I agree with Mike that we should just start with a blog, “since that’s the method all parties seem familiar with.” If you would like to participate in a group blog on sharing teaching resources and creating resources collaboratively, email me at ghw[at]wordherders[dot]net with a username and password. I’ll add you to the list of authors on a blog I’ve set up.
[In case you’re just joining us, dear reader, here are my first post and second post on the subject.]
Via Many-to-Many: “Using Wikis for content management….” Here, Tom Coates addresses what has been one of my reservations about wikis, the somewhat awkward resulting appearance and navigational elements: “the particularly networked rather than heirarchical model of navigation that they lend themselves towards isn’t suitable for all kinds of public-facing sites (the same could be said of the one-size-fits-all design of the pages).” Coates asks us to
imagine for a moment that the Wiki page itself is nothing but a content management interface and that the Wiki has a separate templating and publishing engine that grabs what you’ve written on the page, turns it into a nicely designed fully-functioning (uneditable) web-page and publishes it to the world. It could make the creation of small information rich sites enormously quick – particularly if you built in FTP stuff.
Indeed. Make it so.
On the subject of sharing content: check out the OpenCourseWare project at MIT, and specifically the Literature section.
William C. Dowling, an English professor at Rutgers University, provides a nice handout for undergraduates on how (and why) to use the Oxford English Dictionary.
Via Slashdot: “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything–My Postmodern Adventure.”
You know you’re in trouble when even nerds feel safe beating up on you.
Update: More interesting than Morningstar’s piece, to me, is the discussion on Slashdot, linked above. It provides an idea of what a certain class of non-insiders has to say about literary studies. The discussion is not, in my opinion, very well informed.
And check out this response from Steve Ramsay, a professor of English at the University of Georgia who specializes in humanities computing. He started a Slashdot thread back in August of 2002 on peer review in humanities computing. Many of the resonses to that post indicate readers did not really understand what he was getting at, taking the opportunity instead as an excuse to bash the humanities in general.