
• Let me step back--language is ambiguous. Words might seem to have very determinate meanings, but all words contain varying degrees of indeterminacy. Viola the demonstration: "A bat came through my window"
• I hope this exercise demonstrates how meaning develops according to context. Of course, every person, place and thing contributes to the interpretation of meaning. This is the importance of kairos
• Additionally, rhetoric recognizes that communication, the act of interpretation, is not strictly a logical exercise, it is also an emotional one. While many people are suspicious of emotion, rhetoricians often presume that our emotional sensors can be more perceptive than our logical ones. Take, for instance, the following phrase: "If I really loved you..."

On Morville's Ambient Findability: Quizercise #1: Given what I've talked about today, why would I open this course with Morville? Your response should focus on one specific passage from Morville--no more than five sentences. Your response should link a passage from Morville to something I have said today.

Before we break:

1. Make sure I collected writing samples and quiz#1
2. Make sure I bring up both readings, Surowiecki and Corder
3. Explain how to read Corder, academic prose, responsibilities of academic readers, taking notes, preparing for class
4. Discuss homework: emailing blog choices by Saturday @ 10:00am
5. Set up your del.icio.us accounts (try this one on your own)
6. Conferences for friday

106: Week One

If you are looking for baby photos, then you should scroll down to the previous post. If you are looking to pass English 106, then you should scroll down to the baby photos, sufficiently oooh and aaah, and then scoll back to this post.

Wednedsay, August 22nd, lecture notes:

1. Review the syllabus, especially the course description.
2. Examine some sample blogs:
   • Joystiq [video game news]
   • Games for Lunch [video game reviews]
   • 3,079 Miles to Fenway, 3,448 miles to Yankee Stadium [sports team blog]
   • The Sartorialist [New York fashion blog]
   • Pitchfork [Independent music blog]
   • Superficial [Celebrity Gossip]
3. Other blog possibilities:
   • Fantasy Football
   • Restaurant Reviews
   • AFI Top 100 films (Cult classic movies, classic B&W, dramatic movies, oscar nominated foreign films, blockbuster movie of the week, horror, top grossing films)
   • Books
   • Graphic Novels
   • Street Culture (skateboarding, shoes, music, etc.)
   • Travelling
   • Vinyl
   • Presidential politics
   • Photography
   • Simpsons and society
   • NBA Basketball (Bulls)
   • Chicago Sports
   • Learning to cook: (dorm food)
   • Surviving Freshman Year (campus hot spots--what to do at Purdue?)
   • Painting / Fine Arts
   • Video Game / Television community: reality tv
   • Celebrity fashion
4. Blog resources:
• Blogger's Choice Awards
• Tehnorati [blog search engine]
5. Setting up our del.icio.us accounts:
   1. What is del.icio.us? It is a social bookmarking site. Imagine bookmarking a page in your browser. Now imagine doing it online and categorizing the site. Now imagine a program that sorts every page bookmarked by every user. You are going to create del.icio.us accounts and link them to my account so I can see what you are looking at.
   2. Visit del.icio.us homepage.
   3. Choose to create a new account
   4. YOUR USERNAME CANNOT BE YOUR REAL NAME OR YOUR PURDUE USER NAME. I REPEAT: NO REAL NAMES. You are likely 18. I want to protect your anonymity. I know that I wouldn't want the public to access what I wrote when I was 18. Chances are, you won't either. Even if you want to user your real name, I'm telling to you can't.
   5. Now we are going to set up a "post to del.icio.us" button. Chances are you'll want to do this on your home computer too. On the loggin menu, choose "help." Under bookmarking, you'll see a link to create a button for any browser. That's what we want.
   6. Now we want to learn how to tag. Tags are single word descriptions of a page. SINGLE WORD. If you want two words, use a hyphen to connect them. Put spaces in between tags. Let's do a sample one together.
   7. Finally, I want you to "link" to my account. This way, I can see what you are looking at and you can see what I am looking at. On the top menu, under the del.icio.us page header, choose "my network." Enter my user name into the "your network" text field and press the "add" radio button. Poof, the world becomes that much more connected.

Over the next couple days I want you to surf the web, using technorati and blog rolls to start exploring a community. I am going to ask you to email a list of blogs you might want to write by Saturday at 10:00am. As you begin exploring these communities, tag the blogs to del.icio.us. As you form groups, I'll ask you to share your links with other students of similar interests. This will be our first step toward forming a blog roll for your group's blog.

