What's a blog? Why use it for our class?

Welcome to the world of blogging!

I've held off using other tools at our disposal (WebCT or a standard website) over the last couple of months as I worked with the great people at the Center for Teaching and Learning and the CIT department to get this off the ground. This is an experiment of sorts to see how effective a tool blogging can be for courses in English. English 086 seems an ideal test case given how much of what we've been talking about surfaces regularly in the news.

The way this site is laid out is not typical of blogs, but makes this both a venue for regular blog-type postings and discussions as well as for pulling together important documents such as the syllabus or essay assignments.

The tabbed sections are quite self-explanatory. I'll be adding a lot of related resources and links to course material on the Resources page and, on the Discussions page, I will suggest some topic for discussion that you may want to participate in. As I am the only one who can "start" a discussion, e-mail me with any topics you think we should discuss there and I'll get the ball rolling. As you will see, you can "comment" on any posting to the weblog, so feel free to do that.

One of the things I like about using a blog for this purpose is that this blog will likely remain the course blog for all of my future sections of English 086 and the dialogue that it begins will carry on over the many iterations of English 086 that I will likely teach over the years. This site is also open for anyone to explore, getting away from the idea that course websites (in WebCT for instance) should be private and only for the students currently in the course.

More on blogging and blogging resources on our Resources page very soon.

Jacques Derrida 1930 - 2004

Last week, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida died. We've discussed some of his ideas in class, but the following links will help to give you a bit more background on the work of this extraordinarily important theorist.

You'll find a number of obituaries online that recount his life, the best of which came from The Guardian.

Michael Bérubé, an English and Cultural Studies prof at Penn State, posted on his blog an intro to Derrida that he wrote for his students a number of years back. Bérubé's blog is a great place to stop daily for some first-rate and often hilarious political commentary.

In this story, Deconstructing Jacques, at the Guardian Online books page, another great resource worth following regularly, a number of British writers and academics are asked what they thought of Derrida and his work.

This Postmodern Thought website is a fabulous set of links to sites related to many theorists including Derrida. Take your time here and start to explore the work of some of the theorists we've discussed briefly in class (Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Eagleton) and many other important ones we've yet to touch on.

As I've said before, English 086 is not here to give you and overview of every theory and theorist under the sun but to give you a sense of theory and how it can be applied in critical approaches to literary texts. The next step is for you to start to explore some of these approaches in greater detail.

What do you think of blogging so far?

Hi, why not give commenting a try right here? What do you think of blogging so far? Have you been to any other blogs before? If so, what's your favourite blog? If you've never been to a blog before, do a google search for "whatever your favorite topic is" +blog There may well be a blog (or many!) connected to things that you're interested in.