Dell Digital Jukebox

Hooray for digital music! I can now carry 7000 songs around with me wherever I go. I think as an end of the semester present, this is a perfect one. I have to charge it for 6 hours before I can use it though, so it looks cool, but I don't know how it works yet. Things this will allow me to do:

1. Listen to music while I walk to campus
2. Have access to all my music in the car
3. Arrange my music into playlists in whatever order I want
4. Bring music to campus and hopefully be able to plug it into the speakers so my students can listen to it also

I got assigned a last minute section of BTW 250 for summer session II. It's going to mean lots of last minute planning to get my class together. But since I'm not working out at Allerton very much the next couple of weeks, that shouldn't be a problem. I am excited about the opportunity to teach the course again, and I am rethinking ways to adapt this to a summer course and still do a lot of interesting projects on business writing. I am thinking about assigning every student to a day (or group of students) and having them market the day in some way. Or perhaps starting the course off as a business, etc. like others have done, and assigning the groups to a day. As it forms in my head, I will keep you up to date.

Last night I was thinking about "the turn to the visual". It's interesting how in Writing Studies some scholars have advocated having students do visual arguments in class, but few Writing Studies scholars (or scholars in general) do this themselves. Even Kairos is sometimes just an article in a hypertext rather than using the visual in any substantive or creative way. It seems to me that it often easy enough to advocate that "our students SHOULD be doing this", but what about us? Shouldn't we be doing what our students are doing? Shouldn't we be collaborating in substantive ways? If this is how one SHOULD learn to write, how we are exempt from learning to write that way? I think since we believe we are already "good" writers by the time we end up teaching writing, there still exists an attitude that we make up remedial exercises to help our students learn to write. It makes me queasy. I have a goal this semester to do every project I assign my students to do. If it's too boring for me, it's too boring for them. I'm not interested in teaching any sort of remedial skills. I want to teach writing in a way that my students can explore real ideas that are important them.