On the drive home from Indiana yesterday, I heard a Jean Ritchie concert on NPR. Now I want every single one of these CDs. She is awesome.

Per Rich Rice's suggestion at the Computers & Writing conference, I'm going to compile a list of the people in Computers & Writing who are keeping blogs. It'll be part of the blogroll. If you know of anyone I haven't included, please tell me!

Gah! Turns out I didn't really know how to purl, so I wasn't stockinetting after all! Oh well, Aimee is going to have two garter-stitched squares and two stockinetted squares. In case you have no idea what garter stitching is, here's a pic:

Okay, so I just attended the most phenomenal talk by Victoria Vesna. She's a new media artist who has done all these beautiful projects. She was a great speaker too, very relaxed and funny. When she walked onstage, I was shocked at how young she was; I thought she looked far too young to be a department head and full professor. Anyway, she has done work that looks at bodies in networked spaces (Bodies INCorporated) and now she's working on a project about nanotechnology in the body. She is working with Katherine Hayles and nanoscientist Jim Gimzewski. I'm having trouble describing her work; you just have to see it! One thing her work makes me think of is the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. If you haven't read it, it gives seven principles that help you to think like da Vinci. One was (don't know the exact spelling) arte-scienza: the recognition of how closely connected art and science are. Her work embodies that principle very well.

I was going to go to another session, but I'm tired and just wanted to come back to the hotel and chill and watch Comedy Central for a while. I think in a few minutes I'm going to get out my knitting. Now that I'm done with my presentations, I can finally knit...it's my reward. My current project, in collaboration with my friend Amy Patrick, is a baby blanket for our friend Aimee Whiteside (I feel comfortable calling it out like that; she's probably not reading this). She's due to give birth to a baby boy in July. The blanket we're making is with the same yellow and green yarn that we used to make Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch's baby's blanket. I'm working on a 15-inch by 15-inch green square. We're doing a stockinette stitch, which is supposed to look like this:

Mine doesn't though. It just looks like a regular garter stitch. Oh well. Off to knit!

Nice observations here from Microdoc. I should probably blog this to Kairosnews too, but it's lunchtime. :-)

The dullest blog in the world. How can it be so dull (oh, and it is so very dull!) yet so funny?

This is why I love blogs. You can get Wil Wheaton's reaction to Happy Fun Pundit's "Top Ten Things I Hate about Star Trek." I had some geeky giggles over it too.

Here's Charlie Lowe's presentation, "Open Source Weblog CMS's: An Alternative to Blackboard." He did the most effective thing during his presentation: He showed a screen shot of the Blackboard site for Florida State next to a screen shot of his and Terra Williams' PostNuke class page. I could really see the institutional control mechanism of the Blackboard (WebCT too) site; it was quite a contrast to Charlie and Terra's public site. Charlie pointed out that the Blackboard login page "doesn't look like the Internet." That is so right! Those course sites are really pretty artificial and not real-world Web publishing.

Terra Williams presented in this same panel, as did I, but we won't go there. Her presentation, titled "Individual Student Blogs and Class-wide Blogs: What's it Like to Teach Using Only Blogs?" was an excellent complement to Charlie's presentation. She talked about her experience teaching an online class using only blogs and what a typical day was like, reading all those student blogs. :-) Charlie made a case for why open source content management systems are better than course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT (but then again I was the choir he was preaching to), but by the end of his presentation, I was left with a lot of questions about the course--just basic course design: What were their assignments, besides keeping a blog? What were the course objectives? Stuff like that. Terra's presentation clarified the questions I had. Oh, I just realized that I've been going on about this class they taught, but you can't see it. Now you can.

I just went to a very interesting panel here at the Computers & Writing conference. The title was "e-Racing Social Conditions: Technology and the (Dis)Appearance of Race and Ableness," and the presenters were from the University of Arizona: Ryan Moeller, Ken McAllister, Tracy Morse, and Sung Ohm. What made it great was the interactivity...they each talked for ten minutes and then put two prompts up on the screen having to do with each presentation. We, the audience, wrote for one minute in response to the prompts, and then we had a discussion about the questions.

Ken McAllister talked about how race and ableness are represented in computer gaming, and his questions were:

• What do computer games teach players about race and ability?
• How can we use computer games to teach students about race and ability?

Tracy Morse talked about her observation of classes consisting of hearing and deaf students. Some students had cochlear implants and used speech recognition technology in the classroom, and others had sign-language interpreters. She said that as more deaf children are mainstreamed in school systems (and 70% of deaf children are), we're going to see more classrooms of hearing and deaf students and as teachers, we need to meet the needs of all our students. Her questions were:

• What does technology do to students?
• What demands does technology make of writing teachers and students?

Sung Ohm's presentation was about racist representations of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). His questions were:

• How do these representations of the Ebonics controversy work to maintain racial ideologies?
• What does AAVE mean to composition teachers, especially with its emphasis on standardized English?

Ryan Moeller presented on techno-racial instrumentalism: in other words, how is the issue of race dealt with online? His questions were:

• How does techno-racial instrumentalism play out in the computer-aided classroom?
• As writing teachers, what activities can we employ that would help our students question the roles afforded identity by technology?

A great discussion followed...but it's time for dinner, so I must go! I'll write more about this later.