tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52010447174028610192012-02-16T22:52:35.040-05:00A blog devoted to the two things that occupy my life the most.Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.comBlogger281100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-87678526222229195222009-09-09T17:19:00.001-05:002009-09-09T17:19:45.885-05:00

The particular good news found in these articles is that Levitz will take over Adventure Comics from Geoff Johns, meaning Levitz will be back at the helm of the LSH. Some kinda sad news is that this new focus on branding makes DC seem like more of a corporate machine than before, which chips away at the old magic of comic book companies for me. http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/09/

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-47769025690741439202009-01-28T16:20:00.003-05:002009-01-28T16:29:25.043-05:00

Ah, the intersection of political humor and comic books is always a good thing.... Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed To Understand His Reference To Savage Sword Of Conan #24 | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-5880558524995647682009-01-15T10:56:00.001-05:002009-01-15T10:56:57.482-05:00

Linked so you can go to the original page:

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-67950667007878991012008-12-23T12:53:00.004-05:002009-01-28T16:30:12.968-05:00

Check out Stop Using Rhetoric to Teach Writing for some entertainment today. Here's the introductory paragraph: After almost five years teaching writing, English, ESL, and humanities courses to high school students and undergraduates, I have come to the conclusion that it is a serious mistake to ground undergraduate instruction in writing in the basics of Aristotelian rhetoric. I believe doing so

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-64311986951797236502008-12-21T20:49:00.004-05:002009-01-28T16:30:42.216-05:00

Recently I had a chance to re-edit my chapter in Teenagers from the Future: Essays on the Legion of Super-Heroes. As I was working on the essay, I started thinking about how comic books are cited in MLA and APA formats, particularly comic books like Legion of Super-Heroes, which have had more than one series. In the book, the house style is to use "Vol." and the series number (e.g. Legion of

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-54301648121675226322008-08-02T10:52:00.004-05:002008-08-02T10:57:53.972-05:00

I've been thinking over the events of Justice Society of America Annual #1 and the status of this Earth-2 in the reformed, post Infinite Crisis multiverse, and it's led me to some observations. I forget exactly when it happened in the series (maybe after the "JSA/JSA" arc), but in the previous JSA series, Power Girl experienced a moment of weirdness during time travel as the group went through

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-37030276313922198872008-04-16T08:27:00.002-05:002008-04-16T08:30:05.159-05:00

Check out this post about the new book of LSH essays and look at the list of chapters. I'm in there. :-)

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-35512126704539206062008-03-29T20:13:00.003-05:002008-03-29T20:18:30.606-05:00

So the verdict is in: Jerry Siegel's estate has gotten their share of the rights for Superman back from DC (or, rather, Time Warner). I can't say I'm real thrilled with that decision, and it seems I'm not alone. The comments on that particular article show a split of opinion, with some people claiming the Siegels are greedy and just don't want to work, others arguing that Jerry Siegel and Joe

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-54764302084812891612007-09-07T08:42:00.000-05:002007-09-07T08:48:49.372-05:00

As revealed in this Newsarama article, Jim Shooter is returning to the LSH with issue #37, confirming speculation I read in The Legion Omnicom and elsewhere. How this bodes for the title is a mixed bag at the moment. While I'm intrigued Shooter's return (he's written some great stuff in the past, and he created Ferro Lad, my favorite Legionnaire), the nature of the LSH book isn't what it was when

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-19607320167152836292007-08-12T07:31:00.002-05:002008-03-29T20:15:40.191-05:00

The Home of All Things Legion reports that Francis Manapul will be taking over the art chores as of Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes 37. Go to their site for the whole story, but in the meantime, here's a sneak peek at the art. Things of note, some of which I like and some of which I don't: Chameleon's chain mail doesn't look as cool as his previous costume. Something about that

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-88062255624110388662007-07-13T09:49:00.000-05:002007-07-13T09:52:58.667-05:00

For anyone interested, my thesis is finished and has been approved, accepted, and blessed (well, maybe not that last) by my thesis committee and the Graduate Office. Copies are at the bindery (they'll be ready Tuesday), and I went through the new electronic submission process for the copies required by the Graduate Office. For anyone interested in looking at my thesis, here's the link: http://

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-56548548097494969302007-06-06T12:30:00.000-05:002007-06-06T14:06:38.778-05:00

Tying together Yancey's "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key" and Selfe's "Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention." Yancey's article is the 2004 Chair's Address for CCCC. Some of the points that stuck out in terms of my thesis: Formation of a "reading public" in the 19th century and the parallel formation of the "writing public" at the end of the

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-9485979900526292142007-05-14T01:12:00.000-05:002007-06-06T12:33:25.041-05:00

...writing a thesis is very brain-draining work. Be seeing you.

