Courses
« Previous Entries Next Entries »One More Reason to Use Ning: No Porn Allowed
Sunday, February 15th, 2009As I have written here before, I am a big fan of the social networking site Ning, which allows anyone to create a social network. Over the past two years, I have created four or five Nings, including the Teach English Network, the Shakespeare Connects Conference site, a Vampire Literature Ning for one of my [...]
The Ghosts May Laugh
Monday, February 9th, 2009Tomorrow in class, we’ll be looking at “The Ghosts May Laugh” by Stuart D. Lee. Lee, a professor of English at Oxford, is also the project director of The First World War Poetry Archive, an amazingly rich resource of manuscripts, video, audio, and more. My only regret is just discovering this archive. Still, you may [...]
Arms and the Boy
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads, Or give him cartridges of fine [...]
More Dispatches from Remix Culture
Sunday, February 1st, 2009It’s a little early: Aidan woke up at 5:30 and wanted to play “Diego” video games. So, I’ve been catching up on Google Reader for the last hour or so. I found a couple of articles that initially seem unrelated, but are in fact part of a larger meme: remixing culture. The first struck me [...]
A Few Words on the Inaugural Address
Sunday, January 25th, 2009On Inauguration Day, my Literary Responses to War class looked at Obama’s address and found examples of parallelism–the repetition of syntactical structures, typically used for a grand or elevated rhetorical effect. Like most ceremonial political speeches, it was loaded with parallelism, though the structures were more deeply embedded and less obvious than some political speeches. [...]
New Google Reader Tutorial and Features
Saturday, January 24th, 2009I haven’t been paying attention to some of the recent changes in Google Reader. To me, Google Reader is much like email: I use it very frequently but don’t really notice when small features change. Quite a few things have been added over the recent months–most recently, a new tutorial that, well, is just a [...]
Turn Many Links into One with Sqworl
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009I often have to point to multiple links in a single class period. Sometimes, I use del.icio.us social bookmarking to accomplish this, though the site is a little ugly and doesn’t offer visual previews or thumbnails of the sites you are linking. I sometimes list them on this blog, though that involves a little bit [...]
War Blogs Are In
Sunday, January 11th, 2009Students in my English 384 course (Literary Responses to War and Peace) are keeping blogs this semester, using a feed reader to collect articles about a current conflict (Gaza, Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan) and relate that conflict to the course readings. Here is the list of blogs so far: Add course bundle. Created using RSSmix. Aaron [...]
The Writing Life: Rehearsing Some Ideas
Friday, December 19th, 2008This could be a wonderful morning for writing: we are blanketed in snow, it is quiet in the house, and day seems long. Enter the two kids: the sixteen-month-old, who has somehow found a toilet brush to play with; and the three-year-old, who is hungry and demanding a “nola bar” for breakfast. I love the [...]
Sex, Vampires, and Adolescence
Saturday, December 13th, 2008I’m spending the weekend reading final papers for my English 330 course (Studies in Fiction), which I taught as a study of vampire fiction. I was inspired to do so in part by the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, which I am only partly ashamed to admit that I read like a middle-school girl [...]
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