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!

I JUST noticed that Julie posted .... I was so busy trying to get the assignment for our class in the lab, I didn't even bother to read before the post. I love when Julie posts cuz it surprises me! I get jolted out of thinking that somehow I own this writing space, whatever that means. I get reminded that writing is a social, collaborative activity...no matter how much we do the act of writing by ourselves or alone. My words do not rest in a vacuum. They are not vacuum-packed, freeze-dried, shelved away to gather dust.

Julie, thanks for asking about Black Poetry Day and the powerpoint show. I love this phrase that you quote...."drone pedagogy." Powerpoint tends to be "drone presentation," in my experience. I think people should have to get licenses to do Powerpoint presentations. So many of them simply show on a screen what they give to you in handouts. D'oh! Why not make use of the technology! Take advantage of the relationship between the screen and the viewer ... there's a gap there. Engage the viewer's mind by contrasting and supporting what goes on the screen and what gets presented through speech. OK. Easy for me to say, since I don't use powerpoint much. Has powerpoint become a verb yet? "The teacher powerpointed us" = "The teacher bored us to tears"??? But Arema Cleveland, who did the design of the powerpoint, did a beautiful job. She split the presentation up into groups like "In the Spirit of family," "In the Spirit of ancestors," "In the Spirit of revolution" -- and ended with "In the Spirit of unity." She chose a sparkly night sky background for most of the poem slides and the background echoed the mini-lights draped on the podium where folks spoke their poems. I worked my butt off getting pictures of poets and example lines or poems. Most of my stuff was older stuff and Arema had some more really contemporary poets. Pretty much everybody said they loved the powerpoint but that it was distracting when the slide changed...so if someone was listening to a poet and the slide changed, attention got shifted from the reader to the slide. Others just said they spent a lot of time reading the poetry, watching the slide show.

I gotta finish getting ready for class. I'm so glad you write on this blog, Julie!!! Reminds me of when we used to write together. I really like writing with other people at the same time. I like doing the timed writing practice/freewriting with class. I've got the prompt for today. I've decided to do the Explaining a Concept essay with the class cuz I can use that to explain the concept "blog"....eeek! I don't want to have a draft by next Thursday. Hmm....where have I encountered that kind of resistance before? Ah, yes. Any time I have a writing deadline......

I am in one of my "Ack, A&M drives me nuts" days...the streaming lab has 15 functioning computers. It's in a brand-new room (the new A&M library or Learning Resource Center - LRC - officially opened last spring) but half the room has non-functioning computers -- they're either ancient or unwired or both. CPUs are jumbled on tables in the other half of the room along with unhooked-up scanners and keyboards. Some of my students are in the other lab cuz we don't have enough terminals here. The good thing is that the internet is up here. I get excited watching students invite each other to their blogs, read each other's works, comments on each other's choices of topics. There are a couple of essays I'm looking forward to reading....Dawn's essay on defining burnout for social workers, Kim's essay on explaining credit card debt. I'll know better what everybody's writing after I read the blogs later. Right now, I gotta get up to my office. I've got office hours and I've also got a meeting at either 12 or 1 and then another meeting at 3.30 at the public library. Gotta seriously jet ....

Lab Session - assignment for today:

• if you have your topic for the explaining a concept essay, please complete "Researching the Concept" (219) & "Focusing the Concept" (219-220) and write your answers on your blog


• if you have not chosen your topic, please complete "Finding a Concept to Write About" (217-218) and write your answers/exploration on your blog


• after you finish writing, exchange writing with a classmate (that is, each of you read the other's blog) and then respond to your peer's writing by posting on your blog (title your entry: "Response to X's writing," and substitute your peer's name for the "X")


• for Thursday - meet in class; read the example essays in Chapter 5