English Education Professor

….averaging 113 a day, not including spiders. Cool. My bar had always been five.

In Emacs, if you know how to do XYZ on the keyboard, then it takes about three extra keystrokes to repeat XYZ as many times as you like— no programming needed! Here’s the procedure: F3 (do some stuff that will be recorded) F4 to record; then F4 F4 F4 ... to replay as many times as you like. Link

Office Shed

Why not publish a class magazine? It’s low cost…

MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.

How much does it cost?

It costs you nothing to create a magazine, and you set a markup to earn a profit above production cost. A buyer will pay an additional modest shipping charge (USPS first class mail).

Link

Our important researcher of the Day!

The accomplishments of Janet Emig constitute perhaps the most influential contribution to the study of how humans compose discourse and how teachers should help them. Her background prepared her for her initial goal of becoming a medical doctor, but she determined to study literature because of its enduring interest to her. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, she was influenced by a teacher who emphasized the revision process in writing. Here, however, Janet Emig encountered sexism and was not accepted into the doctoral program. She proceeded to teach high school, and began experimenting with conferencing with students. Emig became involved in the National Council of Teachers of English, attended a Conference on College Composition and Communication convention, and was influenced by Priscilla Tyler, with whom she later studied. Emig then enrolled at Harvard and quickly took over the writing program when others involved left, but encountered difficulty in completing her dissertation due to lack of leadership. Emig taught and was denied tenure at both the University of Chicago and Lethbridge University in Canada, denials which appeared related to her gender and/or a lack of esteem for the study of composition. Finally, she moved to Rutgers, where she has remained. Seven themes emerge throughout her corpus of work: (1) an interest in pedagogy; (2) writing as process and the complexities of composing; (3) the developmental aspects of composing; (4) physiological aspects of composition; (5) the didactic functions of writing; (6) a constructivist philosophy of writing; and (7) the academic profession. (A list of Emig’s major publications is attached.)- link

Where do people find the time to do things like edit the Wikipedia? They watch less television, says author Clay Shirky in a fantastic, brief talk at the recent Web 2.0 conference. Shirky makes a compelling case that people are just learning how to deal with the “cognitive surplus” of free time modern life affords us. We’re waking up from the “collective bender” of mindlessly watching sitcoms and instead, we’re choosing instead to spend our free time volunteering, interacting, and Web 2.0′ing online. Video

From First Monday, Volume 13 Number 6 – 2 June 2008

link

A striking photo from Brazil by Luiz Vasconcelos. Click for bigger.

“An indigenous woman holds her child while trying to resist the advance of Amazonas state policemen who were expelling the woman and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a privately-owned tract of land on the outskirts of Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon March 11, 2008. The landless peasants tried in vain to resist the eviction with bows and arrows against police using tear gas and trained dogs. REUTERS/Luiz Vasconcelos-A Critica/AE (BRAZIL)”.