eBook galleys and finalizing for our webinar

What a weekend!

I was burning the midnight oil in order to complete my chapter for Writing about Literature in the Digital Age. Found an awesome illustration project on Moby Dick with great images I'd love to draw from for my chapter. Hours after sending the request to use his Moby Dick illustration, Matt Kish gave enthusiastic permission. Cool!

The editing and design teams worked pretty much through the weekend doing copyediting and formatting each chapter into inDesign.

Design team Ben Wagner, Annie Ostler, and Sam McGrath

What's left? Today's class agenda:

• Crowdsourced / group edit of eBook galley proofs (editing team, design team)
• Finalize marketing list on wiki for eBook and webinar (all)
• Write category-specific email invitations for eBook/webinar (marketing team)
• Presentation from publishing/distribution team on how and where our epub will go out
• Finalize archival copy of eBook for BYU's ScholarsArchive (publishing/distribution team)
• Prepare for Wednesday's webinar on Classroom 2.0, including how to participate, media to submit to presentation team, and how to advertise to invitees and social graph (Taylor Gilbert), 
• Final two blog posts
• Narrative of eBook collaborative work (what did your team do, what tools did you use, how did this coordinate with the overall effort, what went well or could go better?)
• How did you / we meet the stated learning outcomes for the course?

Phew!

Call Me Gideon: Being Literary and Personal

Perhaps the strongest difference between traditional writing about literature and how communication works in the digital age has to do with the personal. Traditionally, the focus is upon the literary work, upon the argument, and not upon the critic. Self reference is frowned upon, not to mention any hint of personal biography. This is how students have been taught to write about literature -- objectively, through analysis, research, and persuasive interpretation, not subjectively and personally. Let me read your thesis statement, not your diary.

Okay, here's my claim: In the digital age, discussion about literature is less meaningful the less personal it is. But I think you will be  more interested in my uncle, Wayne Omer.

That's him in the photo, next to another uncle, Andy Childs. Uncle Wayne is pointing with his cane (made from a tree in his yard that I regularly climbed with my cousins when I was young, eating green apples until we were sick). Surrounding my two uncles are my wife, sister-in-law, brother, cousin, and others that travel in a caravan each Memorial Day to family grave sites around Salt Lake City.

Uncle Wayne is the family storyteller, the bard. This time he told those in earshot about John Sutherland, whose grave is my next picture. John was a sailor and a convert to the Mormon faith from the Shetland Isles, far north in Great Britain. He was shipwrecked outside of Boston before meeting up with his fiancee and traveling to Utah.

"You know, John's father, Gilbert Sutherland," Wayne told us, "was a harpooner on a whaling ship."

A harpooner on a whaling ship? One of my great grandfathers?

"Oh yes, he went to sea as a young boy."

Assignment: Annotated Blog Posts for Conventional Literary Research

Yesterday my students received some research training at our library. In an effort not to have them overwhelmed, I set forth a short, selected list of literary research resources on our course wiki that I want them to be sure to explore.

So I am giving them an assignment to blog about their use of three of the listed resources and to report on sources found within them. However, only two of these sources should be relevant to their own research subject; one must relate to the research of one of their peers (I require this in order to promote social learning and engagement with fellow students). The three posts should be completed by Friday, May 27, 2011 at 2:00pm.

This assignment is much like an annotated bibliography assignment, except that I am urging as much attention to their process as to the result of their search; to the tool used to find a good source, as much as that end source itself.

Bloggers Setting Sail

flickr - Talba in Iceland (creative commons licensed)

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities. --Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 32, "Cetology"

In assigning my students to blog, rather than to write traditional research papers, I have launched them into an ocean of possibility with more hope than certainty.  Will these untried vessels of communication be adequate for the "harborless immensities" that await them in the cyber-sea? And now, one third of the way into our time together, we have lost sight of shore and I am taking stock. Are our blogs a leaky fleet, or are they making sail toward real destinations?

I see a few bloggers starting to take off, raising their sails into the wind. How does this happen? 

Chasing the White Whale of Literary Blogging

flickr - Skelly B (creative commons licensed)

So ignorant are most landsmen . . . they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory. --Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 45, "The Affidavit."

With apologies to Melville, I'm indeed going to use his famous tale (and whale) allegorically to investigate the topic of literary blogging. I've chosen a rather benign looking white whale in the picture here. His home is an aquarium, and he looks like the sort of sea creature that would roll over to let you pat his tummy. And maybe that's what I want literary blogging to be -- a tame creature, like this one, that can both delight and educate visitors.

But after piloting three courses in which I have had students blog, I've learned that the new media -- of which blogging is merely one well-known species -- is certainly not tame. The new media is a set of cultural and technical practices that are engaging, yet evasive -- like a certain whale from a certain novel.