the month of June

I haven’t done any work on the diss since May. I never finished blogging the Computers and Writing Conference. I’ve been avoiding this blog because it reminds me that I have a dissertation to write. I had forgotten the way that summer courses can swallow you whole.

This morning I sat on my front porch and read an OLD (Feb. 2008) copy of the Chronicle, because it had an article covering the Blackboard/Desire2Learn patent dispute. Even though I know the outcome, I am still interested in how it gets covered in publications of higher ed. I then began to peruse the latest CCC. In the midst of cramming in a survey of women’s literature and feminist criticism for my summer course, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy “my” field and “my” work, how much there is that I’m missing when I’m not looking outside the pages of a Norton Anthology.

Here’s hoping that I can continue to devote a bit of time here and there to my own scholarship, even while I’m really enjoying a return trip to Renaissance literature written by women (scarce as it is).

Typically, Friday mornings begin with dissertation writing. Lately I’ve been trying not to get bogged down in all of the materials that I need to read more closely and integrate more carefully and thoroughly into my work (like all of the debates around assessment and accreditation as instigated by the Spellings Commission), and I’ve simply been trying to “slop” words onto the page. But today I got bogged and came to realize how much I need to develop and unpack what I mean by “open source.” And then there are all the groups, movements, and organizations working with open source concepts that are also doing work relevant to my own: the open educational resource (OER) community, the open source initiative (OSI) organization, and the schools like MIT who are working with open courseware, and it goes on and on — website after website, article after article, wikipedia entry after wikipedia entry…. How’s a girl supposed to keep all of this organized both in her head and on “paper”?

So instead of plugging away at creating chapter descriptions for my introduction, I wrote this blog entry — to moan a little and to try to see a bit more clearly the unruly monster of “open source” that I’m dealing with.

• Went to five movies: Juno, Charlie Wilson’s War, Sweeney Todd, No Country for Old Men, and The Great Debators
• So far I’ve written eleven pages of my 1st/introductory chapter (I still have writing time planned for tomorrow and the next day). It is certainly not as much as I had envisioned writing. I had hoped to have the entire chapter done in really, really rough form, but the writing has been painful. Yesterday I worked on the section on technology (in particular educational technology / instructional technology software) as ideological and connections between surveillance capabilities of propriety software with Foucault’s panopticon and Crowley’s argument in Composition and the University about the surveillance, gatekeeping, and subjectivizing functions of composition. I spent an hour and a half on that and didn’t get terribly far.
• I met with two friends who are in the process of writing and we workshopped the text we’d produced over break. This is something I’ve been *talking* about doing for a very long time but never follow through on (we’re all friends, so the intended meetings generally digress into lamenting the overwhelming nature of writing a dissertation and dissecting our respective relationships). But this time we actually read and commented and inspired each other to wake up the next morning, head to our desks, and keep writing!
• Started my paper/presentation for CCCC. I have only spent a day on this toward the beginning of break and have not gone back to look at it (scared). I did, however, finish reading Convergence Culture, which our proprosal was based on.
• Began watching new seasons of The Biggest Loser and the L Word (not a major accomplishment, but still…).
• Went cross-country skiing once (not nearly as much as I had hoped for and now all the snow has melted). Also, planned a Vermont cross-country ski getaway with D for later in the month.
• And, returned to blogging.