Idea Warehouse

Book Push

After that ridiculously long delay and carrot-dangling Pearson put me through, I am hoping my book will have a new home soon.  Renamed slightly as Due Credit: Avoiding Plagiarism in a Remix Culture, this 7-chapter text should be heading out the door today again. Every time I work on it, I like it all over again. 

Getting interested in a related topic as well: ghostwriting. After reading up on it, I am beginning to realize how muddled the authorship is within medical research journal ranks.

Good Blog Book

I just picked up "Blogosphere Best of Blogs" book (shown in the Books I'm Reading List) this weekend.  Spent a good bit of time Saturday and Sunday looking over the various blogs that are listed in it, and then printed the bonus chapters (13 and 14) because they were more useful than the other parts of the book to me. For anyone who feels like they need to fill in some gaps in their blog knowledge, this seems like a good place to go.  I just wish I had a week to just blog things and read others' blogs.  Funny post-script: check out the back FOUND page in Wired this month, note the spine of the book on the left....wonder if that's what the future will hold...?

Blogging, Podcasting, and Wikis

Forgive me, blog readers, for I have sinned. It has been 6 months since my last entry.  But I've been busy helping my students work on their research projects and blogs and plan to (upon being granted permission) link student work on their hypertext research projects to this site, as well. Their projects are due Monday and Wednesday in their respective classes, so within that week, they will be posted. Meanwhile, I've been contemplating how and why podcasting might be employed. Quite a few more of my students live and breathe by their IPods.

Also, I'd like to know what kinds of discussions educators have about the use/citation of wikipedia entriess in their students' research projects. More and more entries are becoming quite credible, and I hate to dismiss that obvious area of research. Just as we baby-boomers used to (or at least I did) pore over our World Book Encyclopedias and learn a lot that way, this generation seems to get most of their information from the web and wikipedia info.

Podcasting in Education

Ever since I accidentally put a Podcast link on this site, I've been trying to figure out --WHAT is podcasting? Why would anybody want to podcast? Why would people listen? How does it work? I think I've successfully taken off the link to have this blog (or the single blog entry) podcast, but I've been surfing around a lot, finding some interesting links on podcasting in Education:

• Educational Podcasting
• Knowledge Media Labs
• Podcast channel Shakespeare, otherwise known as Shakespeare-upon-ipod
• Podcasts for Educators weblog

Blogging on the Front Page

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Christmas Day issue featured a terrific article quoting Dennis Jerz and his students and how they are learning about writing in the public realm even when it doesn't feel like they are. Yay! This is a great article! As a former copy editor, I know that the spot they featured it in is the most prime real estate possible for newspapers, and on Christmas Day! wow! People stay at home, read the paper after the gifts are opened, find out about how blogging IS changing the way we think about writing and public discourse. Way to to go, Dennis!! The reporter did a good job with this one.

Teens and Content Creation

A Nov. 2 report from Pew Internet & American Life reports that more than half of all teens have created content online. Nineteen percent have their own blogs, while 38 percent of all teens read blogs.  Another report mentions how not very Americans know what podcasting or phishing is. Count me in.

Composition Studies Review

I was looking through the journals that are available online the other day and I wondered if the latest issue of Composition Studies had come out, and sure enough, it had. It's still weird to see my name at the top of an alphabetic list even after ten years of having switched from a "W" last name to an "A." But there it was! I had almost forgotten that I had written that review of Writing New Media, but it was there, front and center. I still haven't seen too many other reviews out there on the book besides mine and Elizabeth Monske's. Motivates me to write more again for publication, even though I've been so tired and exhausted lately.

Almost nearing the end of the semester-- two final class days: 1 in Business Writing and the other in College Writing Skills, and 3 exam days left. But, oh, the work that looms ahead! :(

I'll be happy by the end of next week!!

Web Cam Saves Mother's Life

There was an interesting story on the CNN news site today about how this woman in San Bernandino, California had gone into insulin shock, and her sons had set her up with a web cam on her computer. One of the sons was in the Phillipines and saw she had fallen on the couch and was unconscious, and unable to get through to California, called his brother in Norway, who (actually it was the sister-in-law who got through to CA) then called 911 where the mother lived and got an ambulance there. The brother in the Phillipines then gave information to the medics about her condition through Instant Messaging on the mom's computer, and they were able to get her to a hospital. The video is on the CNN web site  for November 30, 2005.

Lilly Conference Last Week

Last week I attended the Lilly Conference at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Was the 2nd time I was able to go and as was the case last time, I learned a great deal. I especially liked the session on Student Computer Use within Lectures: A Benefit or a Distraction. Have to grade now. Thanksgiving break is no time-off weekend.

Reading --Print and Online

Prepping for today's 101 class ended up taking about 8 hours yesterday, but only because I ended up getting really into going to different links, reading different articles, reading various web sites, pulling books off the shelves, etc. Just plain old got into it, I guess. I ended up getting Wendy Bishop's reading survey from one of the "hint sheets" in The Subject is Reading, which turned out to be a pretty interesting jump-start into our critical reading mini-unit which willl segue into the position papers.  But since this semester we're using Envision, I've been focusing a whole lot on "visual rhetoric" and they just got finished writing a rhetorical analysis of advertisements or editorial cartoons. So, I'm having them read a chapter from Frank Smith: "What Happens When You Read?" and then 3 online articles mentioned on the daily agenda blog for the class--http://collegewritingskills.blogspot.com--OR the Burbules article "Rhetorics of the Web." I'll be curious to see what they end up thinking of these pieces, and what their opinion of online reading is like. One thing is nice is that most students in that first class are art majors of one type or another or English majors, so the visual rhetoric angle works well for them. The second group is primarily psychology majors (or is it the other way around?). Anyway, I enjoy being able to tap into my understandings from the Reading Theory class at IUP. Thanks, McAndrew, for such a good class, even though we only had 3 students that semester!