Writerly Haphazardry

I really hate lugging a computer around at conferences.  Maybe that means I need to get a lighter weight computer or some sort of Internet gadget, but there you have it.  The upshot is I'm not much on live blogging.  I prefer the old-fashioned method of taking notes by hand and transcribing later.

Using Google Docs in the Classroom

Contributed by Tammy Townsend

I attended a session on Google Docs at the Computers in Writing conference in Athens, Georgia. Rick Branscomb from Salem State conducted the workshop, and it was informative. He uses Google Docs for his composition classes, and he says he's well on his way to his goal of a completely paperless classroom. Rick says he only uses Blackboard for the gradebook feature. There are some great possibilities for the application in the classroom.

Rick Hunter and Daniel Anderson both showed video presentations. I came in late and missed a good bit of Rick Hunter’s. I wasn’t the only one late, perhaps due to the fact that the conference provided excellent coffee and muffins between sessions. This one was packed before it was over with, and even Cynthia Selfe was sitting on the floor, leaning against a trash can. Classic. And a nice symbol of how laid back this conference is.

Some random notes from Dan Anderson’s presentation:

Here are my own random notes from the town hall meeting, "File Format Wars: Do They Matter?"

The meeting was led by Bob Cummings, Charlie Lowe, David Blakesley, Nick Carbone, Ron Ralthazar, and Diane Penrod.

Bob Cummings

He explained the file format wars between ODF and OOXML, noting that both have now achieved ISO standards. The big news is that Microsoft just announced that it will now support ODF.

Ron B.

Get Your Twitter Out of My Ajax: Web 2.0 and Writing Pedagogy 

There is an excellent wiki available for this workshop.

http://web20-toolkit.wetpaint.com

My text editor (fckeditor—yes, that is its name) has a button labeled “paste from Microsoft Word.” Thus, I’m typing something in Word in order to try this out.

Will it keep my formatting, I wonder, if I choose to use bold, italics, or underlining?

I'm attempting to feed my web site to my Facebook.  Then I'll link my Facebook to my site.  I've already linked Twitter and Shelfari to both this site and Facebook.  It seems with all this social networking, I'm putting a whole lot of time into just getting set up to network with myself.

This is still a work-in-progress, but I believe I'm set up and ready to blog here now.  Until I figure out an acceptable spam solution, registration will remain off.  Let me know, however, if you are real person and would like to register.

After going through about ten Drupal themes today, it looks like I'm reverting to the same one I chose previously.  This one, "folliage," does at least seem to work with my newly installed fckeditor.I still have a few items to sort out before embarking on the adventure of figuring how to move this version of Drupal into my default position for the site, but I'm getting there...maybe. 

Test, test...It looks like I've installed a text editor.