A place to keep track of info, links, and my thoughts on composition and rhetoric, teaching and learning, and life in general, while I work on my PhD at the University of South Florida.
BBC News
Blog Search Engine
bloggie awards
Blogninja
Blogumentary
calgal
etdguide.org
frozendishes
garden state blog
go.com
google
Howard's pongo mania
HYPE
Joe Moxley's Page
Kairos
Kairos News
misbehaving.net
Moxley's sharepoint
my usf
NCTE
notable etds
Patty's Old Hippie's Almanac
phdweblogs
Questions about Writing
quote source
Ref Works
Research on Blogs
Research Wiki
RhetComp.com
Society for Technical Communication
STC's Blog
strongbad
the onion
Tricia's Patio
wikipedia
World Wide Words
writingblog.org
Year of the Blog
visited *loading* times
I just found a new tool for embedding music into your blog; it's called powerwebmusic. I don't know if anyone wants to play with it. I did embed some music in HYPE, but not at the dump. It' just doesn't seem appropriate here.
PARTY!
1508 people have visited the dump and left fragrant. Thanks to everyone who's stopped by and read a bit.
Quote for the Day
In honor of All Hallows eve (Halloween) the quote for the day is a poem I just read in the St. Petersburg Times.
Kid got candy to hoard
Thrown about his plastic gourd
With future arteries to clog
Details tomorrow in his blog.
- Raymond Sargent
Grrrr!
I read about this article over at Daisy's blog. It really pisses me off that people would even consider suspending some kid for writing fiction in her own private journal.
Quote of the Day
I've been looking at a different blogging site that is partnering with the blog search engine. It's called tblogs.
Disclaimer
I want everyone to know that I have no plans on leaving motime, and I will continue to suggest it as the place to blog to all my friends, colleagues, and students.
Review of tblog.com
Things I like: The custimaztion on tblog is fairly simple and easy to use. It does host images and have commenting features. 3 columns or two is not really a problem as long as your comfortable with html. You have the ability to add html code in either a left of right column on the blog. Tblogs also has this store thing. Basically, you earn tbucks by blogging and commenting on others blogs and then you collect tbucks and can upgrade things on your blog. I'm not real sure how I feel about that.
Things I'm hating: The amount of images they'll host on their free service is limited to 5. If you become a paying customer it's limited to 75. The area to post in is not nearly as nice as the control panel here at motime. You post on a separate page and then hit the link to figure out what it all looks like. Also, you have no idea about a basic template until you preview. You can change the blogs colors and size, but it's kind of hard to figure out what you've changed sometimes.
Overall: It's all right and there are some good blogs being written over there, but stay at motime if you like Howard's help and the ability to tweak on your own. Check out Reservoir Kittens and Mixed Reviews to see what people are playing with. This is the one I created to test it out Flick Chick's Domain.
Strongbad for the English Teacher. I was checking out Strongbad and saw this cartoon. I think you'll find it funny.
Quote for the Day
I just figured out how to add my blogs to the blog search engine and thought others might want to add theirs. It might increase our readership. Basically just scroll down towards the bottom and click to add your blog.
ETD?
I recently found this site, folk viola, which may be a part or the actual etd of a student. I'm hoping it is. I'm trying to get in touch with author, but I trouble with emailing Lindsay Aitkenhead at lindsay@folkviola.com. It's a very cool site, if you're into the viola, which I am. Plus she's working on a masters in ethnomusicology, which is the field I had originally planned on going into.
Quote for the Day
I thought this was an appropriate quote in honor of the Amato article.
What's Amato with You?
Joe Amato's piece is a nice biographical read that plays with words, which seems to be the point of the article, which he does do plays with words and all that. Basically, I'm left with a strong so what was the point of reading that feeling in my gut. I'm not sure what Amato was driving at in "Family Values: Literacy, Technology, and Uncle Sam." I know I laughed when he described his students entering corporations and going into the army as wearing blinders. 'Cause it's not like there are any blinders on Amato. Oh no he's one of the seeing. He's an academic. 
I did not feel comfortable with the amount of family story he gave. I get that he's playing with the genre, but I really didn't need to know that his uncle had gone to jail or that his parents were divorced or that his grandfather may have hit his grandmother. These are the bits I'd rather see in an autobiography then in an academic essay.
