Fear not

HTML is wonderful. Do you remember anything about it? Janine's HTML tutorial is one place to start. Probably I learned most of what I know about HTML from doing my website for Gail's class when I manipulated the code to make my funky drop down menu.

As far as adding comments, I just went to Haloscan and followed the directions. You paste it into the places in the code where they say it goes. I showed Joe this weekend and he got it, so I have confidence you can do it also (or at least I can teach it).

Blogging is so interesting. But I can't seem to shake my DVD obsession this morning. My thought about what to do with blogs is start reading everything I can about new media. As blogs are a new genre, I wonder how DVDs are a new genre, in comparison to VHS. The movie watching experience is very different. There are so many different ways to experience the film these days, from extra footage to commentary to short films about the making of the movie to marketing, etc. etc. It's almost like movies have been made into a new genre as well. I suppose this is stuff people are doing, looking at the ways new media makes things into remediated genres. I don't know if I'm truly thinking about something new with this line of thinking. I also think I'd have to structure an entire course around DVDs in order to explore this because there is too much out there. But I wonder if there is a great reading response in this somewhere.

I think the blog qualitative research idea could be great. That is perhaps something that hasn't been done yet with blogs. The person who was writing her dissertation on blogs at the Fem Rhet conference, I don't think she was doing qualitative research. I wonder how Paul would feel about this? We'd have to do a lot more definitive work about what we wanted to do.

Do you think there are other practices we enact in class that students continue to do outside of class? For example, the probably don't webboard all that much, but a lot of people out there do, so you never know. They probably don't write outlines for papers, at least not on average. But are there other practices they might pick up? What do you guys do in your classes in relationship to students' current writing practices (not just in school but in general) Anything? Do you ever have them look at the ways they use writing outside of school?

And why do some groups really take up practices while others don't? For example, no matter how hard I try, I have never been able to get my students to use blackboard to discuss things. Perhaps they didn't really want to discuss the topics I gave them. Sometimes even when they did want to discuss, they didn't really respond to each other. I have not been able to figure out how to work on that.