So the website went down yesterday during an upgrade of the photo weblog. Of course, this sort of strangles certain work. I have Alex King’s Twitter Tools widget working in the sidebar as well as the Twitter app running in Facebook. So, if the weblog breaks again, or, if the Course weblog breaks, which is perhaps more important, people can get in touch in Facebook or do the Twitter follow.

But I want to know why the thing crashed!

Susan Gibb has seen an eagle.

Big congratulations to my daughter, Kendra. She’s been accepted into Cornell University, along with two other very happy Simsbury High School colleagues. The pressure cooker’s now de-steamed.

We’re ecstatic here because K did all the work herself. While I had to work very hard at getting out of school, trying my best to fake illness, K has done the opposite, often faking not being sick so as not to miss whatever she claimed she couldn’t miss at the time. We would often implore her to stay home a few days and rest. She never did. She set the goal herself, did all the work herself, now making very good headway through calculus and physics, and has reaped exactly what she sowed, all of her own independent mind. And that’s why I’m proud of her. We never had to tell her to work hard. She figured this out herself.

Here’s to you, kiddo.

Boy did I get nailed with a cold this weekend. When that happens everything stops and I’m right in the middle of something too.

Oh well.

I’m not a big fan of comments on weblogs and I try to avoid them as much as possible. No, this doesn’t mean that Mary Ellen should stop writing comments into this space. It means that if she finds something interesting to comment on or add to, hence the above title, she should respond in depth on her own weblog or in long, well argued comments and let trackbacks or whatever provide the network exchange.

I read several weblogs in which the comment spaces are loaded with the good and the bad. Susan Gibb and I started weblogging about the same time, I think, feeding off Contemporary Fiction content, and we both still use comment space as a way of covering something specific or as a means of reminding. Dr. Fierro’s is a well controlled method of comment apparatus, but so are massive social spaces like Kos’, where people make relationships.

But additive writing should locate its energy in the big space of the post area rather than in the small apartments of comments. The future is going to see a lot of pushing for the weblog for students as a means of bringing back the notion of commonplacing in learning, rather han the use of paper journals because the writing is public and easily searchable. The weblog is an excellent learning environment, as Susan Gibb has proven. And I think Carolyn is back in silver now.

I would answer Mary Ellen this way. Comments aren’t the place to judge good writing. This and this and this is the place for that.

Well, that was easy. Podpress upgraded too.

Listen to the test.

Time to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and to initiate some minor housekeeping, such as developing a custom theme for the courses and new media weblogs, hopefully with lots of professional help.

Over the next few days there might be some holes here. But hopefully everything will go smoothly.

I forgot that I can link to the College, now that the website has been redesigned by the great Jim Revillini. I’ve been unable to link because of the embarrassment I felt at the last design, which served very few. I still think the header’s too large, but things are moving.

The new College look also goes deeper, with new buildings, and a new approach to teaching and learning that digs into the guts of pedagogy and instructional practices that we call Ability-based. What’s it all about? It goes back years when we were admonished by our accrediting agency for our inability to detail how we differentiate General Education from other curricular areas. General Education can be defined broadly as those sets of skills, competencies, and contexts that “all” students at the college should demonstrate as members of an academic community and as members of the community at large. General Education is distinguished from specific degree-based cores. Long story short, the Connecticut public college system struggles to define a General Education core because of its “course-based” denotation. This many Social Science electives meets the core is the basic General Education argument, establishing Social Science as a General Education concern.

The path we followed was to define General Education as a set of abilities not as a clustered number of courses. The concept in practice can be difficult to conceptualize but promotes flexibility and problem solving in interesting ways. Communication is one of the broad areas we defined as a Gen Ed Area. Communication is conceived as subsets, which currently include writing, speaking, and listening abilities. Tunxis has defined 10 broad areas of Ability, which may shrink in the future. But here’s where the concept goes deep. The General Education Areas are now conceived as shared across the curriculum. English, Psychology, History, and even Math could all links exams, quizzes, and papers in their courses to the Communication area of ability. Professors in those areas would share responsibility for instruction in writing, as well as other Areas. If a Java programming course links to writing, then its instructor would share responsibility for instruction in writing given the context of the course and its particular method, providing instructional space for instructors to assert authority for their particular subject of interest as it involves the communication of ideas. People typically agree that students at a college should have their principle instruction in writing occur in Composition courses and that the skill will thereby be used by students in other courses. This we see as unrealistic, given that people in reality write in many contexts and for reasons a few writing courses can’t really cover.

In the professions people write, listen, and speak to one another as a matter of the day to day. To confine the instructional practice to a few courses reinforces disciplinary walls. The best teachers I had in college all encouraged us to use all our tools in better ways; they also taught the pen. They saw their way to instruct in more than just Anthropology and Trig; they didn’t see aesthetics as someone else’s job to convey. I still remember being dragged through speeches in a Childrens Literature course, grumbling that this was not a speech course. The instructor not only taught us how to engage texts, but also how to express what we learned through carefully drafted speeches. One of the best courses I ever had, providing a base for much of what I do now in and out of the classroom.

Good to see Neha having fun.

While lost in the darkness of the “classroom” and “politics of education,” teaching is essentially electric. When the opportunity arises. The formal settings come with the baggage of an industry that is hard and slow to change and react. That’s too bad. But we need fresh eyes. We also need people who understand that the walls are arbitrary and illusory.