I spoke with Ms. Alfreda Sullivan-Handy today and she's agreed to be a team member of my blog. Yea! Also, while I sat in my deserted classes, I also worked through the guidelines for chapter 5 -- I'm doing an Explaining a Concept essay on "blogging." I gotta say...I really resist guidelines, and I get very impatient working through the steps that the textbook suggests. But my impatience is worth working through, because I've got my focus for my paper: blogging in the composition class. Also, my writing strategy will be a hybrid one, since I'll use a bit of process narration (need to explain how blogs get set up, for instance); maybe not so much classification, but definitely cause and effect, because my point is that blogging increases student writers' self-confidence so I want to show effect of blogging; and I'll also use comparison/contrast quite a bit, because I've decided that comparing journal writing with blogging is a really good way to approach the whole essay. So here's my tentative thesis: Using blogs instead of journals encourages students to develop a stronger sense of self as writer in community. Something like that. Audience is mostly college writing instructors. Purpose is to get them to consider using blogging in the classroom.

Any comments? You know my research is going to involve y'all in class. I'd like to do some interviews, and I'll also hand out some questionnaires at some point. I'm glad it's the weekend!