Rapid Fire Thoughts

• I'm sitting in one of Purdue's undergrad computer labs to work on my teaching portfolio (the draft of which is below--I'm going to play around with that Dali-esque scheme). The reason I'm using a gen-pop lab: the new Adobe Creative Suite. Our pathetic College of Liberal Arts computers (the one's delegated to the English Department) don't have the new tricked out software package (nor do they have IE 7.0 yet--but that's a good thing for me, I want to beta test my sites with IE 6.0 and the ancient English department is fast becoming one of the few places around Purdue I can do so). To my chagrin, Fireworks is gone--so now I have to start using Photoshop. I new this day was coming, but I just didn't think it would be so soon...
• Speaking of soon, Meg's still pregnant. Very, very pregnant.
• The Red Sox will be fine, so long as Schilling can stay healthy. Starting pitching wins in the regular season, and the Sox have plenty of that. Great starting pitching wins in the post-season, and I'm not sure how Dice-K and Lester will fare. I'm also not sure how Big Big Papi will be in October, but he deserves respect for playing all season with a bum shoulder.
• I finished my upcoming 106 website, and am quite pleased with the results. I really like how the typography came out--expect this blog's typeface to change quite soon. In the end, I took a closer look at how Dave Shea sets up his fonts over at Mezzo-Blue, and sytled something similar:

  font-family:"Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Gill Sans", "Tw Cen MT", Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size:12px;

  I was trying to set the font-size through ems, but found that the different browsers (Safari vs. IE & FF) just interpreted them way to different. Pixels seems more precise to me. The headers are done in a different family, one that looks a lot better on Safari than on PC (I'm still working this out):

  font-family:"Abadi MT Condensed Light", "Gill Sans", Arial, sans-serif;

  I know that the Web2.0 aesthetic calls for rounded everything, but I am more and more liking the simplicity and contrast of straight lines. Course, from a coding perspective, straight lines are a lot easier to pull off! I'm going to try to make sure that my new site has rounded corners, but I'm not yet sure if I am going to use a background image (effective, but old-fashioned) or if I am going to get a bit more fancy. I really like this png technique over at Schillmania, but am not quite sure if it will work on a large scale. Experimentation forthcoming.

Content v. Copy

Here's one of the problems that comes with creating a syllabus. You carefully arrange each reading and budget out your (and your students') time. Then, checking up on your RSS feeds, you come across an article far better than most of the things you put into your coursepack (which is already at the printer--Wishydig, I put your name on the coursepack but wasn't 100% certain that you were going to require it--the printer is initially going to run 60 copies but told me its no problem to run an additional 20).

Today I'm referring to an article by Amber Simmons over at A List Apart. While obnoxious at points (she links to another of her articles as an example of thoughtful writing--a little humility and generousity please). Putting that aside, she offers an interesting classification of information on the web: copy and content. Copy is the hollow, substance-less, corporate, commercial crap that fills our span filters and junk folders. Content is the thoughtful, insightful, often user-generated stuff that we RSS, cut 'n' paste, blog about [its is, after all, the audience who deems whether a post is insightful by their sustained attention], and forward. Here's some snippets:

The kind of writing we encourage is lifeless, insipid, and calorie-free. If we want to get back on track—to allow writers to write wonderful user experiences—we have to change our expectations and our rules.

And

As our culture becomes increasingly digital, the art forms that support it must be constructed with the same care, deliberateness, and gusto as our traditional media. Intelligent content is the literature of our time. It is not enough that our printed books and magazines are ardently written and meticulously edited. Our culture loses much if we encourage online writers to sacrifice grace and personality on the altars of pith and scannability. Perhaps better advice is to encourage writers to say exactly what they mean with precisely the words required, however many they may be.

One of the reasons for our teaching this version of introductory composition is to increase our students ability both to recognize copy and generate content. As members of the digital collective, components of the now living and constantly evolving information filter, we are all responsible for our new information ecology. We need to be conservationists, dedicated to upkeep. I see no reason why this shouldn't start in University, why a basic understanding of not only HTML but also social bookmarking and group think.

Victory-is-Mine: New Website

I've finished the draft for my fyc course this fall. I'm particularly pleased with the sliding image header technique I "invented" for this site--tutorial coming soon. I still have some touch ups (applying a min-width to the content area, thinking about subheading font size, and touching up the definition and unorderlists in the syllabus), but most of the design decisions are finalized.

Standards Compliant URLs

I haven't put up a technology-oriented post in awhile, but, then again, I haven't been doing much web design this summer. This week I've started working on my course website for the fall, and thought I might share a cool, free web2.0 tool that really helps with standards compliance: tinyURL.

