2 Board Alley

Make a Back Up and Check it Thrice

When I imported my pages to my teaching blog, I lost all of the information on them.  I have copies of my CV draft and my evaluation document, so I'm not too bothered, and the literacy notes and draft can be cobbled back together again, but there will be some passages  lost. I'm going to check the WayBack Machine and see if I can't recover some of my writing.  Because this blog is a place for first-draft writing, there are scant pieces of it that I consider polished and ready to go, and I've grown to view it as my online writer's notebook where I can place things and access them from anywhere.  And it's the convenience of access that has made me lax about making backups.  Like the professor in Strunk and White's Elements of Style who expounded thricely "Omit Needless Words!", I now chant thricely "Make a back up! Make a back up! Make a back up!"--though S and W's professor was professing and I'm just plain trying to remember.

The Lost Art of Blog Conversations

More and more it seems like commenters don't talk with each other on the blogs that I read.  More and more it seems like call and response:  the blogger writes a post and the readers respond to it, but not to each other.

What happened?

I suspect that part of the reason is that it is easier to read, post a comment and move on, returning to see the blogger's response, which becomes another list of comments:  "Thanks, Oz, for pointing that out.  Yes, MyrnaBird, I have had my toes webbed. Again. Filbert! You old dog!  Haven't seen you since grad school!"

Bloggers are still linking to each other's blogs, that is, posting a riff about another person's post, so the conversation can continue, just over at another blog:

"Dr. Doom posted this over at his blog, Ragweed," 'bloggitybloggity.' While I can understand the basis for his comment, I'd like to propose the reverse: ytiggolbytiggolb."

So what?

I'm not sure about what is lost or gained by all of this.  Maybe the conversation venue has changed now that blogging has become more widespread than in the past.  Maybe habits change over time. But why?

Now, I am just as likely as anyone else to comment to the blogger and ignore, or at least, not respond to, the other bloggers.  Why?  More often than not, it has to do with time and my greedy desire to read as many blogs as I can.  So while I may read the comments, I don't always respond to what others are saying. 

And, I am basing my perception on my small toe-hold in the blogosphere.  What do the rest of you think?

Community College English

I'm in the midst of the long process of cleaning out CCE and bringing over the links I want to keep.  I've been in touch with Typepad and it doesn't look like I will be able to have different typelists on different pages. That means that my academic typelists will continue to be displayed with my animal rescue typelists and on and on.  Oh well.  I may just up and leave Typepad so that I can do what I want.  I'm open to any and all suggestions of other blogging venues.  I'm even open to learning HTML at this point.  Yes, I am.

New Skin, New Phase

As the dog days of summer give way to the excitement of professional week and the start of the new school year, I'm going to be shifting things around this old blog of mine. 

I've incorporated the new Typepad feature of adding pages to the blog, making this into a wiki-blog.  So far the four main categories, beyond this first page, are:

• Community College items--I'll be absorbing the CCE info that I've got, typelists and all, and putting them here.  I'm tired of having two blogs, and while I would love someone else to take over CCE, I want to pull together all of my stuff under one tent.
• My c.v--I'm up for evaluation this year, and am busily trying to get up a revised version of my activities since the last evaluation. 
• My literacy narrative--it's just a space where I'm slowly arranging the notes, drafts and posts that I've written about being part Appalachian.  It's a rough draft in the roughest sense of the word, but I'm more inclined to work on it if I can access it from anywhere in the world. (Not that there's that much exotic traveling in store for me).
• Tipsy's page--eventually, I'd like to put up animal rescue information here.

Stolen Moments With My Blog

It has come to this.  I'm sitting in my husband's study, late at night with only the screen to lighten the darkness, but ahhhhh, I'm blogging. . . . .In the dining room, my new laptop sits next to my old laptop, waiting for the Geeks On Call to come out and boot 'er up. In the tradition of Billie over at parts -n- pieces, I'm going to blog some random bullets of. . .things that would have become full-blown posts had there been computers enough and time.

• Haven't decided what to do with my old laptop except to replace the hard drive and load it with games and so forth for our friends' kids who join their parents at our parties. A happy child makes for a happy party, I say.
  

• This week, I'm headed down to my father's house, which is slowly falling apart and needs some tender loving care.  New bathroom window, new bathroom walls, new basement windows and it'll be just about perfect. 
  

• Then I'm getting my hair cut--short--and sending the ponytail to Locks of Love, where they'll be able to use the hair to make a wig for a child with cancer. Clancy has some great photos of the bob I want (just scroll past the lolcephalopod to get there). And Bob?  He has some great photos, period.

