impoverished artifices

Two bits of news from over the weekend that are of note:

First, we (daughter, wife, I) went to see Yo Gabba Gabba! Live in Chicago on Saturday morning--and it was beyond awesome. This is the part where I confess that this was likely more for me than for my 14-month old daughter, who managed to sleep through about half the loud, bright, balloon-dropping, confetti-shooting 75 minute performance. DJ Lance Rock, Biz Markie both there in person. Awesome. We all got t-shirts of course, which I will be sporting on Friday, when I have my poetry portfolio review. (Poems, conveniently, about Yo Gabba Gabba! and Phenomenology. (What's better together than Heidegger, Derrida and the hippest kids' show around?)

The second bit is perhaps more "serious": MIT's team won the DARPA Red Balloon challenge in about 9 hours. How'd they win? The promise of money to the finders and the folks who signed them up (a reverse-Ponzi, sort of) and algorithms. Here's the best article I've read on it, via the Maine Outdoor Journal.

Ah, yes. End of the semester crunch. To busy to do anything thoroughly or critically. Lots of papers and projects floating behind my eyes, on my desktop (physical & virtual), between collborators and students...

So, what do I do?

Write a quick blog, of course.

Today, I expect to spend a few to 6 hours working on syllabi, making copies, etc., which will be both exciting and frustrating. I'm trying not to use the plug-and-play approach--copy and pasting new data into old syllabi. I also would like to play with form a bit, tweaking typefaces, adding some images, that sort of business.

Jennifer mentioned "deliverables" as one of the practical goals of our work over the past three days. While part of me rebels against the notion of such a fixed and narrow application of results, this can also be one of the central problems of teaching writing: moving from abstract thought processes to more assessable relics, such as the final portfolio. Eventually, after thinking all day, we must have something to share with others to be judged as successful, to have contributed to the community.

I feel as though I found a little resolution to one of my concerns from day one: how static the course goals are in relation to the values that I will place on the student work. From Dani's great workshop, I'm encouraged to know that these goals aren't as fixed as I, at times, was reading. And, this makes sense in accordance with most everything else that's been said during the orientation. Perhaps, I just got caught up in course goals and results from a few discussions/talks.

One of the goals I'm keeping in mind after and during the first day of Comp Camp is to try to build upon the experiences and strategies I've accumulated teaching second semester composition, while coming to the best possible understanding of the specific goals of the UWM composition program. In trying to achieve this, I find that the idea of a list of goals for interpretative and reflective writing (and really, the student handbook, in general, as an organizing text for what is expected of the composition learning community) is a convenient way of remixing what I've previously remixed.

The University of Kentucky has developed their own in-house social network community for students, faculty and staff. Big Blue Network will allow the academic community to converse in an ever more familiar environment.

The goal is retention (they had 81% Freshman retention last year, shooting for 90% this year) and they'll be cataloging students comments, which they aren't announcing - but aren't exactly shouting about, either. Kind of like Facebook!

Got this link through the SmartBrief on Social Media email to which I subscribe...

ABC is using twitter to keep the narrative for Castle, their mid-season murder mystery about a writer and a detective, going during the summer tv hiatus. I haven't watched the show, as I thought the promos looked terrible like a bad pseudo-USA Network quirky crimedy [crime + comedy], but it's interesting to see corporate/mainstream appropriation of twitter for a narrative space.

Full text below

Playing around with the Google alerts for cream city review [the RSS for the blog "link:http://..." went mysteriously blank a few weeks ago...], i started poking around with variations of "cream city review" - which inevitably led to me googling myself. Who is more interesting than me, right? Partly due to my name and partly due to a lack of curiosity (and content), I've largely avoided the suisearch.

However, today I found a brief review of my story, "Anaphylaxis", at the Emerging Writers Network, which is founded by Dan Wickett, who also does the really solid Dzanc Books.

So, I've been giving love to the um... backend of this site far more regularly than to the whole 'content generation' aspect. Thems the breaks, I suppose, when time is limited.

But, lucky for the interweb, that doesn't mean I've not been listening to or reading about interesting things. Plus, have a few bits of good news to share about myself, too.

I'll try to clip off the easy things here.