Next semester I am requiring my students to read one book on the social / economic / cultural / political / legal impact of technology. I created a list of possible books (and am looking for more--please leave suggestions in the comments) for my syllabus, creating a link to the amazon page for each suggestion. Since students will end up writing a review of the book for amazon, this seems like a good place to have them start. The problem: Amazon uses hideously long URLs full of the kind of code that drives the w3c (x)HTML standards validator crazy. As in 150 errors crazy. Solution: tinyURL. TinyURL creates a redirect that it stores on its servers--users will never know that they've clicked on this redirect. Amazon looses the page rank benefits of the link, but, hey, that's what they get for not providing standards- compliant URLs in the first place.

Smashing Magazine and Networked Research

As we start planning out our Blogging as Composition syllabus (see also me and Wishydig and Mrxk), I've been thinking about what kind of research assignment we could have students work on. The obvious project to me is a two-phase wikipedia project: first fact-checking an existing page, then providing a re-write (with detailed synopsis of changes) of the page.

But I've also been thinking of other ways that research appears on the web. I am particularly interested in Smashing Magazine, which at times has found itself in a bit of controversy. For those not familar, Smashing provides reviews, tutorials, research on web design and technologies: from font choice to microformats, color theory to linkbaiting. What's the controversy? Well, Smashing often collects wisdom from around the net--bringing information from a variety of sources into proximity with little original contribution. Take, for instance, Smahsing's recent article on linkbaiting.

After a brief introduction, the article isn't an article as much as a collection of lists. Something in my old Socratic-Augustan brain cringes at this--shouldn't there be more synthesis to count this as research? And something in my Derridean-Complexity brain says: maybe. In the networked, digital scene, collection, linking, relating, selecting, mixing is high level intellectual activity--it is turning the desert into the rainforest (Steven Johnson's metaphor), helping to build the eco-system. Thinking of Spooky, its the digital writer as DJ, spinning information harmoniously together--a symphony rather than a synthesis. Its Rhythm Science.It also presents information in a wreaderly way (we can assume that digital readers are interactive? that they expect to engage rather than consume?), a Levinasian way, a way that invites others to offer their own interpretation.

Therefore, I think the Smashing format could be incorporated into the wikipedia-research project: the step that shows the student can find and organize the voices on their subject area: that they can, in a sense, capture some of the parlor's exchanges, map the conversation, (etc.).

Introductory Blogging... I mean Composition

This fall a few colleagues and fellow bloggers have decided to network our introductory composition classes (at least four classes). The idea is to structure our course around blogging, having our students write often for "real" audiences, on a specialized topic of interest to them. The idea is to increase the quantity of writing and to expose them to each other's writing. The classes will divide into 15-20 topics with 3-5 members each. Topics will be voted on by students, we will provide them with a list of suggestions. Each student will be expected to produce three posts per week.

I worked with three other teachers last fall on a similar format--in which students from multiple classes posted on the purpose of education. We're presenting on this topic at Computers and Writing (we're meeting to work on our presentation tomorrow). We had success last semester with creating forum roles (launch posts, query posts, extension posts, etc)--and we might try something similar in the Fall. Essentially, I want students to understand the logic of a post--either a pointed pointing at an online object, an informed opinion built around a claim (you should look at "x" because) and evidence, or a query/exhibition, where an idea is worked out in public (like, say, this post).

Besides the blog load, we have a couple of project possibilities in mind. I am really tied to a Wikipedia reliability check--having students fact check a wikipedia entry that has something to do with their blog subject. I'd also like to see some kind of internet/cultural "map" of their subject area. We'll probably do a paper as a guide introducing their subject. And I think I'd like to see a podcast/documentary film for a final project.

I'll post more details as they develop, but I'm also interested in ideas, and cool blogs. We're going to spend the first few weeks reading sample posts. Here's some ideas I have so far (possible sites in parentheses).

• Video Games (Gamasutra, Joystick 101, Penny-Arcade, Slash.dot Games)
• Sports (Baseball Toaster)
• Web design (see my blog roll)
• Music (Pitchfork, Last)
• Movies (DailyFilmDose)
• Celebrities
• T.V. (no idea--but can't be a single show, I don't think you'd get enough out of it--it could, however, be a genre of shows)
• Fashion (no idea)
• Politics (is this a bad idea?)
• Photography
• Art
• Poetry
• Cooking / Restaurants (do freshman eat enough to do these?)
• Major (I know that I've learned as much about rhet/comp from reading blogs as I have from reading articles!)

If any of you have suggestions for good, topic-oriented blogs for anything above (or if you'd like to propose your own topic), hit up the comments! Here's what I know: I want to make sure students are exposed to "quality" blogs, ones perhaps they are as of yet unfamilar with.