I've spent the morning deleting spam from this blog. So that was fun. Blogger is really annoying me lately, and I'm considering moving this blog over to edublogs/wordpress. I don't know -- maybe I just need to explore this new out of beta blogger more thoroughly.

Yesterday afternoon I suddenly realized I have not decided what am I going to have my students use as an RSS aggregate this semester. I'm definitely switching from flock because it just seems that the main benefit of flock was the way it integrated with wordpress, yet this payoff was not necessarily worth the initial hassle of having everyone download a browser they'd never used before--although I did have students tell me at the end of the semester that they now use flock regularly as their browser. I am trying to decide between google reader and bloglines. I've haven't really dedicated myself to playing around with them as much as I wanted to, but at the moment, google reader seems to make a bit more sense--simply because my students will be utilitzing uniblogs to publish their blogs (they won't need something like bloglines that does it all).

The latest College English landed on my porch yesterday. I'm wasn't terribly excited by any of the articles, but became kind of interested in the argument being made by Patricial Webb, Kirsti Cole, and Thomas Skeen in their article, "Feminist Social Projects: Building Bridges between Communities and Universities." The article responds to critiques of service learning projects that describe them as atheoretical. The authors claim that feminist theories could bring a critical perspective and legitimacy to service learning projects that would allow us (and our students) to take into account the systemic aspect of social problems -- as opposed to service learning simply being grounded in an ethos of volunteerism and philanthropy. This somehow how seems important to/related to my own project, which, in a sense, critiques service learning (at least implicitly) through its critique of critical pedagogy -- my own perspective also being to focus on a systemic analysis of systems (in the case of my project -- specifically, the University); however, these authors seem to have a plan (something I tend to lack) for a feminist approach to service learning that moves beyond a critique of existing structures to strategies for change.