Presenting data. While looking for the website of Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary near Naples, Florida, I found their Wildlife Checklist, which is a good model for organizing and presenting data. They group their list of animals by familiar categories, then divide the year into two month units, and record the presence of animals by a simple set of coded letters indicating how rare or common they are.

The people who created the checklist must have recorded a lot of data, and once they did that work their neatly organized form helps others make decisions about how to use their time at the sanctuary -- what animals would they most like to look for?

Teachers can look at the model either "before" or "after" -- focusing on helping students learn how to organize an inquiry so as to create something like this or to use something like this to launch an inquiry. In either case, we're interested in the dynamic interplay between abstraction and the realm of experience it seeks to account for.

Along with talking about these matters with students, we might ask them to find posts on other weblogs working "before" and other posts working "after" and talk about their traits. We might also ask students to write a few of each kind and reflect on the thinking each requires. Can bloggers make good use of such formal assignments? I don't know. I'm willing to try. [0 & P]

Thinking like a writer. In a meeting this week a colleague from Chemistry said that in the course he teaches for aspiring elementary school teachers he has trouble getting them to think of themselves as science teachers. In part I think he meant that they need to stop being the fairly passive undergraduate one often encounters, but more importantly, I think he has been looking for ways to help students think of themselves as insiders, as participants in a field -- maybe two fields, the sciences and elementary education. He looked at some of his students from across a divide. On one side of the divide, the professor and some students who understand that insiders think differently, talk differently, and follow a different agenda of their own shaping, and on the other side, fairly passive folks who think of science as a body of lesson plans you endure as a student or carry out as a teacher. This group seems not to have noticed yet that being a professional means a change of mind and habits of mind.

I think a similar divide exists in the courses using blogging that I've been able to look in on. You see students who see immediately or soon come to see what it means to engage some topic independently, to publish, to see connections to others through both reading and writing. You see others who seem to see themselves as fulfilling an assignment, carrying out a lesson someone has planned for them. They don't think of themselves as writers; they don't think like writers; they don't think like that particular kind of writer, the blogger.

Part of the problem is the divide, I suspect, but part may be genre. Students who don't read may not be a quick study when it comes to picking up on a new genre, or maybe it's that students who don't read on the web may not know the genres they are reading and trying to write here. (There are several weblog genres to learn, as we know, each serving different purposes.) But there is a transformation required, maybe several transformations: passive learner to active, non-reader to reader, non-writer to writer, generalist to web writer, solitary writer to collaborator in web conversation, and so forth.

So in the next weblog course I might need to begin with a few discussions of the genres of the weblog, how to read them, what purposes they serve, their conventions, and how to approach writing them. [1 & P]

How academics can blog. Another thought about Jay Rosen's post about the problems with journalists today. He discusses a piece by Adam Gopnik, and when you look at Rosen's good essay you have to imagine that he uses Gopnik's piece in one of his college classes. Rosen's very worthwhile weblog post is a writing down, I am almost certain, of something he's worked up for class. In other words, if professors could tap just a portion of their work as a teacher, as well as their research, in the form of short posts, many, many of them could start to develop a much wider audience and see their work reach more people. And perhaps in reflecting on the responses they receive from that wider audience they might, we might, I might learn more about teaching the students who sit there in class, too. [0 & P]

Academic credit for faculty blogging. Stephen Bainbridge's long quotation from an actual academic dean, Mark Sargent of Villanova, has attracted some attention as an early and thoughtful administrator's discussion of the ways blogging should and should not be valued as part of the work of college faculty. He points out, for example, that weblogs have established themselves as an important part of the scholarly exchange in the field of law.

This reminds me of the fact that each field has its own ways of exchanging ideas: some fields publish books, while others rarely do; some rely on quickly-updated electronic paper banks while others publish papers in journals at the end of months of editorial exchange; and so forth. Ideas move at different speeds in the work of each field, and weblogs may be a good match for a very important part (though probably not the whole) of the intellectual work of several fields.

Similarly, I recall that a listserver has often been a very useful tool for writing program administrators, who need to respond to problems day by day as well as build their programs on solid principles over months and years. Both needs have been well-met for some years now at the wpa-l list.

Sargent says this early in his message:

On the most fundamental level, it is becoming apparent to me that legal scholars' ability to contibute to and advance scholarly debates through the blogosphere is real, despite the relative brevity of most posts. The blogosphere allows for wide, rapid and highly interactive dissemination of views in a way that is unique. A faculty member who is blogging in a serious way thus would seem to me to be engaged in scholarship.

