Ever see an advertisement for something and want to cry because you had a similar idea and someone beat you to it? That’s how I felt today when I pulled my copy of the NCTE Council Chronicle out of my post office box this afternoon. There on the back cover is a splashy ad for "The Teacher’s Essential Guide Series." It’s a Scholastic endeavor by Jim Burke. There are books on several topics, including Content Area Writing.
I’m no Jim Burke. Maybe that was the problem. If I were, when I turned in the proposal for a similar series for NCTE about four years ago, perhaps I could have scooped Scholastic. Oh well. Maybe I should just write books, and forget about proposals in the future.
Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem "Praise Song for the Day" didn’t really impress me. It was what it was: an occasional poem that tried very hard to sum up a moment of emotion and history.
The poem was quite suitable, but I wanted something that would make me cheer or smile or weep (even if it was with tears of joy). But the reading brought nothing. It was just a poet, sharing a nice little poem.
Maybe I’m spoiled. I worked in the same English Department as Nikki Giovanni when I was in the classroom. Nikki can knock you on the ground when she recites her poetry. That’s what I wanted, but the closest I got that day was that sassy benediction from Rev. Joseph E. Lowery.
Alexander’s poem didn’t give me what I wanted, so I politely tucked it away and made no plans to return to it. That was until I ran across the ReadWriteWeb post sharing word clouds of presidential inauguration addresses.The highlighted words in the Wordle images so clearly communicated a specific moment in time. President Bush’s 2005 address had to defend a war on foreign soil. Was it any wonder that freedom was the most heard word? President Clinton, the president who lead the nation into the 21st century, repeated the word century more than any other in his 1997 address.
My thoughts on the word clouds grew into my Inbox blog for this month, Wordle and the Inauguration. I found the text for four inaugural poem online and created Wordle clouds for each of them:
The way the words fell together for each poem was random. The size of the words is based on the number of times they were repeated, but the relationship among the words wasn’t something I controlled. The computer algorithm behind Wordle laid out the words in the "Half and Half" pattern. In other words, a relatively even number of words are shown with horizontal alignment versus vertical alignment:
When I looked at Alexander’s poem, I saw so much more than I had heard. Suddenly, I had a "love song" and thought of how we all "need words [of] praise." Or the poem might be a "song [of] praise" for "love" and "need" and how the two are inevitably linked. Smaller words in the image told me, "Consider struggle, walking, patching, darning. Begin. Repair thyself, teacher."
"Aye," I thought, "repair yourself." I had dismissed a perfectly lovely and meaningful poem because my first experience with it wasn’t monumental enough. Maybe it wasn’t a great reading last Tuesday, but it is a good poem for the moment. The Wordle image reminded me that there are deeper ways to read and things to see that a video or a single reading can never capture.
I’ve spent the evening getting ready for a conference call tomorrow morning. Part of the work has been logistical–rearranging things in the room so that I can set up a printer. Online documents are great, but I still rely on printouts when I’m in meetings. It’s an old habit, born of necessity. The one time I took my laptop to a meeting at work, I was reprimanded and told to never do it again. So much for the 21st-century workplace, huh? Along with my printouts, I rounded up a journal to take notes in.
I’ve been trying to decide "the next thing" I want to write about for a long time now.
I could write about passages in the book I’m reading (The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging).
I have some notes on revision that I’d like to explore.
I’ve saved news articles on the Wayback Machine, the Flickr 365 Project, grammar choices in online writing, and ways to entice boys to read more.
Yesterday in Books-a-Million, I found 5 more books for my collection of young adult fiction that incorporate computers in an integral way. I need to write about all of them.
I have a bunch of notes on effective writing online that I could work into something.
I’ve printed out calls for manuscripts from English Journal, Voices from the Middle, and Teaching in the Two-Year College,.
I’ve been doing some thinking on how scrapbooking and cardmaking magazines and resources talk about writing, from motivation to writing prompts.
I have notes in several of my "idea" journals that I could write about.
I found a number of starters for Lists of Ten that I could finish out and post.
I have plenty to write about—and I am writing.I have lots of scribbled notes, on paper and in pixels. It’s not blank page syndrome.
It’s sort of the opposite. I have all these pages, but I can’t decide which one to explore more deeply and publish. It’s Too Many Full Pages Syndrome.
Or maybe it’s more like Writer’s Attention Deficit Disorder. I keep spinning from topic to topic to topic, unable to focus on any of them long enough. The ideas are all interesting, and I don’t want to ignore any of them long enough to click that publish button.
Back in 1994, at the Computers and Writing Conference in Columbia, Missouri, Eric Crump called me an "idea hamster," someone who just keeps scurrying around on the hamster wheel, pitching out good ideas. I have notebooks, bookmarks, annotations, rough draft. There are dozens of ideas I’ve spun out. I just have the quintessential problem of an idea hamster—how do I manage to stop scurrying around the wheel and settle down with an idea long enough to get something done?
From my entry this week for the NCTE Inbox Blog:
Unsure if you can use a music video in class legally? The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education can help answer all these questions. Read the review for tips on additional resources you can use in the classroom.
From my entry this week for the NCTE Inbox Blog:
Trying to plan a time to meet friends at the Annual Convention in San Antonio? Doodle is a free online polling tool that makes it easy to gather preferences–for setting up events or anything else! And there are many ways you can use Doodle for professional development and in the classroom.
Yes, I’ve been off this blog’s little sphere of the world for quite a while. Long stories, all of which we’ll skip. I have been writing regularly on the Inbox Blog for NCTE, so I haven’t been completely gone from the world of blogs.
And I’ve been twittering as both tengrrl (for educational colleagues) and hokiebunny (for my WyldRyde friends) for quite a while now. Been a few other places, done a few other things. They’ll all show up eventually.
For now, I think it’s good enough that I’ve converted from Blogger to WordPress, which turned out to be much, much simpler than I thought it would be. Obviously there’s much still to be done. I want to customize a theme, clean up the sidebars, work on categories, and so on. I’ve played with WordPress before, but never to any great extent so it may take a little while to get things exactly as I want them. Tonight my only other goal is to get rid of the ‘just another wordpress blog’ taglines. After all, it’s not JUST another one. It’s MINE.
Fiddling around with paper titles for the English Journal call. Wondering about “Plagiarism or Censorship? The Battles over Using Wikipedia in the Classroom.” Not really sure I like it, but oh well. I’ve written 11 words.
I’d like to get something written for the English Journal due next week on doing the right thing, but I’m having trouble getting started. The call talks about academic honesty, plagiarism, and cheating. I’m thinking about perhaps doing something with how online sources complicate things, especially when teachers aren’t even allowed to take kids to online sites. It can fit the topic. I just haven’t managed to get going on it.
Instead I’m off to happy procrastination land, looking at a CFP that has a proposal due January 1. Why work on something due in a week when you can worry about things due in six weeks? On a whim, I checked the Computers and Composition calls a few weeks ago and began thinking about this one: A Thousand Pictures: Interfaces and Composition.
Here’s the question: Would it fit to talk about how computer interfaces are represented in children’s literature? I’m not quite sure where I want to go with the idea, and I’d need to do some reading on interface design to write anything. But I’m thinking of some books that attempt to fake what IM screens and emails look like as well as picture books that show computers with their interfaces on the screen.
I’m just not certain if that’s a good topic, or it’s ridiculously simplistic and laughable. And there’s the bigger challenge that I’d need to do a lot of reading on interface theory-wise. I’m not even sure what to read. It’s hard to read on a topic when you have no idea where to start—and even harder still when you’re not sure if it’s a topic that would fit the call. Maybe I should go back to the EJ call.
