You might have noticed that things seem quieter around here since the semester began. It’s because of the usual reasons, namely being that there are just some things that I don’t write about here, and my job is usually one of them. That’s especially true now that my department has transitioned from a Department of Rhetoric into a Department of Writing Studies that has incorporated faculty from several departments and taken on the first-year writing program, among other things. We’ve changed colleges (College of Food, Agricultural, Food, and Natural Resources to College of Liberal Arts) and campuses (St. Paul to Minneapolis). Transitional years are best not blogged by graduate students who would like to have a job, I think. But as you can imagine, it still takes up a fair amount of brain space, which means that it crowds out some of the other things I might be writing about instead.

The AFSCME union, which represents our clerical, health, and technical workers, has been on strike since the first week of school. It began as a rather friendly strike (as these things go), with waving and honking, and has mostly remained so. The tone is beiginning to change a bit this week, though. Eleven students (and a professor and staff member, according to some reports) began a hunger strike in support of the workers on Tuesday. This morning, picketers slowed traffic in front of the main parking garage on the St. Paul campus until traffic backed up for several blocks. The tone in front of the garage was fairly unpleasant, but not ugly. (Think Minnesota Nice unpleasant, not Typical Angry Union unpleasant.) When I came back out three hours later, things had cleared out, but it makes me wonder where all this is headed.

I’m finally getting the chance to teach with wikis this semester after two years of teaching presentations. In my Professional & Technical Writing course, the students have split into five groups for the collaborative Instructions assignment. Each group gets a wiki with which to built their text and ancillary documents. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

It turns out that these students don’t code, not even a little bit. When we were beginning to work with the wikis this morning, I asked if any of them writes HTML or CSS. Not a hand went up, even though they’re nearly all web natives and almost all of them are on FaceBook. It makes sense, once you think about it. They’re mostly 19 - 21 now. LiveJournal and Blogger launched in 1999 — a good eight years ago. MySpace and Facebook are both almost four years old. This group never had to know code; to them, the web is just something you write on. They are fully generation web 2.0.

'Tis the season for talks. I’m talking about using blogs to teach digital composing next week in a graduate seminar on Teaching Digital Writing. I’ll primarily be discussing the Internet Tools & Issues course I taught last spring, and that reminds me that I also need to talk about that here. The week after that is Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s), where Mary Jo Wiatrek-Uhlenkott, Jeff, and I will do a panel on constructions of public trust. Mary Jo is talking about the legal rhetoric surrounding public breast feeding; Jeff is examining the invisible role of women photographers in late 19c photography parlors, where a male name on the shingle connoted a more trustworthy public image; and I’m discussing trust and authority in Wikipedia. The week after that, I’m doing a live chat with an undergrad class on wikiality. And sometime later this semester I’m going to talk to another class about blogging and 'zines, if I accept another invitation that showed up this afternoon. And then I think no more talks for a little while.

Regardless, I still have time to cook. Fall brings the urge to stockpile, and we need a pound or so of garlic, some honeys, and some jams. I think I’ll make the first pumpkin pie tonight. I’ve been having roasted red pepper soup with sandwiches at lunch this week, and I’ll probably whomp up a pot of squash soup this weekend. Gawd, I love fall.