Thesis: This is it. It has to get finished. I’m graduating this semester. I will be writing daily. I’m feeling good about it too — a very inspiring atmosphere of late has me feeling optimistic about my own research and writing. It’s amazing what a good haircut and a few other discussions will do.

January 30: Columbia Literacy Academy, follow-up talk to the one I gave in November. Will show examples of how teachers are using blogs in their classrooms. My talk: 20 minutes 40 minutes on tech/q&a, Group: ~20

February 28: Missouri Western State University, 1 hour presentation and moderate follow-up forum/panel, Topic: Becoming Literate in a Digital Age: Why networked communications require nuanced responses (or something like that). Audience: 50?

March 1: MWSU, Workshop on blogging with high school students and possibly instructors. 25-30? Time?

March 23: 4C’s Talk on WAC and Digital Literacies.

Demystifying Shakespeare: Multi-Modal Curricular Reform

This presentation will examine the gains to be made by implementing a multi-modal approach to teaching Shakespeare by including theatre, film, audio, and electronic resources. Although instructors have good reasons for structuring classes as we do, I will argue that many instructors need to implement multi-modal pedagogical changes in order to reach different types of student-learners.

In his text, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, Gerald Graff argues that college faculty need to demystify intellectual-academic speak in order to introduce students to the rich world of ideas and argumentation. More specifically, Graff contends that “academia reinforces cluelessness by making its ideas, problems, and ways of thinking look more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than they need to be” (1). While Shakespeare’s language can be considered intellectual, it can also be considered opaque and more mystifying that it needs to be. Students need help to appreciate its vibrancy. However, just asking students to read the text will not go far enough in addressing their mystification. Instructors can improve their pedagogy and help students’ learning process by implementing pedagogical changes for visual, kinesthetic, and aural learners. Further, I will also pick up Graff’s argument and urge instructors to collaborate with colleagues, introduce criticism, and pare syllabi so we can avoid other miss-cues and help students get a clue, or in other words, help students enter the intellectual-academic conversation without making it seem that doing so is beyond students’ learning abilities.

My proposal was accepted for the Write to Learn conference that is going to be held at the Lake of the Ozarks in February. I am going to be giving one of the breakout session presentations on blogging. I get to talk to people for 75 minutes about blogging! I am so excited!!!

Oh, and there is another convert to blogging. My second piece of good news is that the librarian who visited my English 1000 class to explain all about library services and research has started her own blog. Check out Rachel’s blog when you have a second.

And, finally, I’ll be giving a talk on Tuesday afternoon about blogging and writing with computers to a group of new, up-and-coming teachers.