Teaching Resources

One of the dream classes that I’ve always wanted to teach is a class for student-athletes about identity writing: writing yourself as an athlete. In the past, I’d planned to look at all of the genres that athletes might go on to write: box scores, autobiographies, text interview replies, letters, etc. And of course over the years, I’ve added blog posts, Twitters, and Facebook profiles to that list.

Today I find two new sources for my planning pleasure: Jockipedia and TheJockosphere.

Jockipedia is a site where athletes can make their own profiles and link to all of their own social media, including their personal web site, their blog, their Twitter feed, Facebook and MySpace pages, video and photo sites, and even their foundation or charity’s web site. There’s a brief bio of the player and even some stats on the site. The bio links out to the original Wikipedia article.

TheJockosphere is a collection of reviews of athlete’s blog posts. The editors of the site pick interesting posts and condense them, linking the original blog from the post. This is a great way to surf and find fantastic athlete-writers. Their tag line is: “TheJockosphere - Because how many blogs can you read on your own?”

Please please help me find a department that wants this class taught!

http://wiredforbooks.org

From Don Swaim’s radio show, interviews with poets and writers; other readings and files also available. Sponsored by Ohio University.

Direct link to Swaim’s interviews:
http://wiredforbooks.org/swaim/

Direct link to mp3 page:
http://wiredforbooks.org/mp3/

Diane always knows about the best stuff.  A guy–Mike Diccicco–is writing a novel on Twitter starting February 5th.

Follow secretlifehamel on Twitter, or catch up at his blog:

http://secretlifehamel.blogspot.com

Richard Beach of the University of Minnesota together with Deborah Appleman (Carleton College), Susan Hynds (Syracuse), and Jeffrey Wilhelm (Boise State) have put together a website for training student-teachers to teach literature. With pages and links to critical methodologies, practical questions and answers, and genre studies, this site is a real throw-down resource. A fantastic job, well balanced, and up-to-date.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~rbeach/teachingliterature/

Stumbled over the UNC “Documenting the American South” collections again; I had completely forgotten how great it is. Slave narratives, first-person memoirs, oral history narratives, and most interestingly from a research perspective, 121 compositions written by students of UNC between 1795 and 1868.

Oh, and I stumbled here because they have Charles Chesnutt’s books full text with illustrations and lots lots more (including Grace King!).