r.i.p. flower
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rss feedin’ my students’ blogs
As I have written about in prior posts, my students are writing in collaborative blogs and have also created individual netvibes accounts. I, too, have a netvibes account, and have been using it as a RSS feed host for my students blogs.
I’m exhausted, so not a lot about this, but to say that I really like seeing all their posts in one place. Other times when I have asked students to create blogs or have their own forums, I would have to go to each individual site. Though we would talk in class about creating interconnectivity among the blogs or forums, having to go to go each site to see what was there often worked against that idea. Now, however, because I can see all of their ideas converging into one writing space, I can begin to more readily see connections among their ideas, places where discussions of the texts overlap and contradict one another, how the discussions of their professional, personal, and educational interests merge. This new space allows for the perception that there is a more seamless ecology of ideas flowing through the blogs, mapping their ideas as they emerge over time.
two cfps on spaces
Two CFPs have been announced that ask participants to consider “space” or “place”:
7th Annual Louisiana Conference on Language and Literature: On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture
and
Special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly: New Technological Spaces: Mastering the Literacies of Thinking and Doing across Multiple Modalities.
Descriptions below.
academic salaries
A rather sobering article (subscription required) in the Chronicle’s The Academic Life provides portraits of the financial realities of the profession. A selection:
When Catherine A. Milton moved back to her parents’ home to finish her dissertation, she didn’t imagine that she would stay for seven years. While living at their Connecticut home, she not only earned her Ph.D. but landed her first teaching job, at Norwalk, and even earned tenure there.
“I went back to my old bedroom,” recalls Milton. “You have to give up your independence and your identity, to fit back into whoever you were when you were back in the family mold.” Milton’s mother cooked dinner every weeknight, but Milton did her own laundry. “There was something about mixing underwear at the age of 30 that I didn’t want to deal with,” she says.
While living at her childhood home was inexpensive, it was also sometimes lonely, recalls Milton. “This was a very wealthy, conservative, coupled, married town,” says Milton, who is single. Living with her parents, she says, made her question everything about herself. “What is happening to me?” she wondered. “Who am I going to become?”