Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category
Collection analytics (It’s not what you think)
I am in the middle of what my brain thinks is pure brilliance, though it reveals to me that my recollection of Descartes is shakier than I’d believed. But this sort of writing takes time to mature. There is hardly anything worse than half-baked philosophy, or at least reading it while sober.
My reading of late has been fast and furious, because I set myself the task of reading 100 books in 2011. I am up to about 90. One of the things I hope to write about more is the collection of ideas just for the sake of collecting them. 100 is clearly an arbitrary number, particularly since if I have my way I will be much of the way through A Song of Ice and Fire series, which is about 5000 pages long–so far. And yet the urge drives me forward. I want to do it just to say I did it. Well, why do people climb Mount Everest anyway?
I am also creating a database of all my clothes. This is part of the same project (I think) that talks about collecting ideas just for the sake of it. Clothes are the same way. I am “doing analytics” as I like to say on my clothes to prove to myself that a wardrobe of which 25$ is t-shirts in middling condition clearly needs no more t-shirts added. Why conferences thought they were doing me a favor by providing t-shirts instead of tote bags I have no idea. I did promise to share my template with all of you, but I have to figure out how to do it.
So there you have it. The most mundane take possible on the research and writing that’s been driving me along for awhile now. More later, I promise.
Private writing
Earlier this week I went a faculty development workshop on using technology in teaching. Michael Stephens was presenting on how one can use Twitter and blogging to create a constant conversation among the class about the course material. A lot of this was review for me, but I found the idea of a very public and constant conversation potentially really exciting for student engagement. So, for instance, I decided to give my students in my course-integrated instruction sessions my Twitter name and my Google Voice number for texts. These are first year students, so I don’t know how many of them are on Twitter, but I know they text. Note I did not give them my real cell phone number. There’s student engagement, and then there’s creepiness.
What struck me this week is that for all my fascination with the public and the social in media, lately I have personally been most satisfied by the most private of media. Since January 1 of this year I have written every single day in a private paper journal for at least five minutes. Over the years I’ve been a sporadic journal writer, and for the last 2 years I’d only written in my journal a handful of times. Some say that blogging helps hone the craft of writing, but that never has been true for me. For me, and probably for most people, writing starts with the private and moves toward the public. When I was a teenager and throughout college I wrote very personal things on my various blogs, but that was, in retrospect, not such a good idea. So I haven’t been worrying about my public writing at all (other than a book review, deadlines being what they are), but focusing on the writing that takes places in the intensely personal space of paper, pen and thought. By taking the pressure off myself, I am getting excited by engaging with words, even in the high pressure and intense conversational worlds, for instance, Twitter. I just hope that student writers (of any age) are finding the same thing, and not being made to write everything in blogs or tweets, and that young writers still have some private writing spaces in which to develop.