Behold the Power of the Blog
I think this is really pretty cool.
Shirin Abadi awarded Nobel Peace Prize 2003 Iranian opposition blog: Mo'time member newser is an Iranian activist and journalist, and is the owner of iran.motime.com (in Farsi). Newser wrote a poem, below, translated from the Farsi, for Shirin Abadi. For those of us who do not read Farsi, it is worth a visit the blog. It is heartening to see people organizing to win their own freedom (and using the blog as an effective communications platform), the text script is quite beautiful and there are some photographs. too. And newser probably wouldn't mind reading comments of solidarity in all the languages of mo'time!
posted by howard 10/25/2003 - 01:21 in articles
Mo'time proud to host Iranian opposition blog --
wake up!
and believe/ja...ja...please accept
wake up/girls of the desert,
and create the love/for all of your friends
you are creator of love/lion-mountain-woman of iran
"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2003 to Shirin Ebadi for her efforts for democracy and human rights. She has focused especially on the struggle for the rights of women and children. As a lawyer, judge, lecturer, writer and activist, she has spoken out clearly and strongly... Her principal arena is the struggle for basic human rights, and no society deserves to be labelled civilized unless the rights of women and children are respected." Read more...
Photo: REUTERS/John Schults
[2 comments | 2 unread comments]
Blinded by Packing Peanuts
Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola's article, "Blinded by the Letter: Why are we using Literacy for a Metaphor for everything else?," frustrated and pissed me off. I felt that it purposefully tried to obsfucate it's meaning by creating a non-linear text that hid its meaning in weird structures. I get that literarcy can be a problematic term. That literarcy doesn't save the world, fixing societal ills like some flying super-hero leaping bounds over tall buildings. The thing is I don't get what reason (why it was imperative) for these two authors to repeat the known.
The aspect I found particulary annoying was the bit where they supposedly "unpackaged" the term literacy. What does it really mean when someone unpackages a term? Truth - it means that Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola chopped the term literacy up into bits and then stuffed those bits in brand new packaging with pretty post-modern ribbons, making all of us feel like we've made giant leaps forward from our Spanish fore-padres and their bibles of conquest. Did anyone see the leap we made getting to the new term - articulation. What an ocean we leapt there. The thing is to me literacy has always been learning a set of skills that are pretty much necessary to work. We can say what we want about it being a horrible loaded word and it doesn't gurantee a better life. And that's fine; it's true in its way. But even though literarcy cannot save the masses, it's still something that effects that bit of life known as work. There are few jobs, careers, that call for illiterate workers. So whether people are articulate or literate they still gots to know some basic skills.
Quote for the Day
"Oh yes... I can't confirm anything on this point - but neither can I unconfirm it." - Erik Satie
Quote for the Day
Earlier I posted a link to a place called word play. (It's under my links now.) Anyways, one of the sites listed there makes anagrams out of your name. My favorite was Insane jerkin notes. Check it out at http://www.anagramgenius.com/.
I've gone through the lists of etd's I posted about earlier and have put links to the ones that could be torn apart or enjoyed at my discussion boards http://akjones.proboards20.com/index.cgi?board=etd
I just added this site to my links list under wordplay - http://www.wolinskyweb.net/word.htm. I think all us englishy types would enjoy many of the sites listed .
I saw this on Tech Rhet and thought some of us might be interested in doing a little presenting since some of us are using things like blogs in the classroom.
Call for Proposals:
The NCTE/CCCC Mobile Technology Center
Computer Connection Presentations at CCCC 2004 in San Antonio
Greetings!
Once again, I am looking for presenters for NCTE/CCCC Mobile Technology
Center Computer Connection at 4Cs. The Computer Connection is a project of
the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition (7C).
Last year we had 17 great presentations, covering a broad range of topics --
we had presentations on particular classroom practices, using specific
software tools, MOOs, new online resources, OWLs, and electronic journals --
I am hoping that we can once again share our expertise and provide engaging,
dynamic demonstrations of how we use technology as teachers and scholars.
This is a very good opportunity for people who are new to the conference to
give a shorter presentation (20 - 30 minutes) in an intimate,
dialogue-facilitating environment. Last year, we had a good mix of new
folks, established scholars, and graduate students (although certainly some
of our presenters fit more than one of those categories). The audience tends
to be small but very engaged and ranges from postsecondary writing and
communication teachers eager to learn new strategies for using computers and
the Internet in their classes to technorhetoricians interested in cutting
edge tools and technologies.
