Crooked Timber quotes one of my all-time favorite poems today, Clive James’ “The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered.” Here’s how it begins:
The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
I don’t know whether to be delighted or dismayed that I find such enjoyment in this poem.
I’ve recruited two other faculty members to test the MT courseware this quarter, and we’re in the process of locating and squashing various bugs. Turns out I made a number of things more difficult than I needed to, so I’m streamlining as I go.
Nevertheless, initial results are encouraging. Students are using the comment feature—not just on entries where they’re required to post (like “Introductions”), but also on other entries, like the assigned readings. I have a good feeling about all this.
I expect that by the end of this quarter, I’ll have a better version of the courseware available, complete with documentation. As one of my colleagues said, right now it isn’t plug-and-play, it’s more like plug-and-shock.
However, now that the initial configuration headaches have eased, it is remarkably easy to maintain and add to the site. And MT’s templating features make it easy to repurpose information—for example, putting the “instructor information” in the syllabus as well as the sidebar.
One thing I’m considering is finding a student next quarter to help me write an installer of some kind for implementing the courseware in a more automated way. It may only be doable in a mySQL backend environment…I’m not sure yet. But it would be nice for folks not to have to go in and do all the template creation and category addition by hand.
www.flickr.com
|
