Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy seeks nominations for its annual awards for 2010.

• The Kairos Best Webtext Award for the best academic webtext published in the previous academic year (the webtext does not have to be published in Kairos).
• The John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award (formerly Kairos Best Academic Weblog Award) for an outstanding blog devoted largely to academic pursuits.
• The Kairos Awards for Graduate Students and Adjuncts (formerly the Kairos/Lore Awards), a series of three awards to recognize outstanding contributions in teaching, research, and service to the field of Computers and Writing by graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty. (These three awards are co-sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin's Press.)

Today a student e-mailed me that she was confused by the university's new student portal, so she used Google to search for my senior-level writing course. Instead of locating the advanced technical writing course site, she stumbled into my personal pages and my business pages.

This is not much of a problem, since my personal pages deal with my freelance writing. Having a student read my CV isn't exactly an issue. It's not exciting reading.

For the first time ever, I decided to allow my students to work on a Wikibook project. Normally, my tech comm seniors (Univ. of Minnesota) have to do a community service project. In the past, they have prepared manuals and materials for "Dress for Success," "Helping Hands," and "The Immigration Project" among other non-profits. Service learning as part of tech comm reflects a general philosophy within the UofM that students should do 20 hours of community participation.

A friend pointed me to this post on ars about Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Lessing is concerned that all of this "blogging and blugging" is reducing people to, uh, uh...Like, blithering idiots. The author of the post offers a few gentle criticisms, pointing out that people are still reading, though in different ways. There's even the obligatory Kindle reference (it's such a fad there'll be Kindles for Ken dolls soon).