I have two classes starting today, second semester first year composition, Summermix, and a sophomore level literature course called, get this, Major American Authors, what I'm calling, America. I first tried to find a way to bring both courses under one Web site--to my mind there is enough overlap between composition and literature to combine the two, especially when funneled through new media. But I really wanted to keep some emphasis on the readings from the book in the literature course and in the end it was easier to do a site for each.

So, here is a blog composition reflection: I can't abide the plain template, the generic theme. I had an illuminating glimpse at this tendency last night when setting up the Drupal sites. I wanted to add the meta theme so that I could give the sites a less-out-of-the-box feel. Copied over the themes, but couldn't for the life of me get them to show up as options in Drupal. I spent probably thirty minutes poking around the admin menus, thirty minutes deleting and reinstalling the theme, thirty minutes checking and uploading the settings files. Sucked in, I banged my head against the wall of design, rather than moving on to the course organization and assignments. It was a weird disjunction between function--getting prepped--and form--getting a look.

And, I realized I need to conduct the computing metaphors exercise right away. It turns out I had been logging into the ISP with the wrong account, so while I was typing in the server correctly, fixing configuration files, and generally running on a fine set of fumes, I was uploading files to wrong space. My bad. It just goes to show that I always have to go back to the beginning sometimes. A good lesson.

Finally, some thoughts on the courses so far. This is the first time I'm assigning a profile as a formal writing task. I've seen profile assignments in lots of books and talked to teachers who laud them, so I will be curious to see how they turn out. Here are my thoughts so far. Using a metaphor can help pitch the assignment. I'm going with profiles as portraits, as it gets at the objective tension in the assignment. The ethnographic bent to the profile makes traversing the objective/subjective continuum a key process in the learning mix. I'm going to say the profile is about the author as much as the subject. And, if you're not thinking about truth value when writing a profile, then you are not doing it right. Finally, I need to think through the necessary tweaks and encumbrances. We did the Drupal user's profile today, adjusting the categories based on discussion, but I feel there is more to be done with profiles on the net to get some resonances going with the prose assignment. We also will be doing playlist complements.