Exciting! Secret! Thoughts!

I am! Therefore: I will try to avoid all complaining in this blog post and resign myself to only positive comments (insert cliché: if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything). As I usually don’t have anything nice to say, but keeping my mouth shut just gets me into trouble too, I will take advantage of the fact that I find two nice things I would like to ruminate upon.

I am tempted to take out ‘ruminate’ and replace it with a more optimistic word, one that does not sound like it implies a thunderstorm (reflect might have served ‘nice’ly).

I will leave it as linguistic evidence of the truth of my assertion. The predictable pessimist will fight, but no, she will not prevail (Does it count if I complain about myself? I’m going to say no, otherwise the whole premise for this post is flawed, and by now, about a hundred and fifty words in, I am committed to the project of joy and optimism at the expense of myself. The critique stands).

Okay.

Nice thing to say number 1.

Allyson’s post about wiki’s and links to Sarah’s wiki were very helpful and interesting. Thank you Allyson for the brilliant idea of using the wiki in personal research! If I can figure out how to upload the program onto my flash drive and connect my hopelessly isolated laptop to this facet of splendid technological innovation I will do it (I came very close to complaining here about the woes of not being able to seamlessly connect etc. but stopped myself, drunk on the resolution to avoid such things, and with the recollection that I’ve only myself and lack of a phone line to blame for not being able to do so).

Nice thing to say Number 2:

Good reading (I would add ‘this week’ but that implies that I didn’t think that the other readings were good, and that is contrary to my opinion and current goal). How about, instead, I say helpful readings?

I like it.

The assignments sections were wonderfully concrete ways in which to incorporate new media into the classroom. Even for a potentially non-dinosauric, but still backward and out-of-touch person like myself. I cite, for example, Cynthia L. Selfe and her fourth activity: “text redesign and revision”. Again, I have two nice things to say about this.

Subtopic Nice thing 1:

It gives a list of links to web-design instructional sites to assist the uninitiated in the strange and beautiful language of web site construction.

Subtopic Nice thing 2: The idea of revising a previously written text to fit into web-format seems a brilliant way to make students explore the ways in which different mediums provide different options for the same text.

Return to primary topic, Nice thing 2:

In class last week, as we designed three assignments based on the text, I announced my interest not only in studying identity formation, but also focusing on revision. I have plans to appropriate Selfe’s idea to accommodate the developing understanding of music choice that I hope to get at in the lamenting ipod assignment(is the ipod, in this case, a projection of my own pessimistic self, which will too probably be annoyed to tears by a good deal of the music choices of my potential students? New optimistic outlook says: no).

Anyway, revising this essay into a web-site seems an excellent way to begin the ‘gathering’ of facts around music to come to a ‘gathering’ of more sophisticated understanding of self.

I look forward to looking at these links to see how user-friendly they are, so I might prepare myself for whatever… (cannot say doom)… challenge lies ahead.