Many views exist concerning the usefulness or necessity of the few days before Thanksgiving break. Some instructors hold class and enforce their normal attendance policy on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Thursday. Others make class on Wednesday optional. Still others (many, from what I can tell) cancel Wednesday's class outright. My own students were actually outraged that I would hold class on the Monday--THE MONDAY--before Thanksgiving, since many of their Tuesday-Thursday instructors had canceled Tuesday's class, and they wanted to turn the break into a week-long furlough.

Some changes are on the way for Blogging Pedagogy. We've upgraded to Drupal 4.7, which means some new functions. It also means that we will soon have a new look (which, in my opinion, is long overdue).

Here are a couple of things you might notice right away

1) Regular visitors to the site may have noticed the "Tags" section on the left-hand side of the page. In the past, people posting to the site chose from a list of categories that best described their post. With our new "free tagging" function, bloggers can type in any "tag" they'd like. Tags are keywords that describe a post, and any number of tags can be entered by a blogger (separated by commas). You can use a tag someone has already used, or you can invent your own. The Tags section to the left is known as "tag cloud." Larger text indicates that a lot of posts fall into that category (notice the largest tag is "general pedagogy" - it seems that most people have stayed with this tag since it used to be the default), smaller text means that fewer posts use that tag. You'll notice that I've tagged this entry with "blogging" (a tag that has been used previously) and "administrative" (a tag that I just created).