More thoughts... I really am curious to hear your responses to my questions, as I figured you did this in your classes, but I wasn't sure exactly how. I am beginning to see ways I could bring other kinds of writing in BTW. I am especially seeing ways we could do more of a new media focus. My students might hate this. But I think I could even do another course I proposed on this topic, although my students might hate that too because it'd be "too theoretical". I don't know. I have many good ideas, but much bad audience analysis.

Yesterday, since the paper prototype thing, I am thinking about prototypes. They use these things to do almost everything, like a wooden box to decide what size a PDA should be, or car prototypes, etc. We are going to use paper, scissors, sticky notes, tape, pens, & pencils to create a mock website that users could test to see if the arrangement of information makes sense to them. What could we do with this other than what people usually do? Where are the distinctions between work & play here?

One of my students, Lauren, said last night, that she is in technical writing basically because she doesn't have to think for herself. She is very sweet, and she didn't say this in a mean way, but I was shocked. I guess I should have known it. She explained that she hates having papers where she has to come up with something to say about anything, a book, etc. I don't think it's that she has nothing to say, but that it's difficult to write about what you have to say. (I relate to this because I have such a hard time writing about things I care about). She says she hates writing. But not really, she just hates expressivist writing. I told her, it's not that you don't get to think for yourself in technical writing, it's that you don't get to write about whatever you want. But the thinking part is not attached. You have to think for yourself in order to be a good technical writer.

Bringing this back to blogs, why do people like them? They are an informal way for you to express whatever ideas you have. They are public, so you can express them to an audience. They don't require planning, or "thinking", and you can say whatever you want. So what's the disconnect here? Why don't people think they can say whatever they want in school? What are the constraints in that environment? How does the audience of a teacher (judge?) affect the message? Why is it easier to write about something that you are assigned to write about in a school form, but to write about whatever you want in a blog? How are people constrained in writing blogs (for example, I don't predict my class will write whatever they want in the blog for our class)

So many questions...