I'm interested in his comment about brevity. While brevity would seem to rule out good work in the eyes of most deans, he notes that wide and rapid exchange of ideas makes up for that possible weakness. I think that this is not true for just any posting, but rather it can be true if the posting is of a certain kind. And what kind is that?

He goes on to say that these posts must be "serious," which he presents as a synonym for "thoughtful and carefully reasoned commentary." But if the posts are brief, then the reasoning must be expressed with great economy or must be focused on something fairly specific that can be addessed briefly. This, I think, is the key.

If a good blogger develops an audience and trades ideas with other readers and writers, then a short, specific post on a particular point or detail can be very useful to readers who will pick it up, reflect on it briefly, and reply in kind, with a careful but smallish extension of the point or challenge to it. And particular brick by specific brick the work of the field advances. Had the posts not been particular, they would have been of no use. Had they not been commentary on the words of others, they would not have been academic discourse.

As in so many areas, the specificity of the language and the care and richness of the exchange allow us to do our work. This is what we need to teach students and learn and relearn ourselves. [0 & P]

What your people think. Laurel Snyder of The Revealer writes about the too-frequent habit of Americans of asking someone to speak for their people, as if their people were a monolith rather than an ordinary human pot-luck of traits and views. She's getting calls because, as Jewish Student Life Coordinator at Hillel at the University of Iowa, people figure they know what monolith she speaks for, and this week people want that monolith to talk about Mel Gibson's movie.

I mention the article because many of us run into this same impulse in our classes -- we're reading James Baldwin, say, and a student is unable to restrain himself from the impulse of asking one student to speak for her people.

Snyder notes that people often want the monolith to say something in particular -- there is an answer the questioner already has in mind, and if it doesn't arrive there will be disappointment, astonishment, even anger. This goes to show how much the discourse of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in our country is troubled by stock speech that doesn't ever get tested against the complexity of experience. It's our job to teach people the skills they need to do that testing themselves, and to help break the habit of asking things that only masquerade as questions, and are, instead, statements of fixed positions or appeals to others that they not trouble the waters. Or maybe they are a harrassment or a quiet kind of threat? [0 & P]

Is my blog burning. Clotilde over at Chocolate & Zucchini, a beautiful food blog, is hosting a second round of food-related group blogging on Sunday, March 7. According to the announcement, this round has a theme of tartines, which means preparing interesting things to lay on a piece of bread, she says. As many bloggers as possible prepare a dish, blog about it on the 7th, and, if possible, include a photograph and recipe, and C & Z links all the participants. The first event was hosted at Il Forno, a baking blog.

I think this is a good model for all sorts of shared efforts across the web, though how many groups of blogs share a topic as tasty and attractive as the food bloggers do? (By the way, bloggers who don't ordinarily write about food are also invited.) If students participated in this kind of event, likely with a non-food topic, you'd want to stand back at the end and discuss with them what it amounted to, what ideas came out that should be preserved and developed, and how to start doing that. And of course you could ask students to organize an event of this kind, too. Come to think of it, the project is a cousin to the wiki conference idea James Farmer posted several days ago. [0 & P]

Students get over half a million hits. You have to hand it to Will and the students who built the website devoted to The Secret Life of Bees, where the hit counter is quickly making its way toward 600K.

In my course evaluations last semester more than one student remarked how cool it was that they had been able to post their research projects on the web for others outside the class to use, and the last time I checked the logs a couple of the sites had been starting to attract attention (nothing like Will's class's site, though).

I expect our election site here at IUSB will publish a good bit of student work, but the details are still being worked out. We're aiming for a June 1 launch. [0 & P]

Proper journalism. Tim Porter praises critic Eric Alterman and Michael Tomasky for their discussion of the values central to good journalism. Along the way Porter shares a great old quotation from the Hutchins Commission report, A Free and Responsible Press:

It is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It is now necessary to report the truth about the fact.

Porter, Alterman, and Tomasky hope journalists will reassert the proudest elements of their field's traditions.

The two pieces would make a great discussion-starter for a political reporting class or weblog staff working on the kind of election site we'll be launching here shortly. The Hutchins Commission statement presses us to name the contexts for what we report, a profound challenge for teachers, students, writers, and readers. [1 & P]

WWW.BushNader2004.com. I see that someone has snapped up the rights to operate www.bushnader2004.com already, but the site ownership seems to be masked right now. As of this morning, the ORG version of the address is still available. Can bumper stickers supporting this dynamic duo be far behind? [0 & P]

Indiana blogs. Librarian Greg Schwartz noticed my search for South Bend bloggers and pointed out his Indiana Blog! collection and its geographic listing by country and municipality. Greg's own weblog, Open Stacks, is about information access and literacy.

