There’s an Ask Slashdot discussion taking place in response to a question regarding computer classrooms and freshman composition. It’s the usual Slashdot mix of helpful and not so helpful comments. Many of the responses address the use of blogs in teaching.

I won’t be in front of a freshman composition class any time soon, but I have been thinking about blogs and teaching. Last week, Jill Walker posted an entry on Alex Halevais’s “grading system based on … karma,” a system which didn’t quite work because students learned how to cheat. I’ve also been thinking about games — thanks to Jason’s recent post in the midst of a larger conversation he TrackBacked himself into — in relation to the kinds of conversations that take place in an academic environment, either online or off. I took a shot at having my students play Ivanhoe this year, an online literary roleplaying game (at least that’s how I describe it), but it didn’t go so well. I’ll try it again, I think, but I need to re-tool my directions and how the game is framed within the rest of the course. I welcome advice from anyone who has experience with the game.

However, the experience did inspire me to think that participation in a conversation can be conceived of as a series of different “moves,” to use a game term, that these moves can be named and classified, and that value might be awarded to each move, allowing participants to score “points” leading toward some sort of goal. How to avoid the potential for cheating? Maybe make the goal unrelated to the grade, count on the motivation provided by a desire to do well in a competition, to enhance one’s reputations with one’s peers. The grade is about my reaction; the competition is about peer reaction. Hmmm. How to put this in action with a blog?

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Well, it looks like my session proposal was accepted for next year’s meeting of ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies). Now I just need to toss out the hook of the CFP and hope that I get some bites.

Print Culture and Religion

How did the expansion of print culture in the eighteenth century affect religious beliefs, practices, and institutions? Conversely, how did religion affect the expansion of print culture? This session seeks 20-minute papers on the production, distribution, and reception of print in the eighteenth-century with an emphasis on religious materials, or responses to print framed in religious terms. Possible materials of interest might include but are not limited to sacred writings, hymnbooks, sermons, spiritual autobiographies, prayer books, moral tracts, or religious periodicals. I welcome papers from those working in a variety of languages and in a variety of national or religious traditions.

Jeff turned me on to jEdit, “a cross platform, programmer’s text editor written in Java” that, with the XML plugin, is a nifty way to tag XHTML or TEI-conformant XML. It enforces the DTD as you go, just like XMetal. Unlike XMetal, jEdit is free.

I’ll go into more detail about setting it up if anyone’s interested.

Update, June 23: Okay, first make sure you have the right Java runtime environment on your computer. Then, you download the appropriate version of jEdit from the website. Since I reluctantly run Windows, I downloaded the Java-based installer for that system, but you should be able to follow the directions on the website for any OS.

Once you have the program installed, you’ll want to add the XML plugin. To do so, make sure you’re online, then go to the jEdit “Plugins” menu, select “Plugin Manager,” and then click the “Install Plugins” button. You’ll be presented with a list of available plugins; just scroll down until you find the XML plugin, check the box, and click the “Install” button. Close the “Plugin Manager” screen. You will probably get a message telling you to restart jEdit in order for the new plugin to work.

In order to make the menus for tags, entities, and IDs visible on the right side of the screen, go to the “Utilities” menu and select “Global Options.” Select “Docking” from the menu on the left. Over on the right, scroll down till you see “XML Insert”; change the drop-down menu to read “right.” Close the “Global Options” window.

You should now see a box in the upper right-hand corner that reads, vertically, “XML Insert.” You can click on this box to make the tagging interface appear or disappear. Once the interface is visible, you can click on an element to get a pop-up window that provides you with a menu of appropriate attributes for that element. If you don’t want to see that window, however, you can just right-click the element and it will be inserted (both opening and closing tags) in the document wherever you have placed the cursor. If you have highlighted some text, then the opening tag will be placed before the text and the closing tag will be placed after it. If you type an opening tag, jEdit keeps track of that opening and will automaticallly insert an appropriate, complete closing tag when you begin to type it.

As I said above, the editor enforces the DTD as you go. The menu of elements will only display those elements that are allowed by the DTD at the point in your document where you have placed your cursor. I’ve played around with (X)HTML documents because it appears that the DTD is included with the XML plugin, but I haven’t tried downloading the TEI (or TEI-lite) and getting jEdit to enforce that DTD. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work just as well, however, and Jeff seems to be very happy with using it for this purpose.

There you have it. Any questions?

…to be discussed at free New Letters symposium.

New Letters magazine and the American Jazz Museum will co-sponsor a panel discussion on past Kansas City African-American writers, at the Jazz Museum, 18th and Vine Streets, at 7 p.m., Saturday, June 28, 2003. The panel discussion will be moderated by Kansas City Star writer and literary critic Steve Paul. It will feature Rep. Lloyd Daniel, Missouri state representative and poet, and others, including Chip Fleischer, publisher of Vermontís Steerforth Press, which recently published the novel Such Sweet Thunder, by the late Kansas City writer Vincent O. Carter.

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The oven is back on at Heck’s Kitchen, and Jenny reminds us that today is Juneteenth. Yes it is.

On June 19 (“Juneteenth”), 1865, Union general Gordon Granger read the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, thus belatedly bringing about the freeing of 250,000 slaves in Texas. The tidings of freedom reached slaves gradually as individual plantation owners read the proclamation to their bondsmen over the months following the end of the war.

Juneteenth is also the name of Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published second novel. His first novel being, of course, the brilliant Invisible Man.