Hi everyone. I wanted to announce the CFP for the upcoming issue of Praxis (Fall 2008), with the theme of Technology in Today's Writing Center. I know that many Blogging Pedagogy contributors are interested in the use of technology in writing instruction, so I invite you to consider writing something about your experience with pedagogical applications of technology, particularly if it might provide insights for people in the writing center community.

Your friends at the Undergraduate Writing Center have published the latest issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. This issue's theme is "Diversity in the Writing Center," and we have a number of articles that should be of interest to people on this blog, particularly in the areas of ESL education, writing instruction, and writing center pedagogy.

At Jim Brown's suggestion, I'm posting a link here to an assignment that he and Rodney helped me develop for my RHE 309K class. The assignment uses MySpace as the forum for the students' first submission of their second essay. For the present unit of my class on counterculture rhetoric, we're reading a book that critiques countercultures. I wanted an assignment that would require students to evaluate the book's argument. To add another level to the assignment, I am requiring students to take on the persona of one person associated with a counterculture. As we're reading the book, each student will create and maintain a MySpace page as that person (e.g., Abbie Hoffman, David Horowitz, Jello Biafra, etc.). They will do everything that people do on MySpace to express their personalities (and, as a non-MySpace user, I'll be learning very quickly about how that is done, and I'll keep a page myself as Norman Mailer), and they will also be blogging responses to the book on their pages. Their first submission will consist of these daily responses and the page as a whole, plus a short write-up explaining their intentions behind the page. For the second submission they'll take the ideas generated through this MySpace assignment and "translate" them into traditional essay form (5-7 pages).

Here is a very interesting definition argument in the National Review claiming that a number of rock songs have essentially conservative messages. The author ranks the top 50 conservative rock songs of all time. I'm planning to use this in my classes, and I think it could be especially useful for anyone teaching any kind of rock-'n'-roll or pop-culture rhetoric.

Here's a sample:

3. “Sympathy for the Devil,” by The Rolling Stones.
Don’t be misled by the title; this song is The Screwtape Letters of rock.

For anyone teaching Mill this summer: I never thought helmet laws would be a very interesting topic to discuss in relation to Mill's harm principle (or at all, really), but these days some of your students may be interested in the subject due to the recent helmet-less motorcycle crash that injured Ben Roethlisberger (the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers). Although he was not at fault in the accident, he's been ticketed for not wearing a helmet.

Is anyone planning to take your summer students to see An Inconvenient Truth? I'm thinking of taking mine in a week or two. If anyone else is thinking about this, let me know. Or maybe people who have seen the movie might have ideas for good class discussions that can be prompted by the movie. I haven't seen it yet, so I'm not sure how I'll use it, but I'm going to try to work it in with some readings on the environment from Good Reasons. And Rodney's earlier post certainly provides some good ideas for discussing art vs. science and how we can determine the truth.