the month of June

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.

For all the anxiety that I had going into each of the three classrooms that I was assigned to teach in yesterday, my students seem — on the whole — to be quite an interesting, entertaining, friendly, thoughtful, and lovely bunch (and I mean none of that in a condescending way). I just finished reading through the three sections worth of questionnaires that I give them to fill out on the first day. Here are a few of the things I have learned:

• Favorite authors among college students (at a four-year, private (Catholic affiliated) liberal arts institution): Nicholas Sparks, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, J.K. Rowling, Khaled Hosseini (a good number of my students have read or are reading The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns). One book mentioned by a student that caught my attention (having never heard of it) was This Present Darkness — apparently this falls into the genre of “Christian thriller”, which I also never knew existed.
• Approximately 94% of them have Facebook and/or Myspace accounts
• Many (I’d say about a third — maybe slightly more) transferred from community colleges and/or other colleges — mostly state schools
• The majority don’t blog (in fact, only 3% have ever blogged before, and none do currently) but have heard of or are familiar with them.
• Sports (playing) and hanging out with friends lead in the hobbies/activities department

All in all I am hoping to hold onto the magic and enthusiasm with which both students and instructor met the first day.

• 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.

As I revise last semester’s syllabi to this semester’s schedule, I am trying to rein myself in and not go all nuts trying new things, making major changes, and all of that. I love playing with curriculum and pedagogy, brainstorming all the possibilities and spending time strategizing, but this is my last semester at CSR, as they’re not renewing my contract next semester (I’ve reached the two year mark, which marks the end of contingent faculty contracts), and since I’m basically teaching the same courses as last semester (and as far as I know the semester went relatively well), I don’t see the point in going into total overhaul mode. It’s strange, but I haven’t gotten my evaluations back from last semester, so I also don’t have a lot to go by in terms of feedback about what worked and what didn’t.

I really wanted adopt a new grading system this semester. I have been considering trying contract grading, but I guess I am just one of these “not ready to let go” people. I guess I’m just feeling like it will be a lot of work to pull off for this semester that is starting in less than a week.

It might seem as though the titles of my blogs having nothing to do with education, writing, or research. And they don’t.

My first blog was titled “the most cake.” When I started the blog I was going through a (re)bonding experience with Hole. “Doll Parts” was probably stuck in my head at the time and wanting the most cake seemed to fit my life at the time. I wanted to have the academic career, the relationship, the sports and poker playing, the yoga, the TV watching, the social life, and I wanted to be good at all of it (especially the TV watching)!

Fast foward three years, and I’m in the process of starting a new blog, and I go to see the film, Juno. There is a short scene in the film where Juno is playing guitar with the potential future adoptive father of her baby, and it is a Hole song that they are playing. Juno, who in the film we learn was not named after an Alaskan town but rather after the Roman goddess and wife of Jupiter was such a fun character that she too got stuck in my head. In addition, the month of June was named after Juno, and being the month of my birth as well as the month during which I sometimes have enough time off to write (and garden), I decided to so name this blog.

I guess this is much more a free association than an etymology per se, but here it is — the half-wacky and not entirely clear thinking that is my (writing) life.

Welcome to my “new” blog, which is actually a continuation of a blog I kept for a little more than three years. This is my new year, new blog blog — all the clichés apply — turning over a…, a fresh…, a resolution that I’ll write more, find more balance, complete my dissertation, all of that. Aren’t those the promises we’re all making?

In fact, I could pretty much just borrow (steal?) Dr. B’s resolutions. Those pretty much cover what I want 2008 to be — minus the racquetball, and our date night consists of not leaving the house and watching Project Runway.

Anyhow, as are all new blogs (and old blogs for that matter), this one is a work in progress. The blogroll is unorganized. I haven’t played with every possible widget yet. The picture is probably just a stand-in for now (**coming up — an attempt at explaining why this blog is a blog about writing and not about summer gardening and cooking…or rather an attempt at explaining why the URL has cake in it and the title has June in it).

