yikes, should I change my blog name?

I just came across the word “cultivated” in an article I’m reading, and it just now occurred to me that there’s a definition of “cultivated” — as “educated” or “refined” — that I definitely didn’t mean when I entitled my blog “Cultivated Pages.”
I don’t know why this other definition didn’t occur to me until today [...]

reminder to get access to Charles Tryon’s “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition”

Note to self: get a copy of this.  Looks interesting, especially the emphasis on what’s unique to blogs: “blogging’s ephemerality, its focus on the everyday, and its no-holds-barred…”
Tryon, Charles
Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition
Pedagogy - Volume 6, Issue 1, Winter 2006, pp. 128-132

Duke University Press
Pedagogy 6.1 (2006) 128-132 [...]

eight random things

I discovered today that Michael Faris and then Chanel have tagged me to do the “eight random things” meme. So I thought up eight of my own. It’s amazing, though, how non-random these eight “random” things are. I thought about my choices for a little while, so they’re definitely not random. [...]

TagCrowd

I just read about TagCrowd on Michael Faris’ blog, and so I tried it on one of my posts (good grief? from last November). So easy. A snapshot of word emphasis.

around bad comes course cousin deal dealing deaths died either fascinating felt fortunately friend grief grieve heart honest horrible increased interrupted less ll losing lost [...]

“Blog Models for Teaching and Learning”

I should remember the possibility of using rss feeds when using blogs in a class. Jon Dorbolo at OSU talks about using them in Blog Models for Teaching and Learning, a presentation he did last year.
Here’s the part about rss feeds:
An rss feed reader picks up categories from the student blogs (e.g. phl201 or [...]

“It was like talking to someone who wasn’t listening” (importance of audience)

Konrad Glogowski (The Blog of Proximal Development), who’s writing a dissertation on blogging communities in education at the University of Toronto, describes what happened when the blogs in his classroom went down and were down for two weeks. The students were very entwined with their blogs, to the point of feeling as if learning couldn’t [...]

NOTES ON Melinda Baer’s “Using Weblogs in Your Writing Center”

NOTES FROM “Using Weblogs in Your Writing Center,” by Melinda Baer, Northern Illinois University (TheWriting Lab Newsletter, Vol 31, No 2, October 2006) [not online, but PeerCentered refers to it.]
Hmmm, Blogging wasn’t originally conceived as a place for pundits to gather a following: Baer says that Blogger’s founders wanted to find a “user-friendly way to [...]

NOTES ON “Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom”

NOTES FROM Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom (by Charles Lowe, from Purdue, and Terra Williams, from Arizona State):
Lowe and Williams do a good job of bringing out the main advantage of blogs in teaching writing: blogs supply a real audience to student writers.
They review the importance of writers becoming more “rhetorically [...]

NOTES ON Linda E. Patrik’s “Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy”

notes from NOTES & IDEAS: Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy by Linda E. Patrik (submitted December 12, 2005).
1) It helps students get used to the “I” of philosophical writing, the “I” of making an argument with an actual audience in mind. And it makes them more confident in making those arguments.
2) It works best to [...]

all my road before me

I’m not sure how well this blog will work for me, but I’m already fascinated with how a blog can fill in a space usually unfilled in writing: something more formal than a private journal but less structured than a formal piece. In the past, writers could write only for themselves, for a few friends [...]