You may present at the Computer Connection as well as presenting at a
regular conference session; because the Computer Connection selection
process is separate from the main conference, these presentations are not
subject to the 'only one presentation' rule.
I am pleased to announce that this year, the Mobile Technology Center will
feature an LCD projector for display (not a television) and a live Internet
connection will be available. We'll also be able to offer a small number of
workstations for hands-on demonstrations or short workshops.
If you are interested, please email your name and presentation proposal
(including a title and brief description) by November 15 to
eymand@earthlink.net. Feel free to email me if you have any questions, or
visit http://www.msu.edu/~eymandou/cc/ for links to the Computer Connection
presentation schedules from 2002 and 2003.
Thanks!
Douglas Eyman
CCCC Computer Connection Coordinator
eymand@earthlink.net Call for Proposals:
Round (Where is my head?) Found a new etd that might be worth considering as an edition to etdguide.org http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/WCE/title.html This one's a little different as well http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~umw8f/Barbarians/first.html. Actually, this site seems to have a good list of etds http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ETD/directory/browse.html. Some of the links appear dead, but others are working just fine. I think I'll be considering these a little further at the discussion thread I have set aside for etds. Welcome to join me at http://akjones.proboards20.com/index.cgi?board=etd
I really like this article about dragon slaying http://www.socraticarts.com/documents/SCC%20white%20paper.pdf. Like Tricia, I wonder what kind of story our own program at USF is really creating. In a way I find myself a little worried that it does not actually meet what it needs to meet. The one program I can see needing the most help though is professional/technical writing. Unfortunately, I don't think that this program teaches all that a technical writer needs in order to be conversant in the art.
I can't quite figure out what's going on, but I've tried to sign up for the ndltd list serve about a dozen times now and still haven't been invited to subscribe. I'm really beginning to wonder about them. It's making things difficult for finding exemplary etds. I think I'll try and send a request out to the other lists I'm on and see if I get a response.
Quote for the Day
Life is an opportunity, benefit from it. Life is a beauty, admire it. Life is a dream, realize it. Life is a challenge, meet it. Life is a duty, complete it. Life is a game, play it. Life is a promise, fulfill it. Life is sorrow, overcome it. Life is a song, sing it. Life is a struggle, accept it. Life is a tragedy, confront it. Life is an adventure, dare it. Life is luck, make it. Life is life, fight for it!
- Mother Teresa
I've decided to make my wiki a place to pull out all our free tool links in class so we can easily find them instead of searching the syllabus for them. Please contribute to http://teachingwiki.org/ow.asp?Anne+Jones.
I made a few additions to the autotext library I'm working on with the class I'm taking in Rhet and Comp. Basically, I thought some formatting autotext might be good, things like Margins (margins are incorrect) and Double space (because so many students don't take double spacing seriously.) This wiki space is for creating a library of comments English teachers might want to use when looking at students' papers electronically http://teachingwiki.org/ow.asp?AutoTextLibrary. Anyone is welcome to give other suggestions for comments.
I was reading through the WPA list serve and happened to see this site. It just looked like fun - you know the kind of fun involving Dante and Hell -http://www.4degreez.com/misc/dante-inferno-test.mv. Some of the questions are a little rough though. Lucky me I made it to purgatory.
Quote for the Day
This comes from a book called How to be a Villain: Evil Laughs, Secret Lairs, Master Plans, and More. In it is a section about potential evil henchman and I thought I'd share a quote about this ideal henchman
"mean english teachers - These sadistic henchman are perfect for when you want to inflict the greatest amount of pain possible...Long after a child has grown up and become a hero, the sign oof a mean English teacher continues to cause fear and discomfort." - Neil Zawacki
Of course if I were to become a villain I'd personally go with either the ninjas or the flying monkeys, but it's nice to know there's some other career paths in English.
I invite everyone to post fun, funny, beautiful quotes (especially student quotes) in my discussion board http://akjones.proboards20.com/index.cgi?board=quotes&action=display&num=1065572968. I'm curious to see if it'll work.