• I've almost finished reading the course text for the Women in Literature course that I'll be teaching.  How profoundly rich the experience has been--to go back and reread Woolf, Behn, Chopin and Anzaldua among others, and to read works by writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose only work I remember reading in college was, you guessed it, her sonnets.  The anthology has "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim Point," an anti-slavery poem, and it has felt right to return to one of the few women poets I'd ever heard of before and during college, and to see that she had more to her than her many-wayed love of Robert B.  How times have changed.  That's a good thing.

• The laptop demise sent me to all three computers to print out and compile all of my poetry, which until now has been sloppily saved hither and yon.   On Sunday afternoon, I went through  the stack, did  some editing and read each poem out loud a few times, something  I don't often do. What luxury! To walk and pace with the poem--or walk in pace with poem--and get a total body feeling for the moods and energy and meaning in my work.

• Laurie Writes/wrote quite a piece on Blogher.  Wish I'd gone!   Laurie and I are going to be working on developing a first-year learning community for students who have failed Basic Writing and who want to not only retake the course, but brush up on their college literacy and study skills as well.

• Oh, yoga.  Yoga has been our salvation this summer, and like flowers blooming in a slowly  changing  film sequence, Paul and  I can move around,  if not like teenagers, then like middleagers who are thrilled to be able to stand up straight.  And move without sounding like the Tin Man. Or woman.

Well, best to end here.  Tomorrow is our annual pilgrimage to the v-e-t-'-s.  I'll need plenty of rest for that.

2 Board Alley Is Now A Language Tool in Japan

I kid you not.  Several months ago, Dan W. contacted me from Hawaii and asked if I'd be interested in submitting some of my blog posts to a Japanese publication created to teach American language and culture to the Japanese.  Sure, I said, and last week, via sea mail, came my copy of the book. 

I've retained the rights to the writing and, like a poet, have gotten a copy of the publication in lieu of money.  Whether or not I've been had remains to be seen, but I thought, why not give it a try? It's interesting to see where this blog goes and whom it attracts outside of the regular fine folks who read this.  Thus far I've been contacted by three cousins and a woman who lives at 2 Board Alley, to name a few.

2 Board Alley Delivers

In working on my literacy narrative, which has become more about me and less about Gran, I've realized that 2BA, the place where ideas first  come to be drafted, has been a gold mine.  I've  taken  about six pages from  the blog and pasted them in the essay.  The big question is, do I have to cite each blog entry or can I say that much of the information in the essay originally appeared on the blog?  I plan to cite family letters and such, but I'm not clear about how exactly the blog should be treated.
 

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Shadow Posts

"Shadow posts " refers to everything that I don't put into this blog.  In order to be considered a shadow post, the idea/information has to be related to what's already here, so perhaps "everything" is an overstatement. 

The first kind of shadow post is the one that contains very specific information about my friends, family and coworkers.  Because I am not an anonymous blogger, I'm not comfortable identifying others or going into detail about their lives--it doesn't seem fair, and even if I had their permission, I wouldn't feel right about it.

That isn't to say that I don't write about it-- I do.  Offline.

Then there's the kind of shadow post that's akin to Frost's poem-- the posts"not taken," the ones that seem so interesting, vital, important and maybe witty on the drive to school at seven in the morning, and increase in detail and development as the teaching day wears on but by evening feel like large clods of lead and seem too time-consuming to write. 

And then there are the ideas that come while you're in the middle of writing a post.  The ideas come fast and furious, but you're too devoted to what you're doing and so you let them fade off into oblivion.

What I Blog

If you look at the data cloud, you'll get a pretty clear idea about what I like to post here--very often silly writing or collages or whatnot.  Not only is this blog a place for rough draft writing, but it's where I let off steam, being most prolific when I am most under stress.

Audience, I think, varies with the kind of posts.  The work that I've done about my father is very raw, and I know that there are probably only five people out there who read it.  Believe me when I say how grateful I am for anyone who posts a comment after one of my "Dad" pieces.  While my first goal is to just get it down while the feelings are still fresh,  I wouldn't be posting it on the web if I didn't want feedback--or a hug--or a pat on the back.    At the same time, I realize that the topic is very depressing, and I understand if folks don't read it.

Now, about those cats.  Well, they're a great foil when I'm trying to let off steam or experiment with some new art program.  Given my surreal bent (yes, I look like a painting by Dali), it's  surprising that more photo-collages of the boys haven't made it on here.  One of the most popular posts here is the one that I wrote about our late cat Arnie's plans to renovate his cat house.  If the search engines are to be believed, the reason behind it is that I have a photo of Debbie Travis as Arnie's crush.

Sister Dysthemia, an occasional "blogger" here, is also frequently read by people searching for information about depression.  I don't often write about her because I haven't figured out a voice yet--I don't want her to be the stereotype of the scolding wacky nun, nor do I want her to take on the voice of high ridiculousness, which I do very well on my own.  I sometimes think about giving her her own blog, but it seems like too much work.  I suspect that in the coming year, I may just write about "Living With Depression When You're the Landlord,"  in my own voice here. 