Most likely it will be moving, though I have not started the new year, new blog yet. First I wanted to experiment with the “new” customizable templates, because I never really played around with the “new” version of blogger in nor out of beta. But ultimately, all of my other blogging is done via wordpress, and I am finding that I prefer it. I especially like edublogs and am considering starting this personal/academic blog there. I thought to stay here for reasons of readership, but since my sitemeter reports that I don’t really have much of a readership (not that there has been anything here to read), I figure it won’t hurt too much to start over somewhere new (and improved!).

I took an entire semester off from this blog. During that time I began a meditation blog, administered a blog for the ENG105 faculty at CSR, and of course maintained my course blogs.

Currently there has been an interesting (and motivating) discussion taking place in the WPA listserv regarding “time toward PhD completion.” Within that discussion has come the reminder that habit in writing is super important and that daily writing is crucial. As a writing teacher this is obvious to me, yet as with doctors who tell us to eat right and exercise and then are themselves complete couch potatoes, I have been one of those dissertation writers who has not been taking my own writing advice to heart. I feel the pressure when I make time to write that it has be a large amount of time and that it has to produce something momentous (or close to it). But, that isn’t always going to happen, and it is better to write a bit each day than to have a few sporadic pressure-filled marathon writing sessions. Daily writing is actually where blogging was supposed to come in — public accountability always helps too.

A few folk on the listserv have suggested this site — PhinisheD — so I plan to spend some time checking that out and commiserating with other ABDs.

So I guess this has kind of turned into a new year’s resolution post: to return — more diligently — to writing and completing my dissertation and to return to this blog (or this blog at a new location) as part of that more diligent dissertation writing process/habit.

Finally, I have also given some thought to what I want this blog to be. It started out a little over three years ago (!!!) as my attempt to move my work and my voice outside the “ivory tower” and reach a larger audience than my dissertation committee. The blog was to be an account of the research and teaching and teaching as research that my experience as a PhD student was/is comprised of. For the most part I believe that is what this blog has been — along with the occasional (or more than that?) asides. I realize that some readers prefer to read academic blogs that are strictly that, and I have considered making my own blogging fit more into that strictly academic “genre.” However, I’ve come to the realization that that blogs I most enjoy reading are “mixed bag” blogs — the ones that move between pedagogical practice, writing theory, most recent movie viewing, and dinner menus. I’m sure it is the voyeur in me, as I believe it is for many of us working, writing, living, interacting in these online spaces who are also reality TV junkies and fans of memoir and the personal essay, etc. Anyhow, I’m feeling fairly certain that this blog will remain a blend of the personal and the academic. A post I read today is of this opinion:

The mix of professionalism, critique, personal obsession. This is the juxtaposition that drives the best kinds of writing.

I spent the morning kicking around the web through a variety of websites, google searches, JSTOR articles, compfaq and CompPile searches, etc. in search of some specifics on online/virtual/electronic peer review (or writing workshops). I spent about an hour and a half. It was an exhausting search and didn’t yield the kind of results I was hoping for: suggestions for specific technology, logistics, results. From the tidbits I was able to find, I learned that research favors asynchronous over synchronous peer review. This is making me re-think my original idea, which was to use chatzy, in favor of using wikis. Still, I haven’t quite figured out exactly how I am going to do this: have students post a page that is their essay, and then use the discussion section to answer workshop directing questions? Should students be able (in true wiki) fashion to intervene in the original text? My impulse is to say yes, as the author can view the history of changes, but what are the drawbacks to this idea? I’d definitely like to do more reading about this. I’ve gone ahead and ordered myself the book Virtual Peer Review: Teaching and Learning about Writing in Online Environments, despite it being in hardcover and way to much money for me too be spending right now.

In my online travels I also came across some references to designing hybrid courses, so I’d like to look further into those as well.

Do NOT assume that just because you’ve been assigned a hybrid course of which one credit is digital that you’ll be assigned to a computer classroom that allows you to teach the technology necessary to making the digital aspect possible. Such assumptions will hurt you, when, a week before classes start you suddenly check the classroom space and see rows of tables as opposed to computers, and you nearly have a heart attack. These are things you need to ask for and agressively pursue. Please remember this in the future.