Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Matt informed me that the new Kairosnews site design was breaking in Firefox with the navigation menu over on the right.

I had experienced it, too, during the upgrade. The fix is to clear the private data for the browser. Must be some legacy CSS or javascript files being held in the browser cache from the old site.

BTW: the site does look better in Firefox than IE (for those still stuck in MS land). Safari users let me know if there are any problems.

I’ve finished tweaking the navigational elements on the site, although additional feedback is always welcome. One new feature people might be interested in is that I have enabled avatars for user profiles and comments. Edit your user profile through my account, and you should be able to load an image. I’m not much for avatars myself, so someone else let me know if they have any problems submitting the picture. Once loaded, the image will appear beside all previous comment posts.

Kairosnews has been updated to the Drupal 4.7.0 Release Candidate in anticipation of the approaching stable release. I’ve still got a few things to do on the site, so some of the menu items and pages may move around a little bit.

New features, such as

• Much improved search capabilities.
• Categories for posts are handeled as freetagging like on del.icio.us.
• Blog posts URL’s are now automatically built from the title.
• Registered members can add new and edit existing book pages, and book pages show revisions. Now anyone can update the Weblogs by Teachers and Scholars in Composition, Rhetoric, and Literature and Weblog Webliography pages.
• New theme based upon and inspired by the Drupal version of Mollio and tristar web design’s euphoric.
• The news aggregator can subscribe to atom feeds. Someone could start a thread with a blog post and recommend composition and rhetoric weblogs with atom feeds (e.g., Blogger sites) for us to suscribe to.

For the moment, there is on WYSIWYG editor for entering content. I have not had the chance to test the options availablef for Drupal. But don’t let that stop anyone. The site is ready for use.

If anyone experiences any problems, please post the issue to this thread.

– Charlie

read more

Later today or this evening, I’ll be upgrading Kairosnews to the Drupal 4.7 release candidate. Expect that the site may be unavailable for about half an hour, and then some momentary glitches here and there while I fine tune.

Note that you’ll easily be able to spot when the upgrade has occurred.

Get your Kairosnews Limited Edition T-Shirt Today!

Wow. So much news–and so exciting! It’s my honor and privilege to be the first to tell you about a new line of Kairosnews ™ merchandise that will (a) help fund a very important new project here at Kairosnews and (b) help get the word out to your colleagues about our upgrade. Of course, the biggest project that’s in the works now is the upgrade from Drupal (a zero-cost open source CMS) to Microsoft Sharepoint Team Services (a full-featured, commercial, “solution-focused” management system). Of course, Sharepoint isn’t free like Drupal, but you get what you pay for. Now that we’ve been doing Kairosnews for awhile, and what with getting PhDs and such, we feel it’s time to take things to the next level; to quit hobbying around and get professional. We will also be implementing a subscription-based model. Non-paying users will still get to visit the Kairosnews site *however often they wish*, but only those paying a nominal support fee will be allowed to view actual content. We feel that this is an equitable solution that should satisfy everyone. We will also be updating our CC license to an All Rights Reserved traditional coypright notice. While we support the spirit behind CC and all that, it’s not paying the bills.

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is pleased to announce that it will again recognize outstanding webtexts with awards to be presented at Computers and Writing 2006 in Lubbock, Texas.

Please see the full text of this announcement for criteria.

For the past several years, many scholars have been making a significant contribution to the knowledge in rhetoric and composition via their weblogs. Academic bloggers are conversing about topics such as professional issues in the discipline, best teaching practices, electronic discourse, and cultural criticism of digital space. Weblogs
are also making a significant contribution to the public intellectual commons. Because weblogs do not have the same gatekeeping checks as traditional scholarly publications, they have heretofore not been considered scholarly work and thus are not often recognized for the contribution they make to our discipline(s).

Just finished experimenting with Rollyo, a web-based service for building a personalized search engine index. As an experiment, I built a searchroll including some of the sites in the Kairosnews weblog list and news aggregator and then added a search block for it in the right hand navigation.

Four years ago today, we went live with this site. Hard to believe it’s been four years already

Live no more in fragments.
Only connect….
E.M. Forster

Sometimes a book becomes less a tree and more a map. That is the way John Rajchman wants us to understand his effort to make Gilles Deleuze understandable: _The Deleuze Connections_(2000) Anyone who has struggled with the problem of roots, tubers, and leaves knows what I’m writing about: it is much better to be capable of lines of flight. “Lines of flight” will now be my way of referring to what rhetoric knows as Invention. (Some composition teachers might think of it as brainstorming.) Lines of flight means we start going and we just keep going, and where we’ll end up can’t be predicted.

It took me a LONG time to learn to exercise self-control with email and instant messaging. The problem is that it’s all too easy to forget the trail it leaves behind–all too easy not to consider the permanence of our digital detritus. One reason I’m loathe to use email is that I can’t instantly hit “UNDO” when I click “SEND.” I’ve sent STUPID emails. But now I feel better. At least I’ve never done anything to embarrass myself as badly as FEMA director Michael Brown. Like OMFG, you’re going to vomit reading this post. Warning: Don’t be drinking Coke when you click this link.

I am preparing my Masters Thesis on the use and effectiveness of motion graphics (primarily Flash animation) in the classroom. I am in the preliminary research stage, and working on narrowing my focus. I am leaning toward post-secondary educational uses, but will appreciate any experience or comments received.

A sense of injustice is a powerful motivator. Notice the honor rightly paid to Rosa Parks, one of the few ‘little people’ to be accorded the honor of a ceremonial funeral at the nation’s capitol. A sense of injustice turns you into a crusader, a person devoted to righting wrongs and correcting injuries. It is this sense that brings me to you today. Terrible crimes have been committed. Some of these crimes include mischaracterization, mistrust, and disrespect. In other words, we face violations of all the norms of liberal democratic discourse. These crimes are so grave that we are forced to pause at the triumphalism of liberal hegemony and acknowledge the necessity to re-think our commitment to its norms and values. Let’s begin with the first crime: