Raining Cats and Dogma

I've been asked to build on the early success of Spectacular!Spectacular! to apply for a small teaching development grant to develop a "hybrid" course, one that replaces some in-class time with a technology component.

Although I do use BlackBoard for basic uses like syllabus, assignment, and handout distribution and archiving, as well as GW's nifty e-reserves function, I'm not all that interested in using its online workshopping possibilities. Instead, I'm hoping to develop the function of the blog.

Could those of you who have used blogs in the composition and literature classroom perhaps suggest some of the ways that blogs have "invigorated" the in-class experience? Obviously, though the administrative function here is to create less demand on GW's strapped classroom spaces, there's also at least a nod to actual pedagogical benefit, and I'd like to not only reference that in the proposal, but consider it in designing said hybrid course . . .

I will, of course, also be poking around Palimpsest to see what's been said over there on the subject.

Posted by at 10:20 PM | Permalink

After setting up a blog for my composition class on the rhetoric of spectacle, I was debating how to get students up and running on it quickly.

The fact that inauguration coincided with the first week of class seemed a good omen, so I had students do an initial writing assignment, bring it to class to discuss, and then discuss how those writing assignments might differ/intersect/resemble a good blog post (also a great way to talk about genre and schema!)

Since I was out of town for yesterday's class, I decided to require a "blog forum," where students were required to post revised/excerpted versions of their inauguration writing assignments, and then spend class time reading each other's posts, and commenting on them. The results are, well, in my humble opinion, spectacular.

Please do check it out, and post your own comments!

Posted by at 1:27 PM | Permalink

I've just re-run across British performance artist Bobby Baker's website, Bobby Baker's Daily Life.

Baker is remarkable not just for her very trenchant critique of a core component of feminist discourse, the construction and reification of domesticity. But beyond this, her approach to food, cooking, shopping, and cleaning, among other components of British women's daily lives not only reveals both the joys and deadening agonies of this sort of experience, it also clearly marks out the ways that these codes of domesticity are performative--that they mark out feminity by their repeated doing.

Take a look around the archives, particularly HouseWorkHouse, which is an interactive map of a typical middle class British home, with the traces of routine daily experience marked throughout.

Posted by at 10:06 AM | Permalink