Just a reminder: the cutoff date for nominations for the 2005-2006 John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award is tomorrow. Anyone and everyone can nominate a weblog for the award, and the winner will be announced at this year's Computers & Writing conference. As the original call for nominations indicates, the judges are interested in academic weblogs that offer a regular, ongoing, and useful contribution to the scholarly discourse in our fields; weblogs that -- through their public engagement -- help to build our common knowledge. Send your nominations to kairosed@technorhetoric.net.

The UMass Amherst English Department is co-sponsoring a K-college Conference on Writing, Teaching, and Technology on April 7 and 8, 2006. From the Call for Proposals:

The rapid development of computer capabilities is providing new venues for writing for people of all ages: personal web pages, web diaries, and blogs make it possible for people to write and share their work around the globe. As technology facilitates writing, it also challenges our very notion of writing. Writers can compose not only with words, but also with images and sound. Software programs are moving far beyond spell-checking; some are being marketed claiming to evaluate writing. Finally, technology also provides new opportunities for teaching writing (for example, electronic writing portfolios; software, like WebCT, that organizes courses and facilitates sharing of drafts; distanced education platforms). This conference aims to allow teachers from different backgrounds and with different interests to share methods, ideas, and projects for using technology effectively in the writing classroom.

Kathleen Yancey will give the opening address, and Charles Moran will be the speaker for the closing session. If you're within a few hours' drive of Western Mass and have an interest in technology and teaching, it looks like an interesting conference.

People here have already discussed the troubling nature of Elsevier's attitude towards intellectual property concerns. (Elsevier, as many here know, is the publisher of the journal Computers and Composition.) But it's difficult to characterize as merely "troubling" the fact that Elsevier is also involved in connected (via parent company Reed Elsevier) to the international arms trade.

(Via Crooked Timber; cross-posted in slightly different form at vitia.)

(Correction made after response from Elsevier's Sarah Oates.)

Congratulations to Collin Brooke for winning the Kairos Best Academic Weblog award. Jenny Edbauer, Traci Gardner, and I were unanimous in our opinion that, out of all the nominees, Collin's weblog best met the criteria for this year's award. Collin is a consistent, insightful, and engaged blog poster and commenter. He does careful and impressive work addressing and interlinking issues relevant to our field, and he's put his weblog to some deeply innovative uses, of which his online seminar and the rhetoric carnival are two excellent examples. And last night, perhaps as evidence of how widely his weblog writing circulates in our field, Andrea Lunsford cited one of Collin's weblog posts as one of the concluding examples of her Computers & Writing keynote address, less than an hour after the well-deserved award was announced.

Congratulations, Collin!

Mike Edwards

As someone whose presentation at CCCC dealt with plagiarism issues, and who's read Jenny Edbauer's thoughts on plagiarism and works for hire with considerable interest, I thought the comment-storm tempest at MetaFilter and elsewhere over the college student who solicited a stranger via IM to write a paper on Hinduism for her might be worth pointing out. (Follow-up links here, here, and here; according to BoingBoing, it's a hoax, but the arguments offered as to why it's a hoax aren't entirely convincing, and April Fool's Day ain't until Friday.)

Mike

Via Slashdot: Paul Graham, computer programmer, author, and inventor of the Yahoo! Store, has written an essay on the current state of the essay. While I don't entirely agree with all of his points, there are some interesting comments at the end about the influence of technology on writing, and some of the comments in the Slashdot thread are potentially provocative as well (if you're willing to brave the Slashdot signal-to-noise ratio). (Title edited for correctness.)

The New York Times has posted an interesting article on online plagiarism and paper sellers. Writing as someone who's taken several spins through the online mills myself, wondering how much my students might find in such places, I think Jenny Edbauer's recent blog post offers an interesting perspective on how rhet/comp practitioners spin their assignments to students. Margaret Price's CCC article offers another smart perspective. According to the New York Times article, "While 10 percent of college students admitted to Internet plagiarism in 1999, that number rose to around 40 percent in 2003," and "2 percent of students purchase papers online". So what are you doing about online plagiarism -- other than perhaps unethically ceding ownership of your students' writing to turnitin.com's database?

The theme of the 2005 CCCC convention in San Francisco prominently features the word "Access". Those of us whose scholarship intersects with the Web know that the word "access" has many different connotations: access to computers, access to education, access to journals, access to information, and access to opportunity, among others. And along with "access" goes "accessibility". One of the ways to make sure information online is accessible is to validate it (reasons for validating can be found in many places, including Guideline 4.1 of the W3C's above-linked Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), but making sure your site's code validates can be a pretty significant undertaking. My site's markup doesn't yet pass either the W3C's or the Bobby validators for standards compliance, but I'm working on it slowly (basically, it's mostly MT issues, which I'm hesitant to tinker with), and the site at least has a doctype and uses alt tags for the graphics. The other stuff will come along as I find the time. But I wonder: with their concerns about access, when will the CCCC's pages validate? Furthermore, since (as I understand it) any entity in the US that receives federal funding is required to be Section 508-compliant, has anybody using Web courseware like Blackboard or WebCT done research into their compliance with Web standards?

Anybody else catch Geoff Nunberg's little bit of linguistic elitism at the end of tonight's Fresh Air (page has links to audio streaming via RealAudio or WMA) on NPR? I usually like Nunberg, a lot (his book is why I like quoting the ceci tuera cela thing from Hugo), but check out his closing argument: his stylistic difficulties in keeping a weblog indicates that weblogs do not use the "high, formal style" of the contemporary news story, but rather engage in the informal "table talk" of the "urban middle class".

In a recent email to the Kairosnews weblogs listserv, Barclay Barrios writes: "I was asked to generate a list of 10-15 blogs to be listed at rhetcomp.com , and I am hoping all of you can help me finalize that list. It only takes a simple web survey to cast your votes: http://barclaybarrios.com/poll/. My method was entirely unscientific. I started at kairosnews and surfed through blog rolls, noting blogs that I had at least heard of. I'm hoping this blog savvy group can help me identify a good mix of organizational, personal, and generally interesting blogs for the Comp/Rhet crowd."

I wonder: why is this being done via e-mail, instead of via a weblog? What sort of results will an "entirely unscientific" poll bring? How helpful is it to have a weblog that's updated only once every couple of months on the list? And, most importantly: why only 10-15? Are there only 10-15 worthwhile rhet/comp weblogs, or are we trying to get a rhet/comp "A-list"? How helpful would it be to have a list of political weblogs comprising only, say, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Calpundit, Eschaton, Instapundit, Talking Points Memo, Andrew Sullivan, Common Dreams, Volokh, and Crooked Timber?