Quote for the Day
"I believe over-longness is the worst fault in writing...Isn't it odd how one can spoil a story by being too leisurely in telling it?" - P.G. Wodehouse
Oi frustrating! I was going to work on my wiki and web site, but the server must be down. I hope Doc Mox gets it fixed quick. I was going to invite people to my discussion forum. I've created a thread for collecting fav, fab quotes and I was thinking about the student quote I entered earlier. I was thinking I'd invite teachers and anyone who wants to to post their favorite student quotes that they read in papers. So often students create some of the most unique and unintentionally funny quotes that should be saved somewhere so why not in my forum. Plus I want to experiment with what can be done there. I'll post the link just as soon as I can get to the bloody thing.
I really dig quotes from people like Dorothy Parker and one of my favorites P.G. Wodehouse.
Quote for the Day
"I suppose the secret of writing is to go through your stuff until you come on something you think is particularly good, and then cut it out." P.G. Wodehouse
Creating Self on the Web
I wanted to post on the two readings we did for last week as per Doc Mox's request. Both Susan Romano's "On Becoming a Woman Pedagogies of the Self" ( summary http://austen.sla.purdue.edu/iosynromano.html) and Gail E. Hawisher and Patricia A. Sullivan's "Fleeting Images Women Visually Writing the Web" (this website looks at same issues and has printed a portion of the article http://www.oakland.edu/~kitchens/160a/ch6/part2.html) bring up interesting issues about women in cyberspace. I felt that Hawisher and Sullivan's article was really the more applicable aritcle for the current look of the web. Their article focused on women's creation of online self.
I know that when I was asked to create a professional blog for my Rhetoric of Technology class, I made the mistake of creating one that allowed no freedom of expression. That word professional seems to stifle creative presentation and use of (at the very least) the semi-personal voice, which is really the interesting feature of blogs. Once I moved to motime and created my own dump, I debated placing images of myself on the page. Why? Well, I think that there is always an underlying fear that if you show yourself as a female (this may be applicable to all twenty somethings trying to create a professional space) you'll be taken less seriously then other professionals. I think that it is important to look at how women are creating themselves online, but it is also important to realize that most university faculty pages stifle everybody's image not just women. Somehow universities seem to feel that blandness and consistency create the most enlightening faculty pages. Selfe and Hawisher's article should be a call for both sexes to liven up their webpages and really experiment with the creation of online self.
Hurrah! Hurrah! I'm finally done.
Well with that project anyways. Now I can spend the next so many weeks getting ready for the next deluge of papers to be graded. 
Oh well se la vie.
Well, this sentence a student of mine wrote woke me up "I know that I will institutionalize my own children one day and keep the tradition alive." It just made my day.
God, I'm bored. I'm trying to finish my grading and am practically falling asleep at the computer. I would much rather be blogging then waiting on slow old blackboard's gradebook to open. I hate days like this. My students keep whining for their grades, and I hate feeling rushed then I'm never sure if I'm being very fair. Shoot me now so I don't have to look at another essay.
Oh by the way one of my students created a website for his place project http://brinall.tripod.com/. I know completely off topic, but I'm a little proud to have someone experiment with genre. 
I've set up a large group blog for all my students to post in and they have begun to set up their own group blogs. Some of them look really good. I especially like what http://radiohead1.motime.com has done with their space. I putting all the links to my student blog on the new classroom blog http://blueprints.motime.com. We'll see if any get into writing there.
I went to the PHwords site http://www.prenhall.com/phwords/. Basically, this site has a lot of useful parts to it. I liked the way student documents could be submitted and there was a tag board for comments right next to the submission. I also liked the little film that visually represented the cyclical nature of the writing process. Something that can never be emphasized too much. I still am not a huge fan of the drill and kill method. I'm glad it's there, but I'm more glad that this site includes writing submissions.
I found this site that provides a free rss (really simple syndication) reader, http://www.rssreader.com/ for free. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but it looks interesting.
Hey my blog's been visted 700 times now.
Hey I was reading that article posted below and saw this term is anyone familiar with it k logs? I'm a little curious about it.
There's a new article about blogging that I got off the tech rhet list serv. http://www.blogninja.com/DDGDD04.doc It's an empirical study, which is interesting and looks at how blogs aren't really new, but are now easier to use.
I'm having my students blog their group logs here. So Howard you can expect around 40 new members over the next couple of days. I want them to create group blogs so that all of them can participate in writing it.