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-20666387174621081792007-05-06T18:11:00.002-05:002009-09-09T18:01:07.279-05:00

Reviewed here: 52 52 Hawkgirl 63 Click on the post title for full text. 52 52 So we've reached the last issue of DC's year-long weekly-format experiment, and while the ride's been uneven sometimes, I have to say of this last issue: damn, what a way to go. Having tied up most of the remaining plot lines last week, this issue focuses on the Rip Hunter/Booster Gold/Mister Mind story, and we

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-50636735091223427082007-04-29T21:21:00.000-05:002007-09-05T10:09:27.204-05:00

Only three books this week, so this should be a lot shorter. Reviewed herein: 52 51 Justice Society of America 5 Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes 29 52 51 With only one more issue to go, the writing team running the show in 52 finally get around to resolving some of the other plot threads that have been carrying on. Animal Man finally gets home (I love that "I'm still

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-12338685027700399532007-04-23T01:23:00.000-05:002007-04-29T21:20:35.303-05:00

This is the first time I'm using this account to post comics reviews. Reviewed here: 52 49-50 World War III: A Call to Arms World War III: The Valiant World War III: Hell Is for Heroes World War III: United We Stand Flash: Fastest Man Alive 11 Justice League of America 8 Manhunter 30 Shadowpact 12 52 49-50 and the World War III issues With 52 nearing its end, it's about time

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-25972114441219175742007-04-22T14:44:00.000-05:002007-04-23T07:35:06.808-05:00

I've been trying to work on my final project, but I'm feeling lost and tempted to give up. What have I accomplished in this class? I've done all the reading, written all the stuff, given all the presentations, but what have I actually learned? Maybe I've learned I'm not suited to this kind of class. It isn't that I wouldn't use computers and new media in teaching a composition classroom, but I'm

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-34780156795269410802007-04-08T16:08:00.000-05:002007-04-23T07:35:28.268-05:00

Okay, so I'm going through Writing New Media (we haven't talked about it all semester and all of a sudden we're supposed to talk about it, so it's a mad scramble to refresh my memory of what I did read and read some more of it—I wish we'd used this book more consistently through the course instead of having it feel like a sudden add-on that felt like "Well, haven't you been reading it anyway?"—

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-45903522659791262822007-03-27T08:04:00.001-05:002007-04-23T07:46:16.190-05:00

When it comes to this week's reading about Wikipedia and Turnitin.com, I scarcely know where to begin. Let's start with this: Turnitin.com scares the crap outta me. Don't get me wrong: I'm all for students publishing their work. I'm all for open source and the free sharing of information in the digital domain—frankly, I'd think of myself as a hypocrite if I didn't, considering I use Firefox, a

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-46927618177077349742007-03-05T23:36:00.001-05:002007-04-23T07:36:30.164-05:00

This is going to be one of those tying-things-together posts, so if you don't like them, skip right over.... A couple of things I noticed in all the articles (even, in some ways, Scott McCloud's stuff) is the focus on the Web as "presence." People self-publish on the Web through blogs and MySpace and—well, just putting something on the Web is self-publishing, really. And that self-publishing,

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-26500947842554383582007-02-26T00:09:00.001-05:002007-04-23T07:37:02.116-05:00

"[I]n this chapter we explain how new technologies can be integrated at various phases of the writing process without requiring teachers to have access to the latest technology or a wired classroom" (34). It's good to see an article that finally brings to bear the notion that not everyone's classroom is created technologically equal; too often in the reading thus far I've been left with the

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-26778129371820451382007-02-13T21:11:00.000-05:002007-04-23T07:37:02.116-05:00

Just a quick comment on something Selber writes.... So why do so many students today still operate the computer like a glorified typewriter? In part because teachers often implicitly or explicitly dismiss student experiments with genres and formats, and in part because certain documentation styles remain quite traditional (the MLA style, for example, still uses underlining to indicate italicized

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-52230385510835727232007-02-12T02:08:00.001-05:002007-04-23T07:37:02.116-05:00

This is definitely not a chapter to read if you think academic texts should look a certain way and no other.... Wysocki argues that the examination of visual rhetoric gets short shrift in the academic setting. Certainly it gets short shrift in the average English class; a look the main style manuals that English classrooms apply to academic texts (MLA and APA) shows that texts produced according

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-36537969709846396962007-01-30T01:34:00.001-05:002007-04-23T07:37:02.117-05:00

This chapter is a recounting of the first attempt by DeWitt and Dickson to change the pedagogy of a first-year composition class to include the use of technology in teaching students about writing. DeWitt and Dickson revamped their class to incorporate Web technologies to achieve the same student writing goals that the class had before the revamp: "to process difficult text—both as readers and

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-83684743591574096442007-01-22T22:29:00.001-05:002007-04-29T16:32:13.243-05:00

I tend to take fewer notes when reading case studies, because usually I'm not interested in focusing on any one particular case/narrative. page 644: "Literacies have life spans." This is an interesting notion, and I'm curious as to whether it would interface with Scribner's paradigms of literacy and Brandt's notion of accumulated literacies. Cf. this quote on page 664: "[I]n the lives of

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-92125208934112919342007-01-22T02:18:00.001-05:002007-04-23T07:37:02.117-05:00

Haven't read Hawisher/Selfe yet; that's for tomorrow. Scribner, "Literacy in Three Metaphors" I keep using substituting the word "paradigm" for "metaphor" in my notes. Too much time working with physics paradigms in that class at Bradley, I guess, but these do seem to me more like paradigms than metaphors (in fact, I don't see how they're really metaphors at all). Perhaps I'm just being dense.

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-61736109422908816162007-01-14T17:28:00.001-05:002007-04-23T07:37:02.118-05:00

Just finished reading the two Time articles for class. I could blog about how the 1982 article (the infamous "Person of the Year: The Personal Computer" article) came true in a lot of ways and fell through in others, but what really caught my eye was how the 2006 Person of the Year article was organized in comparison to the 1982 article. Read the 1982 essay, and it's just that: an essay. I

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5201044717402861019.post-78517888218863723852007-01-11T12:19:00.000-05:002007-01-11T12:24:03.407-05:00

Welcome to the space where, right now, I'm keeping my notes for my W510 class. After the class is over, maybe I'll move my comics reviews over here from my LiveJournal account.

Alan Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484960498565217558noreply@blogger.com0