Warning…this is one of those catch-all entries that wanders all over the place….

Alex at Digital Digs has an idea, tipping the intellectual climate. It’s about motivating entry-level English students to write and I want to think about it in conjunction with a blogging across the curriculum program:

Rather than trying to motivate the entire campus, break the student body down into groups of 100-150 (Gladwell provides evidence as to why groups larger than 150 cannot cohere). This could be done through the dorms, but those associations seem arbitrary to me. What makes a little more sense is working through departments and first-year learning communities (the latter b/c first-year students may not have majors and are likely to not be taking major-specific courses even if they do).

(My emphasis on motivate as it indicates, in my mind anyway, the need for an affective tie.)

His ideas for motivating students’ writing is exciting for me:

My general goal is to improve intellectual climate, and I’ve decided that one tangible way I can do that, especially among English majors, is to get them writing, publishing and performing their works, and responding to one another’s texts. My hypothesis is that if I can change the “writing context,” then I can perhaps tip our students into new writing practices, which will in turn contribute to shifting the intellectual climate of the campus.

We have a speaker’s corner here at MU that really needs some alternative speakers. It would be fun to ask students to perform their texts–plus it would be a chance to get out of the classroom on these beautiful fall days we’re having.

Also, I want to think about the frame, “writing, publishing, and performing,” in conjunction with some ideas I’m already having about a paper for my Shakespeare class on the topic of teaching Shakespeare in a computer classroom, which I’m hoping would also tie with the EGSA conference in February that the conference committee is starting to plan. I want to think about what sort of derrivative multimedia texts/compositions/speeches students could create that would help them (me) understand/appreciate Shakespeare better. I’ve never taken a Shakespeare class until now. It’s taken me about half a semester for the words to come alive. How might apprehension of the language come more easily?
Also, I want to think about pedagogy as making rather than pedagogy as made. I picked up what I think is going to be a great book along these lines at the Journalism library that I just can’t wait to read: Places of Learning: Media Architecture Pedagogy by Elizabeth Ellsworth.

Somehow, all of these ideas connect with what I want to work on for papers in both my classes and for my PhD apps (write 2/revise 1).

And somehow all of this will be perfect preparation to write my thesis. I just need to connect all the dots. Just! Oh, and I’m also giving a talk for future high school english teachers on writing and computers on October 25. OMG. Can I fit anything more into the next two months? Well, yes, because I want to attend the conference at St. Louis University on Oct. 27 at which Gail Hawisher is speaking on multi-modal composing. Yes, and, I want to copy, for D & R, this bibliography I have from the computers and writing conference on that subject plus pedagogy for the technology sub-committee I joined. Fun, fun. fun. Really. I’m so excited about all of this!!!

First things first:
1) study for Shakespeare mid-term on Tuesday (prepare for essay plus 8 passage identifications!!)
2) review and comment on reports written by Professional Writing students
3) finish readings and blogging for class on Monday night