Oh by the way I've started a second blog for fun. It's in my links under hype - http://hype.motime.com
I was reading the tech rhet list digest and saw a link to a new tool that looks interesting and should probably be examined in this classroom. It's called the living textbook - http://livingtextbook.umich.edu/ Basically it allows you to create a page with multiple frames, very quickly.
I've been looking at different kinds of software for audio and video editing and wound up looking at sonicfoundry's stuff. They have a new product called mediasite live which allows for easy creation of rich media live presentations. It looks very interesting. I would love to play with this tool and see what it can really do. I think Dr. Mox needs to get involved with Sony and Sonicfoundry and play with their new tools. Check it out at http://www.sonicfoundry.com/main.asp
Happy Birthday to me! Twenty-five years ago today I graced the planet with my entrance.
I went to the McGraw Hill book fair and was a little dissapointed. I happened to look at one of the readers and found this article about the evils of technology in the classroom and the resulting illiteracy computers cause. It really bugs me that this kind of attitude is perpetuated in the readers we assign our students. Articles like that continue to push both teachers and students away from the use of technology. I started to look around for a book that included ideas about writing in multimedia, in hypermedia, and visual rhetoric. There weren't any.
Ideas of literacy have changed, but our textbooks do not reflect this. Every CD-Rom McGraw Hill was offering was either grammar related or a bunch of traditional essays and stories. I never thought I'd say this, but I almost want to write a textbook that focuses types of writing around the new literacy.
An etd that everyone should check out, especially anyone teaching or researching Hamlet can be found at http://www.hamlethaven.com/.
Oh a few words about my new tool. I was going to use the Frontpage discussion boards, but they are not very nice looking or conducive to discussion. The discussion board I'm now using is free at http://proboards.com. The cool thing is that they don't have any pop ups attached.
As I've said a dozen times by now, I'm looking for exemplary etd's. What's an etd? Electronic theses and dissertations. Anyways I have a discussion board up and running now where I'd love to invite everyone to come and talk about etds or whatever else http://akjones.proboards20.com/index.cgi. If you find any exemplary etds let me know.
I've finally realized what it is that bugs me about blackboard. The discussion boards do not have a subscribe feature so that students can be updated via email when their board or thread has been responded to. Being able to subscribe to a discussion board is one of the more powerful features of discussion boards.
I know we've been looking at different software for video editing and I've been looking for something that would improve the sound quality of videos as well. Sony has some software called Vegas 4.0. Basically there is a complete set that runs about $799, which is a lot, but still cheaper then getting the Adobe suite.
Oh if anyone wants to play with their templates check out Howard's new group blog on the subject here at motime http://template.motime.com/. I'd imagine there'll be helpful advice here even for the bloggers at other sites.
I take back what I said about etd's being in pdf. There are some very creative ones out there that use more hypertext features. I still think pdf is difficult to read online. Anyways if creating a more communal feel at etdguide.org is the objective, then I think we should consider sites that have good communities. When I think of a webiste with a strong community, I always think of http://theforce.net. Their dicussion boards are very active and easy to use. http://boards.theforce.net/ In general I like the design of these discussion boards, which is what's needed at etdguide.org. My reasons for suggesting creating boards similar to these is that it is easy to subscribe to a thread or a person, who's posts you like. The boards are well ordered and easy to navigate. Posting is also simple. I doubt that our threads at etdguide.org will ever be as large or extensive as the boards at theforce.net.
I found this site http://etd.vt.edu/guidelines/samples.html of etd's from Virginia Tech. Each of the etd's listed here has used multimedia within their pdf documents.
Most of the etds (electronic theses and dissertations) I've found so far are pdf files.This is a little dissappointing to me because I feel like sure the infomation is out there on the web (a plus), but pdf files don't really make use of the best features of hypertext and new media. I'm not saying the content shouldn't be as formal, but an etd written as a webpage can embedded links and include the audio or visual components easily in the page instead of opening three different documents. I've got to keep looking, but I'm a little dissappointed.
All right today I'm quizing my students on Of Mice and Men. I'm going to give them the ultra-condensed version that's at http://rinkworks.com/bookaminute/classics.shtml and ask them whether it's true or false and to explain. I'm also looking for good electronic thesis and dissertations. If anyone reading this knows of some good ones let me know and I'll check it out.
today
February 2005
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
Template by motime.com