Hi everyone. I'm happy to announce the grand re-opening of CCC Online. I've posted a longer, semi-formal announcement and description of the site over at my blog, but thought I'd post a quick announcement here as well.

What we've done is to turn CCCO into a site for the management of that journal's metadata. The content itself (i.e., articles) is still password-protected over at NCTE, but CCCO provides abstracts, keywords, bibliographies, et al. We're using Movable Type and del.icio.us to make as much of the journal accessible to searches, bookmarking, tagging, and research as possible, and we're pretty pleased with the results. It's only one journal, and we've still got a ways to go in terms of adding back issues, but there's enough up there now for you to see some of the potential of the site.

Please feel free to take the site for a spin, and to let us know what you think, either through blog comments or over email. Thanks!

cgb

I've published this presentation over at my own site: http://inventio.us/deixis/. Thanks for taking a look... cgb

Abstract:
In his recent Kairos article "When Blogging Goes Bad," Steven Krause suggests that the fit between weblogs and the writing classroom isn't perhaps as seamless as we might wish it to be. His article recounts a "failed experiment" where weblogs failed to provide a "dynamic and interactive writing experience."

My presentation takes Krause's article less as a "cautionary tale" and more as a challenge to understand where the friction between weblogs and the writing classroom is located. Drawing on Kathi Yancey's discussion of deixis in her 2004 CCCC Chair's Address, Carolyn Miller's work on ethos in Human-Computer Interaction, and Duncan Watts' work in network theory, I suggest a couple of conclusions. I argue that the "community" we work towards in our classrooms is largely a clustering, or centripetal, type of networking, while much of the "dynamic and interactive" nature of weblogs comes from connective, or centrifugal, activity (or more accurately, a healthy mix of the two). Furthermore, the energy of blogging is highly context-specific (deictic), in a way that can be difficult to accommodate (or value) in a classroom setting.

Abstract Submitted for Computers and Writing Online 2005

In his recent Kairos article "When Blogging Goes Bad," Steven Krause suggests that the fit between weblogs and the writing classroom isn't perhaps as seamless as we might wish it to be. His article recounts a "failed experiment" where weblogs failed to provide a "dynamic and interactive writing experience."

My presentation takes Krause's article less as a "cautionary tale" and more as a challenge to understand where the friction between weblogs and the writing classroom is located. Drawing on Kathi Yancey's discussion of deixis in her 2004 CCCC Chair's Address, Carolyn Miller's work on ethos in Human-Computer Interaction, and Duncan Watts' work in network theory, I suggest a couple of conclusions. I argue that the "community" we work towards in our classrooms is largely a clustering, or centripetal, type of networking, while much of the "dynamic and interactive" nature of weblogs comes from connective, or centrifugal, activity (or more accurately, a healthy mix of the two). Furthermore, the energy of blogging is highly context-specific (deictic), in a way that can be difficult to accommodate (or value) in a classroom setting.

Ultimately, I do not argue that weblogs and classrooms should never mix, but rather that their mixing should be informed by a more careful articulation both of what weblogs can accomplish and of our pedagogical expectations for this particular technology.

I don't know that this is necessarily front page appropriate, but rather than just asking Charlie, I thought I'd cast my net more widely:

One of my colleagues has asked for some assistance in learning more about blogs, and specifically for a list of folk in the field who are already doing it. Obviously, I'll be pointing to the list here at KN. But I'd like also to set this person up in an aggregator like Bloglines, and it occurred to me that it might be useful to include on that page (especially as it grows longer) an OPML file of the feeds.

If you've ever used OPML, you're one step ahead of me, so I thought I'd ask either if someone would be interested in putting it together, or pointing me to a good tool &o tutorial for doing so. Thanks!

I dropped an announcement here a couple of months ago about the graduate course that I'll be teaching this spring, and I wanted to let folks know that the weblog for the course is slowly taking shape, and will continue to do so over the next few weeks. I don't have much more to say at this point, except to invite anyone who's interested to follow along, make suggestions, participate, etc. More to come...

I'm not really one for tooting my own horn, but I wanted to let everyone know about a course I'll be teaching at Syracuse this spring on Network(ed) Rhetorics. I've posted the official course description, and over the next month or so, I'll be resuscitating the weblog of the same name that I started this past spring and using it as the official site for the course.

I'm excited about the course because I think we'll be reading alot of really good, recent work on blogs, wikis, social software, network studies, etc. I'm also going to try and push the envelope in terms of conducting as much of the course as possible online, and that's where the "invitation" part of my title comes in. I've spoken with a few people, but hammered out nothing definite in this regard: if there are others out there who are teaching c&w grad courses, and would be interested in coordinating some of the readings and/or even setting up opportunities for collaboration across institutions, that's something that I'd be interested in working on. If there are students outside of SU who'd like to join the online portion of the class (and perhaps even earn credit for it as an independent study at their home institutions), that's something I'd also be interested in. And of course, I invite anyone who's interested to read along and/or participate in discussions as the mood hits them.

Becky Howard, a colleague of mine, was asking the other day about how she might publish something she's been working on, and publish it quickly, since it's relevant to the Presidential race. After talking about it a while, and coming up with nothing, she's decided to self-publish it on her website. My first response was: well, of course, you blog it. Which would be the perfect solution but for the fact that Becky has no blog. Oops.

So my second-best alternative? I blog it. Becky, as some of you probably already know, is one of the country's foremost experts on plagiarism, and the essay in question is a close look at the process by which the Brits and the Bush Administration set about justifying our actions in Iraq. It also makes no secrets whatsoever about its own position: Plagiarism and Fraud in George W. Bush's Foreign Policy. Check the URL if you think I'm joking about this.

Here's an even scarier question: What happens when a bio-cracker unleashes a plant virus on all the wheat in North America, and the genetic code to "Wheat 2.0" is closed-source, patented code controlled by a corporation?

An interesting blog post mixing open source w/ a recent court decision regarding GM food...