One of my Bloglines files that has grown the most over the last couple of months is the collection of librarian weblogs. This is a generous, dynamic community that seems to be having a good time using their blogs to make and share knowledge. The list of Indiana weblogs is just one example. Thanks, Greg. [0 & P]

Intellectual / practice. In "Blogging and the New Citizenship," an extended essay, Gary Dunlop argues that the distinction between "public intellectual" and "active citizen" vanishes once we start talking about practice, "at least somewhat." Properly irreverent, Dunlop says:

The basic of idea of the public intellectual is of someone with superior knowledge coming into the public sphere and speaking slowly.

He says that weblogs have importantly increased the amount and character of exchange between experts and active citizens, in effect widening the pool of people who practice together the public work of inquiry and argument.

As we set up our university-sponsored website addressed to the election this summer and fall, we should aim for more of this shared practice. Can we invite not just comments but guest writers from the community, for example? [0 & P]

Beautiful blogs. Scoble votes for speed over beauty as he grudgingly points to Lars Holst's collection of attractive weblog designs. [0 & P]

PC microphones. Dave Winer is trolling for advice about good microphones to plug into a PC, and he's getting responses in the comment section of the post. Links mentioned there include Griffin Technology and Minidisco and Midiman. And last week I heard a very good quality recording of a classroom visit made on a SONY MZ-R37 minidisk recorder using a four year old Sony ECM-MS907 microphone. [2 & P]

Integrating weblogs into learning. Anne Davis and Will Richardson grapple with the problem of integrating weblogs into a packed school curriculum here and here.

They're right about the problem, but occasionally we might be able to make an end run around the whole thing -- at least that's my dreamy goal for the class on weblogs and wikis I'm offering this fall. For three semester hours I hope to focus on the tools themselves, and assume for the moment that students will bring the curriculum to the tools instead of having to bring the tools to the curriculum.

I wouldn't be able to try this, I'm guessing, if we didn't have a new Informatics program here at IUSB, where the knowledge-making tools themselves are allowed to be the focus. The last three pages of this pdf file contain the official proposal for the course. [0 & P]

Who blogs here. I sent an email to all the thousands of student email addresses at the university, looking for student bloggers, and less than half a dozen replied, but two of those were asking for more information about blogging. Lots of students don't use the school's email, so the data is incomplete, but it looks like this part of Indiana hasn't much noticed weblogs yet. A Google search did turn up the work and personal blogs of area librarian Michael Stephens and those belonging to Jim Gosz and Matt Klawitter, who are, I believe, at Notre Dame. There may be some chances to connect to a handful of people at the other campuses in town, then, but for the moment bloggers in schools and colleges seem to be more or less on their own here. [0 & P]

Freedom and poetry. We've had three poets here in the last two weeks, a luxury for our campus but one that I recommend. After the last reading one student said that the poet had helped her see that she could break out of the limits she was imposing on herself as a writer -- "I feel freed by the example of those poems," she said.

The extravagance and intimacy of the language, the music, the ethical power -- there it is, in the best poetry. [0 & P]

Delia Rexroth. In his visit to our campus this week, George Kalamaras recited from memory the poem called Delia Rexroth, written by her son Kenneth Rexroth as he passed the age at which she, his mother, had died. If you want to read a powerful poem, situated mostly in the personal life but also in the turmoil of World War II, try this one. [0 & P]

American Democracy Project. Our campus is gearing up to participate in the American Democracy Project, which joins 145 or more colleges and universities with the New York Times in an effort to increase active, knowledgable citizenship. For some months now I have found that whenever someone mentions a problem, there is a 50/50 chance my answer will be, "Well, they should start a weblog." So there I was, walking down the hall with the Vice Chancellor, saying, we should have a weblog from the campus, covering the election, informing the people of our community from the many perspectives of our academic fields. A meeting followed a few days later, the VC asked when we'd start to publish, and we're looking into office space, computer access, a URL to call our own, etc.

The heart of the project is finding twelve faculty members who will each write one column-length piece a month, so we can offer new content every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We'll wrap around those columns voter registration information, issue resource guides, links to campaign and party web sites, and so forth. Maybe we'll have email interviews with regional candidates, some press criticism, if resources allow. Some of the content will be generated by students in courses offered in the fall -- they'll get to see the best of their work go into service in time for the election.

