Getting it together

I got up this morning. Anyone who knows me, knows what a mistake that is. I’ve been slaving away at trying to get the 2.0 version of this blog put back together to place online, but due to a session I’m attending on instructional software my days and nights are getting screwed up. No more slaving into the wee-wee hours when I’m forced to get up early.

The reason why I wanted to put it back together is because I thought the string of posts I wrote on oral discourse and blogging might be of interest to those who were excited by a great thesis project. I didn’t remember, as I slaved away, just how long ago that was—the posts were already online in my 1.0 archives, here, here, here, and here, with the original post that started my train of thought. I think that the growth of blogging is directly tied to the advent of secondary orality, which Eric Havelock and Walter Ong trace to the spread of radio. If I hadn’t been distracted by another project closer to my heart, that one would have been a good one to pursue. I wish Stephanie a lot of luck. I think the parallels are strong, and worth pursuing.

In another weird synchronicity, Joseph Duemer’s response to plagiarism is exactly what I wrote on a student’s paper when I caught him trying to foist a rather poorly written essay by a P.h.D. as a first year comp paper this year. I wonder who these people think they are kidding? It’s rather silly. I just bounced him from the class. I’m not much of one for public humiliation, though I must say I did consider it.

I’m going to switch to teaching on the web next semester for the first time next fall. I’m hoping to incorporate blogging into it. I’ve used it fairly successfully in my second year comp classes, and it wasn’t hard to describe to the other people in the session this morning why I think it’s better than threaded message bases, and all the other built-in “social” stuff in WebCT. I think it’s because people who blog own their own writing. It may be public, but it is also private in the sense that a blog writer maintains full editorial control, and no one can censure them except themselves.

Sorry if this seems a bit scattered today, I’m laboring on a lot of lost sleep.