The category about D.C., past and present, has been fun, but I have to tell you, it makes me feel old. 

Then there's my poetry--some of which appears here.  Other posts deal with my process of writing poetry, particularly the nine-stanza piece about my Irish ancestry.  Although I haven't posted anything about it lately, I spent the break listening to three long books on Irish history and researching everything I could find online about the Plantation period in Ireland.  I decided to expand the poem from three to nine stanzas and group them into three-stanza sections, which I'm hoping can be mixed and remixed up--but gotta write the thing first.  Two choices I've made have been to continue with the surreal style for most of them (maybe all) and to draw in more about my father's Irish relatives, thus bringing the poetry cycle forward in time. My working title is trace, a play on the groups of three and on going back to research one's ancestry. 

And there are other topics, too, but I need to go and work on my syllabus for my poetry class, so I'll end here.

All Those Blogs

This post has less to do with why than it does with how--that is, how I use blogs.  Over the years, blogging has been part of my personal writing, academic activities, classroom practices and fundraising efforts.  In all cases, I used blogs as my medium because of how easy it was to set one up and start communicating with people.

So here's the line-up:

1.  This here blog. This is my home blog, so to speak, and, like a journal, it's the place of rough draft writing.  Keeping a blog, where I have an audience, has certainly helped me keep writing, which, obviously, is the first thing a writer needs to do.  I've also tried to stay true to its being a first-draft document.  While I proofread and spellcheck, and yes, edit a bit, I don't spend a whole lot of time redoing a post.  That means that some posts tumble about vaguely in search of meaning, others are clear and crisp and to the point.  I suppose that one could argue that if I'm posting my ideas for the whole world to see that I need to make sure that I make complete sense, especially because I teach writing. But, as a writing teacher, I want this to demonstrate a writer's notebook, where there are false starts, repeated ideas, doodles (or my fascination with photo and collage programs) and moments of silliness and moments of seriousness. There are also essays, poems and other ideas waiting to take shape whenever I reread my posts. 
I'll address the ideas of audience and my categories in another post.  let's move on to the second blog,
Community College English

CCE is a communal blog, and while it is read and sometimes cited in IHE, it's a pretty laid back blog.  If it were to take a Quizilla quiz called "What Religious Service Are You Most Like?," the CCE blog would be a quaker meeting, steady and quiet, with occasional members moved to speak.  I am always happy to have new folks post on CCE, but I have a feeling that when a blogger already has a blog, it's sometimes hard to find the time and topics to add to another. The writing that I do for CCE is less informal than here, and each year I try to keep the academic stuff there and the personal stuff here. Because my posts are an effort to discuss things with other academics, I've grown more focused and audience conscious over the years.

At any rate, category three of my list are the blogs that I've used for presentations, and which are no longer public.  Those would be one that I created for the Middle Atlantic Women's Studies Association's conference a few years ago--(I gave a workshop on how to blog).  Another blog would be one that I put together for an in-house workshop on doing genealogical research.  Both of these blogs existed to instruct people how to find material, and if webpage design had been easier, I might not have used blogging per se.  The audience was face to face, so I wrote the information on each blog as a way to support what I was doing in class, and while I left the comments sections open, online communication wasn't the purpose for the blogs.
The fourth category, fundraising, belongs to The Pearlington Blog  that Sharon Gerald and I did in August for Katrina cleanup in Pearlington, Mississippi. In contrast to the previous two blogs,   TPB was very audience focused as we wanted donations to help restore the destroyed town.  Sharon and I alternated shifts--six hours each, I think, and the time flew  by.   I was aided (big time) by Sharon's having sent me  article links  ahead of time, so much of my writing was to explain the article or the need and beg for money.  We did not have a great deal of commenting from others during the blogathon, and I can't recall how much money we brought in, but on the whole, it was a good experience and an example of how a blog can be used to raise money on a national basis--Sharon lives in MS; I live in MD, and we couldn't have done it without the ease of use that blogging affords.

In the classroom, category number five, I've tried using blogs with Basic Readers and Writers, and I find that student technical skills are so wide that if I can at least teach them how to set up their own blog, comment on others, add some sidebar links and a picture, and then write a few posts, I've done my job.  I have some other thoughts on why it works so slowly, but I'll save those for another post.
Another use of blogs in the classroom are class blogs, where I'm the blogger posting assignments, ideas and course materials on the pages.  Two examples are:  profh.typepad.com/myth and profh.typepad.com . 

In both classes, students responded only when I made them-- as an assignment with points attached that would be graded (responded to, as well) nearly immediately. I'm doing a lot of rethinking about how I use blogs in courses, and am going to be modifying my m.o. next fall.  Again, I have lots more to say about this, and I'll address it in a later post.