It's very exciting, somewhat daunting, and yet amazingly within reach -- thanks to the fancy software that draws content from the data base and uses it to fill the page template. I couldn't have imagined such a thing a year ago.

One question I have right now, though: will the site have the kind of voice we associate with the best weblogs, under this format? I suspect not, or not quite. So I'm wondering if there also needs to be a more traditional weblog element, a running commentary of some kind that weaves through the rest of the content? And who's going to write that? It might have to be me, but then again, if any of my colleagues find this form as appealing as I do, maybe two or three of us will provide the blogging core of the site. More news to follow. [0 & P]

Live wiki at the committee meeting. I continue to serve on a committee that meets in a room with wireless access and a cart full of laptops. I provided a wiki site to the committee, and we wrote some of our work together in the first couple of meetings, then posted to the wiki for further discussion and revision. But in the last two meetings we've mainly revised our document live, in the room together, with each person at a laptop and one person operating the wiki site. We agree on a change to the document, the scribe enters the change and clicks on Submit, and we refresh our screens; the six of us carry on then with a fully-updated document on all of our screens as we address the next point of revision.

This process has worked very well, without much tension and with some success at avoiding the worst excesses of committee prose. Imagine -- we're all in the room in South Bend, Indiana, and the scribe updates the wiki, and the electrons fly to Texas or wherever the server is, where they jostle the data base slightly and await our call to refresh the screens with the updated version of the text. In seconds, the electrons head back our way, scoot around the mother boards and shoot onto the screen. We get back to work.

I'm sure somebody has used a wiki live like this, but I don't recall hearing anyone talk about it. I recommend the process. [0 & P]

New political weblogs. Ed Cone keeps us up to date with a list of new political web sites and weblogs, and he asks whether it matters that candidates or parties have the real thing (that is, weblogs, with their greater chance for personal voice, frequent updating, and exchange). As a good journalist, Ed reminds us that we don't know the answer to that question yet. But my hope and my hunch is that the answer is yes. [0 & P]

Modesty. I like novelist Anne Tyler's remark in this morning's New York Times about a writer's debts:

Really, we're all standing on other writers' shoulders. (B5)

And along the way she generously recommended three recent novels by other writers: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, Brick Lane by Monica Ali, and The Sleeping Father by Matthew Sharpe. [0 & P]

A wiki conference for students. James Farmer shares a good-looking assignment that changes a tired old essay task into a wiki-based online conference. It would be nice to see an example of the results sometime. I'm guessing that it would work best if the students had warmed up a bit on a wiki, as he suggests.

I like the idea of giving students the criteria for evaluation, in step 3. This has at least two goals: to help them aim their papers toward the assignment's goals and to help them give feedback to others with those goals in mind. It might be one of the hardest habits for teachers to break -- giving assignments without clearly spelling out what we're trying to accomplish and how we'll know when we've done it. So it's good to see criteria mentioned here. I haven't seen or created a set of assignment criteria that include online exchange of ideas or feedback, but it needs to be done.

If the course is long enough, I'd consider having more than one conference, and having students run the second one. I would also consider asking students to write a memo advising students from later semesters how to get the most out of the conference assignment. [1 & P]

Guantánamo Satyagraha. With an informative 23-item news archive and a series of web pages devoted to a letter-writing campaign, local organizing and protests, and a plan to protest at the United States naval base in Cuba, Guantánamo Satyagraha challenges the lengthy captivity of

more than 660 boys and men being held...by the United States government at the Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba. #

The news archive itself is a good model for students who wish to assemble a substantial body of source material, and the whole site is tightly organized by section, with lively use of pictures and color to help readers attend to their argument. The broad model of a site offering information and seeking to inspire social protest and change is successful; the issue itself, the lengthy imprisonment of hundreds without trial, is a test of the country's fundamental values. [0 & P]

CJR watches political bloggers. Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk now offers "a brief, daily summary of notable commentary from the political blogosphere." Students could follow this model as they track a particular topic or issue for a group or individual web site. [0 & P]

Critical narratives that inform our lives. That's a phrase from a recent post by Brian Alger. I find it wonderfully compact and suggestive. I'll gloss it, if I can:

Narratives -- we can organize our knowledge and experience around ideas, and we do, and we need to, but stories organize experience for us in ways that have immediacy and power. Good stories are what my daughter's first grade teacher called a life skill.

Critical -- Brian may mean "important" here but I bet he means, instead, the power to cut through flabby common sense notions to the essence of a circumstance. The ability to see deeply and precisely what the story shows about some aspect of life that is ordinarily cloaked by convention.

