One of the things my colleagues and I have been discussing is how we can communicate to our students what it means to be a professional writing major. If you’re in traditional English or History and so on, that identity is quite familiar. On the flipside if you’re in a more distinctly professionalizing major in […]
Category: Professional Writing
You have to want to write. And I understand that’s not easy. This summer I did a one-day presentation at a writing institute for teachers, talking about technology and education as I often do. At one point I was talking about Twitter and microblogging a live event. One of the teachers commented on how that […]
I’m teaching our "advanced creative writing" course this semester. It’s a new course that adds another layer onto our "creative writing" curriculum. As I’ve noted in the past, the majority of students come to our professional writing program with a primary interest in writing fiction or poetry or screenplays. There are many reasons for this. […]
An unfortunate incident during our Writers Retreat has me thinking about the obligations of curriculum. In the wider scope of life, it wasn’t perhaps the biggest deal, a policy violation, but also a demonstration of disrespect and immaturity. It is something I take seriously, but I don’t really want to talk about that but rather […]
Categories
fall semester planning
As the semester starts, I’ve really got to start planning what I’m going to do with me time this semester. I’m on sabbatical in the spring (and there was much rejoicing). I plan on hitting some conferences, writing an article, and putting together a book proposal. I just finished writing one article over the summer […]
Commenter DKO and I have been chatting. about contingent faculty and role of academic specialization. I decided to post about this b/c it fits in with the discussion about uneven tuition and even the idea of writing studies as FYC that I’ve been writing about here. Essentially, I think the question is "what does it […]
Here is William Gibson discussing his soon to be released novel, Spook Country, which is a somewhat tangential continuation of Pattern Recognition as one of that novel’s characters, Hubertus Bigend, makes an appearance in the new novel as well. The interview is interesting in its discussion of character and writing process, particularly the participatory role […]
Jeff Howe recently offered some reflection on Wired‘s crowdsourcing journalism project, Assignment Zero. As noted in the Wired article and discussed at Smart Mobs and around the web, the project is being described as either a modest success/productive failure. You can go to the article for the details, but the lessons learned from the project […]
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-7585943465991500964&hl=en A discussion of some of the ideas shaping my thinking as I approach teaching in Second Life in the fall. what is direct deposit cash advance #plaa{display:none;visibility:hidden;}
Much talk today about the CCC article by Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, which builds on the growing (perhaps) argument for revising first-year composition as a writing studies course. Basically what this means is that the course would serve as an introduction to our discipline–its research, methods, questions and so on. As I’ve said before […]
Alex Reid 