Location update: Our basement-of-the-science hall class has officially relocated to the Academic Underground (a real place!). Sliding swivel chairs, detached from workstations. Pop-up desk/monitors. Networked. Dry erase _only_. LED projection equipment. Granted, it is, essentially, a cave–classroom space carved out of mined limestone caves with gunnite-sprayed walls, painted white, dimpled with texture. No, there are no bats in there, none that I’ve ever seen anyway. The new room is just a short meander (first-timers get lost down there quite easily) from the mail room, library, computer labs, study rooms, bookstore. Oh, and coffee shop. Good news since that means all the work I did over break whipping together a mixed-mode curriculim won’t go like scraps to hungry dogs. I landed the zippiest tech-enabled place on campus, just by asking. Fancy that.

Now off to coach my kid’s basketball game. Got seventeen seventh graders playing on two teams. Nobody told me that March Madness starts in January for twelve and thirteen-year-olds (pre-pubescent stir renders the Roman calendar obsolete, I’d say). And that explains where the bats are. In my head.

SC05. Basement of the science hall. Yep. That’s where I met with 14 students enrolled in EN106HOC Writing Purposes and Research this morning. My single request when I (somewhat reluctantly) signed on to teach this class this semester is that it be scheduled in a tech-enabled classroom.

Of course, the light switches are technology, the fluorescent bulbs (who knows how those work?), the pencil sharpener, the roll-retracting maps used to teach Modern Geography (which follows stampedishly soon after my section of comp). There’s an old color TV and an overhead projector. Notably, the overhead projector requires wet erase markers, but the white board at the front of the classroom needs dry erase markers. The slate on the side of the room: chalk. Dizzying. I wanted to project the course web site, dazzle ’em with pixels on this, our first day together.

So I marched over to the registrar’s office after class. Surely we can do better than this. Hell, last time I taught EN106, I was slotted in the basement of the chapel, but that space has been upgraded, overhauled, remade into a clean, well-lighted space which smells of nothing. I’m sure they’re not hosting comp sections there any more. And now I fear that I’m sounding snide. The long, long line at the registrar’s office delayed my inquiry–my quest for an alternative, suitably wired space. So I called instead. Left a message. More anon.

About the technologies surrounding us: light, language, radiators, markers, chalk, and so on: I wrote my name on the dry eraser board with the wrong kind of marker. A wet-erase marker. As the modern geographers stormed the room, my name was fixed, immovable in the middle of the white board covering the south wall. And my first name was underlined. It’s the basement of the science hall. Shouldn’t they have beakers of solvent lying around just for such crises? Good Christ! what a morning.

[R.E.M. Green in the headphones.]

Yesterday, at lunch, Andy said this about my new blog (without having read it): “You probably want to avoid building a general blog. The day of the all-knowing pundit who trails off on this and that is passing. Themed blogs are probably more successful at attracting and keeping an audience.” Okay, so I didn’t keep notes, but he said something close to this.

And this: “You should add a subtitle explaining Earth Wide Moth.”

To wit, I’ve been thinking about genre and audience. I know, I know, others have thought about it more than me and many good folks at CCCC and C&W will complicate matters with their presentations on this subject. But it’s with me now because I’m devising this new blog—without an explicit plan.

The other blog, the one for EN106 this spring, is more clearly in-line with a purpose I can articulate: pedagogical utility. I understand its aims and ambitions. I know how it will be used to fray the boundaries of the course, to disarm the usual restrictions on space and time in f2f courses, and to get students to
write. Audience? Initially, that’s easy. Initially, it will be the students in the course and me, followed by something more, maybe.

I took time out this morning to read the rant of a blog-hating student at Indiana State. Mike posted the link at vitia.org. It’s not easy to understand why the ISU student is so angry about blogging. I’ve visited blogs that I didn’t find inviting or interesting, but it didn’t make me mad. It’s kind of like being invited to dinner in a house with brown shag carpeting…on the walls. As a guest, it’s not decorous to spout off about the host’s poor taste. Could be that the medium convolutes manners, as in shared senses of decency.

Gotta get to work. Course-prepping and other admin stuff. Ack!