DigiWriMo 2012

Oh, all right, fine. (That's me agreeing, but in something a huff.) I'll have a go at DigiWriMo, because it'd be nice for a change to get beyond the sense of having recently meant to have written something. I'm interested to see whether and how writing online -- "digital writing," he scoffed, "puh-leeeeze" -- can work as a distinct practice rather than just as a different publication venue.

The primary venue for my writing will likely be three blogs:

  • Not Strategic: dating back to my deep frustration at the draft UVic strategic plan, released in 2011, this blog seems like as good a place as any for me to articulate assorted professional frustrations and questions
  • Book Addiction: this very blog you're reading now, this month should give me a push to make some connections between some of the posts I've written and books I've read over the last several years
  • Ecology Writing Pedagogy: this one may not fly. I set it up as my blog for #CFHE12, a MOOC which started on October 8, 2012, on the Current/Future State of Higher Education, but marking and contract bargaining/mediation meant that I couldn't make time even to start articulating my thoroughly conflicted views on the questions being raised under the #CFHE12 hashtag. Like I said, I'd like to get beyond the sense of having recently meant to have written something.

BUT FOR THE RECORD: people don't need to write more, so much as they need to READ more. I'm opposed neither to Digital Writing Month nor to NaNoWriMo, National (?!?) Novel Writing Month, but there's only so much benefit to having lots of people running off at the finger-tips. Quite apart from the chance of finally achieving the million-monkey Hamlet, the great literacy challenge of our time isn't writing, but reading. There's already vastly more text, digital and otherwise, than can reasonably be read by any one person, and on irregular sad occasions I find myself simply purging my list of online pages to visit and read, out of despair at ever getting the time for them.

So my worry about DigiWriMo, frankly, is that I'll join the hordes of writers for a month, but at the cost of all the reading that I do so enjoy.

And of course the marking has to get done, some way, some time: 75 lecture summaries currently in hand, 75 project proposals arriving in mid-November, grad student supervisions. Somehow I see no cachet or future in DigiMarkMo.

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