With much-appreciated help from James Farmer, I am going to start a wiki (subject matter TBA, :) but I think everyone will like it and find it to be a useful resource). He has asked me if I want PHPWiki or TikiWiki. Based on what I know of each, I'm leaning toward Tiki, but I'd like to hear more opinions.

Last night, I made a lot of headway on that purse I blogged about a while back. I did the following while indulging my latest addiction: season 2 of Alias on DVD. I can watch four episodes in one night. :)

Today marks the 56th day since the last time I donated blood, so at 1:00 I'm scheduled to donate again. I don't know if I've written here before about why it's important to me to donate blood as often as they'll let me. As long as I can remember, my mom used to give every 56 days, but in November 1999 she got diagnosed with breast cancer and went through chemotherapy and radiation. She hasn't been eligible to donate blood since then; she's now on Tamoxifen and, while she'll be eligible again in a couple of years or so, she hasn't been able to donate in a long time, and I know she would if she could. So I wanted to do it in her stead (not that I'll stop when she's eligible again! Only 5% of the people who are eligible to donate do it, so I'll continue). I'm going to eat a huge lunch of pork tenderloin, black beans, and jasmine rice beforehand. I weighed myself this morning to make sure I was still meeting the weight requirement -- 110 lbs. -- and I was, but barely. I've experienced a weird sea change in my body and metabolism after losing all that weight in the summer; now, it seems, I have to try to keep from losing weight. My goal now is not to go below 110. One last thought on blood donation before I move on to go-go boots: Last time I gave blood, they timed it, and I filled up the bag in six minutes. I'm both fascinated and disturbed by this fact. I even opened up my calculator and figured out how many ounces per minute it was.

Via feministe comes Go-Go-Boots.com, a fabulous tribute to go-go boots. It's got a great image gallery, and I've chosen this one as my desktop wallpaper.

Hilarious!

Via Makeout City.

I'm still preparing for Friday's presentation, and starting to stress about it, as I have several other deadlines this week. Clay's marvelous suggestion to put all projects in a spreadsheet is working wonders for me; I am a machine right now, knockin' it all out. Eh, not exactly, but I know I need to be making progress on this presentation, so here are some items I'm planning on including in the takeaway. I'm planning on doing ~100-word annotations of them, but one step at a time. These are some of the pieces on teaching with weblogs and wikis that have stood out in my mind over the last couple of years. In no particular order:

Weblogs

Falling out of love ... by premmell at Kairosnews

Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom by Charles Lowe and Terra Williams

Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs by Kevin Brooks, Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe

A Course About Weblogs

(this) Space by Austin Lingerfelt

When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction by Steven D. Krause

Wikis

Wiki by Matt Barton

Embrace the Wiki Way! by Matt Barton

My Brilliant Failure: Wikis in Classrooms by Heather James

Posts on Kairosnews about Wikis

TeachingWiki

And, just for my own edification, a crash course on Writing Across the Curriculum:

Purdue's WAC handout

WAC links

I think the information on WAC will help me to create better "If your objective is ______, weblogs and/or wikis can help fulfill it by doing _____" statements. Any other thoughts? Your comments on my last post about this were very helpful!

On November 1, I'm to give a talk on weblogs at Metropolitan State University for a course on learning technologies. Unlike the weblogs and writing pedagogy talk, this one will have more of a focus on instructional design. The course centers on learning technologies in education and training that could take place in a corporate setting or a school. The instructor would like my talk to be a general introduction to weblogs and to cover ways they could be used for learning in each of these settings. She also wants me to offer tips on how to evaluate the effectiveness of weblogs. It's proving difficult! This discussion on Kairosnews is helping, and I want to do something with weblogs and WebQuests. In addition, I think Michael Angeles' work could be helpful. Do any of you have suggestions? I'd be grateful for them, as I'm somewhat out of my element here.

Several of us are working on revamping the blog for CCCC-IP, and part of what we want to do is to have a nice big portal of resources on authorship, intellectual property, copyright, public domain, open content, open source, and collaboration for people in composition. For my part, I'd like the CCCC-IP portal to be the best, most comprehensive IP portal on the entire interweb. We're eventually going to divide it into subcategories, but here are the links I've thrown together for now, in no particular order:

• Rhetoric 8550 Syllabus
• The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’ by Martha Woodmansee
• The Political Economy of Commons by Yochai Benkler
• Rhetoric, Feminism, and the Politics of Ownership by Andrea Lunsford
• A Copyright Cold War? The Polarized Rhetoric of the Peer-to-Peer Debates by John Logie
• The Economy of Ideas: Selling Wine Without Bottles on the Global Net by John Perry Barlow
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond
• A Second Look at 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' by Nikolai Bezroukov
• Prospectus: 'The Future Is Open' for Composition Studies: An Alternative Intellectual Property Model for the Digital Age by Charles Lowe
• The Copyright Cage by Jonathan Zittrain
• Illegal Art
• Seth Finkelstein
• What Matters Who Writes? What Matters Who Responds? Issues of Ownership in the Writing Classroom by Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo, and Susan West
• Intellectual Value by Esther Dyson
• Wikibooks
• Wikisource
• Authorama: Public Domain Books
• Bibliography on Openness, IP, Collaboration, and Scholarship by Charles Lowe
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
• bIPlog
• Commons-blog
• Copyfight
• Creative Commons Weblog
• Creative Commons
• Frank Field
• Infocult
• Lawrence Lessig
• Napsterization
• Sivacracy.net

Arete and This Public Address also have a portal with some IP links that I'll have to check out. (NOTE: I will be adding links to this entry and reorganizing the links as I see fit.) We also need links to campus IP policies for instructors (for distance ed, etc.), more articles (esp. on theories of authorship, e.g. Foucault, Barthes, etc.), collections of public domain content, material on libraries and IP, articles on open-access scholarship, anything you think is appropriate. Please comment! Even just pasting in URLs would be great.

For about a year now, I've resisted listening to Modest Mouse. I'm reluctant to explain the petty, stupid reasoning behind it, but here goes: Good friends of mine love them and talk about how sad the lyrics are. It's an "I love this music because it makes me miserable!" logic to which I throw up a wall of resistance. I sneered and groaned at the album title, "Good News for People Who Love Bad News." But a few months ago, I started hearing "Float On" on the radio and would blast it. I thought, okay, maybe they're not so bad. I could get into this. So yesterday at Cheapo, I saw "Good News for People Who Love Bad News" (shudder) for six dollars. I went ahead and bought it, and you can say "I told you so": I lurve them! Gloat on, alright. :P

There are chinks in the armor of my refusal to consume certain pop culture items for no good reason. Jeebus, I might as well watch Titanic now.

As if I'm the first person to think of it...but for those who haven't been struck with this inspiration, I'd like to pass it along. So you're at the used CD store, flipping through the new arrival bins, with that familiar tapping sound of jewel cases hitting each other in the background. Sidle up to a cute boy or girl (first, try it with a not-especially-cute person, just to practice). Grinning and twinkling, say, "Excuse me. I'm looking for (insert band here) CDs. Would you mind keeping an eye out for them and pulling 'em for me if you happen to see one?" If the response is positive, ask if cute boy or girl is looking for anything in particular and offer to pull it for him or her. If cute boy or girl finds what you're looking for, he or she will walk up to you triumphantly, holding the CD(s) up. Be delighted and thank him/her profusely. Then ask cute boy or girl what he/she is doing for the rest of the afternoon.