A few housekeeping issues…

This falls in the category of announcements I thought I’d group together here:  about the book review schedule, about my lack of office hours Friday and about comments being held for moderation.

First, the book reviews. I’ve added them to the schedule, but here are the dates and choices as I have them:

Beginning March 8 and finishing March 12:

Cristin B., Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide NYU Press; Revised edition (2008)

Gloria S., David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder Holt Paperbacks (2008).

Beginning March 15 and finishing March 19:

Carrie L., Jeffrey Grabill. Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action. Hampton Press, 2007.

Ashlee W., Lisa Nakamura. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet Minnesota UP 2007

Judy W., Gwen Solomon and Lynne Schrum, Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools International Society for Technology in Education (2007)

Beginning March 22 and finishing March 26:

Dave N., Andrew Keen. The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values Broadway Books; Reprint edition (2008)

Brian R., Barbara Warnick Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web Peter Lang 2007.

Cate P., Liz Kolb Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education International Society for Technology in Education (2008)

Beginning March 29 and finishing April 2:

Angie L., Lindan W. Braun, Teens, Technology, and Literacy; Or, Why Bad Grammar Isn’t Always Bad, Libraries Unlimited, Westport, CT (2007)

Andrea L., Jeff Rice, The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media , Southern Illinois UP, Carbondale (2007)

Renee L., Lynn Worsham Plugged in: Technology, Rhetoric, and Culture in a Posthuman Age Hampton Press (2008)

I think this schedule works out pretty well because it will leave us a little more time at the end to wrap up research projects and the like.  So unless you have some sort of really compelling objection/change of heart, this is the book review schedule and consider it written in stone!! Being “late” on this will throw off the schedule for everyone and is simply not acceptable.   So make a note of the date of your review!

Note also that you need to send me a link to your YouTube video to include on this site on the Monday of the week of your review.  We’ll discuss the process for doing this soon enough, but the main point I want to make for now is you will need to think of getting your video all set to go before the Monday of the week where you are giving your book review.

Second, office hours this Friday: For a variety of different reasons (meetings), I won’t be holding office hours this Friday.  Ironically, I’ve had to come up to school for something every other day this week anyway….  In any event, I will be on campus tomorrow (Thursday), and I’m always happy to schedule a meeting with any of you.

Third, about held comments/missing Gravatars: The way the site works is that you have to have a previously approved comment for subsequent comments to automatically appear, and by “previously approved,” I mean a comment with a particular name and email address.  Your gravatar (the little picture) needs the same thing.  So, if you try to post a comment to the site using a different email or name, it will get held up until I can approve it.

Your comments will also get held up if it has links in it.  This is because a common marker for blog spam (yes, blog spam is quite common, unfortunately) is the inclusion of links.

Of course, none of these things are a big deal– it’s easy enough for me to approve comments that get held for moderation.  Just want to let you know what’s up with that.