Inform -- the kind of knowledge that doesn't confirm what we know, but rather breaks new ground, sheds new light.

Our Lives -- because we hope to shape the stories our own lives, the stakes are real.

Now, how to teach narrative as a critical form that teaches us about our lives -- that's another question. [0 & P]

TrackBack. Phil Long explains TrackBack in this piece from Syllabus. I haven't seen anyone using TrackBack to connect student entries from their individual course blogs, but it seems like a natural. I need to move to the newer version of pMachine in order to start working with this feature -- maybe over spring break? [0 & P]

Congressional Quarterly and Syllabus. I see that CQ offers a free daily email update from their coverage of Congress and a free weekly feature story, by email, on the presidential race.

And I see that Syllabus offers a variety of free email updates as well -- click on Subscribe. [0 & P]

Take my word for it. Below is a complete recent weblog post from a good weblog. I won't link to it because I don't want to criticize the weblog but rather to remind myself about the obligation to add some value to the link -- to make some comment, to talk a little about what you're linking to and what you're thinking about it. Otherwise, it's as if the writer is saying to a reader, "Take my word for it, this is worth you spending your time on, but it's not worth my time to tell you why."

I've put the post's title in bold, and the links to two other sites I've placed in italics. I didn't check out the links to see what they were, on the theory, maybe unfair, that the writer was implying that they weren't worth thinking and writing about.

Here is the complete post:

Even a woman...

Oh, my. I don't know what to say about this except how terribly demoralizing I find it.

This, I hope, is a good antidote. [0 & P]

Avalanche of RSS feeds / new Bloglines feature. I was away from the office for most of the week, and although I was able to keep writing I didn't have time to read the RSS feeds on Bloglines. I currently subscribe to 126 feeds, including some news organizations that produce many items a day, and when I returned there were just under 3000 items to scan (or ignore).

I suppose it's not much different from the decision you make to read, or not, the newspapers that await you after a couple of days away. But Bloglines rewards my allegiance this week with a new feature -- you've been able to save posts for awhile, but now you can sort the saved posts into folders, mark those folders public or private, and annotate the posts as well. Bravo. [0 & P]

Op-ed. Peter Suber of Open Access News quotes this exchange from the June 2003 Chronicle of Higher Education online discussion of blogging by Eugene Volokh:

[Ken Smith, Indiana University] If, as you say, blog posts are more like op-ed pieces than traditional scholarship, and tend to promote one's scholarship rather than carry out that scholarship, in what sense are blogs academic discourse?

[Eugene Volokh] Blog posts aren't scholarly publications, so they're not academic discourse in that respect. But academic blogs are ways for academics to try to promote their academic ideas, both to people in the field (whether academics, students, or practitioners) and to people outside it; so they are academic discourse in that respect. I worry less about whether to label blogging "academic discourse," and more about what benefits blogging produces. If it benefits the writers and the readers, then it's worth doing, just as op-ed writing is worth doing. #

Fair enough. I would like to see more faculty members writing for wider audiences, too, because this which would, I hope, usually strengthen the discussions of public issues. [0 & P]

Audio weblogs. Dave Winer points to a long article in the Guardian about online radio and audio weblogs. [0 & P]

Weblog culture. I'm at a conference today, where people from several colleges and universities are working on ways to help students succeed in their studies. Over and over again people mention the need to communicate findings, to share approaches, to learn from each other, and I quietly think to myself: they'll probably have a listserver going in a few days to keep these people in touch with each other, but a weblog would be better because the work would be preserved in a handier format. But I haven't raised my hand to volunteer to set up a weblog for the group -- it's true, the conference isn't over yet -- because I don't think I see any evidence that the culture that supports weblogs exists among this group or could be easily fostered. We're from all over the state of Indiana, most of the people here are high level administrators (not me), and I don't see them adding this kind of reading and writing to their day. I could be wrong.

