Calling All Bloggers (CCCC 2006 Chicago — Day 3)
Mike Edwards and Clancy Ratliffe led a very productive special interest group on weblogs.
The project I had agreed to work on last year, seeking NCTE support for proposing some sort of official statement about the professional and pedagogial value of weblogs, fizzled. The NCTE had its national meeting in Pittsburgh in November, but this meeting had a very narrow focus. When I proposed a panel or workshop on blogs, I was told that it was not a good fit with the intended focus of the November conference. The sudden death of SIG member, blogger, and former CCCC chair John Lovas left me without access to the professional contacts I had been counting on. (Yes, I could have sent an e-mail to any number of people, but the chance to work with John was one reason I picked this task to follow up on. So it remains incomplete.)
I’m not going to blog much more about this, because we asked Mike to post his notes (which he projected on the overhead as he wrote them — very efficient) to KairosNews. I’ll add a link to it when it appears.
Six of us went out to dinner afterwards, and raised a glass to jocalo. The tag line of his archived website says it all:
John Lovas resides here. Actually, he’s a virtual John, a web clone, a cyber presence. John’s work is teaching. “Education should help you make a life and make a living,” he’s wont to say. This virtual residence will tell you more about how John makes a living than the life he has made, but you’ll find hints of that too.
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I missed you, too, Daisy. I would have enjoyed the chance to raise a glass to John with you. I'll be teaching "Writing for the Internet" this fall, and this time around I'm expecting that most of the students will already have experienced Facebook and MySpace, so I'm going to have to change the focus quite a bit. I know the kind of trauma you're talking about is very different from the teen angst one finds in LiveJournal, but perhaps there's some overlap.
Sorry I missed our annual chatting about blogging and blogging about chatting! THanks for all these detailed posts. I'm trying to finish coursework this semester and have 3 theory-filled classes. I will be at Computers and Writing though--are you going?
And what of a panel next time around? My dissertation is to be on Online Communication During Times of Trauma so let me know if that fits into anything you are doing these days.