Personal Journal

Installing a Bit of an Update

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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.

Personal Journal

Another Revision

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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.

Published a lesson plan revision, a new 6-8 lesson on using books and their movie adaptations: Cover to Cover: Comparing Books to Movies.

Personal Journal

Proposals

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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.