So the tools are there but not the culture to make use of them, I suspect. Lately I've been reading Will Richardson's admirable accounts of working to build a weblog culture in his school, and you can tell that it's a lot of work. There's nothing natural about weblogs, I guess -- they are a set of practices wrapped around a set of tools, but down deep we have to wrap a culture around that whole package, yes? [1 & P]

Self-expression and craft. Our guest writers were getting ready to give a poetry reading to a creative writing class today when one of the students asked whether it was okay for poems just to be what the writer wanted them to be -- that is, whether it was okay to avoid the issue of revision and craft. Jeff Friedman answered more or less in this way: he put this "poem" on the board:

I love you

And he asked the students whether they found that satisfying as a reader, even if perhaps the writer might have found it satisfying. The students agreed that it didn't really offer anything to a reader because it wasn't complex enough. Then he added another line:

I love you
I hate you

This, he said, was surely more complex, but was it any more satisfying or engaging to a reader? The student who asked the question seemed to agree that it was not. Soon it was time for class and the reading to start, but he was aiming the discussion toward the issue of craft. There are skills and techniques that can transform an experience of mixed emotions (I love you and I hate you) into a narrative or lyrical piece that captures much more vividly the nature of that kind of experience, and along the way usually more of the insight and emotion is fixed into the writing too.

Young writers, whether they are poets or bloggers, enjoy the self-expression -- just getting their words out there. But we can name the craft much more specifically for them, with them, so their writing serves as more than a venting space. With craft, we shape ideas and experience so others can read along. I would like to think and write more about craft, then. [0 & P]

Midrash. I had the pleasure of seeing a lively and interesting lecture and reading this evening by Jeff Friedman and Howard Schwartz. They presented a series of poems, translated into English, from originals written by contemporary Israeli poets, all on themes and stories from the Book of Genesis. Weblogs never came up, of course, but I couldn't help but think about the rich sense of give and take, or cultural process, or a very human need to interpret founding texts and traditional values freshly in order to work out contemporary problems.

So Howard Schwartz described the centuries-old Jewish tradition of midrash, or retelling and reinterpretation of episodes from the Bible. And Jeff Friedman read some of the translations, in which familiar stories, such as God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, are reconsidered. In some cases an element of the story is brought forward, elaborated on, speculated on, because it has a new relevance for our day. In other cases, a familiar story is changed to reflect the dynamics of contemporary life.

So Dan Pagis's poem of Cain and Abel, called Autobiography, in which the murdered brother speaks from the grave, becomes a poem about the Holocaust as well as the broad sweep of human history. There are very moving lines about his family's "inventions" -- one brother invented murder, the parents invented grief, and the other brother invented death, and humankind has spent the intervening years, he says, perfecting these three inventions.

It's a fabulous poem, well-translated, and very moving. But for my purposes as a teacher and as a person interested in weblogs, this tradition of midrash shows how important it is to think of culture as a process and to see ourselves as having a chance to join the conversation, to share in the acts of translation, and to refresh the best of what our ancestors have passed down to us.

I recall my own teenage years, a time when I found some of the traditions around me very dry. I want to ask myself what happened, and when, to allow me to start connecting to tradition and feeling a place for myself in its processes. I know that it had to do with the power to move that I felt in music and poetry -- these spoke to me as a young person. But I wonder whether we teach far too often without allowing students to write midrash, without inviting them into cultural process. I can honestly say that I have never spent an hour in church or in Bible school with such a lively feeling of open cultural process as I did during the reading tonight. But if we showed the process of midrash -- in its Jewish manifestations but also in other areas of culture, such as the arts, where it is essential -- and then invited students to write midrash, would more of them come to know that they can have a voice? Is this, secretly, what weblogs have accomplished? Are weblogs mainly, deeply, a secular practice of midrash? [0 & P]

New clipping service. I'm looking for ways students can quickly start to contribute to a weblog about the election, and I realize that at the very least they can each sign up for an issue beat and begin to contribute to a news clipping service. This should help them orient themselves to the issue or topic and prepare for writing more analytical pieces a few weeks down the road. I expect to try this exercise in a course about elections this fall, for the sake of the students and as a way of quickly making the class weblog worth visiting for outsiders. [1 & P]

Bible RSS feeds. Dave Winer points to a group that offers several RSS feeds for the Bible, including some that would help a person read the entire text in one year (a common format for printed texts). The model is suggestive for other works -- how about a feed for the any of the great periodical essayists / columnists of the past, such as Addison, Steele, or Johnson? How about following the events of a historical period through a paced reading of the periodicals of the day? Read a few things from the December 6, 1941 papers this week, a few things from the December 8th papers next week, a few things from the January 1942 papers the week following, and so forth? I think students could better find their way into the historical context with the help of this kind of RSS feed. Mock United Nations events, that is, student re-enactments of the U.N., could use RSS feeds to structure their activities, too. [0 & P]

Publication format. For bloggers who are, like me, thinking of launching something more like a web magazine, The Truth Laid Bare offers another page format to consider. Then there is In These Times, too. [0 & P]