RSS on the WWW

Years ago I tried using an RSS feed aggregator inside of Mozilla's Thunderbird. It was great at first. All of the blog posts and new articles on my favorite football teams or from my favorite news sources came right to my email application. I could scan through them quickly to stay abreast of the latest.

Eventually, however, I added too many feeds. Missing a day of checking them off as Read meant that the number of new posts grew to unrealistic amounts. It felt overwhelming, and I started ignoring that part of Thunderbird by marking all new entries as Read. The whole thing became a bit of a waste.

Later, I found out about Mozilla's live bookmarks, and that was exactly what I needed! The browser could hold ten or so of my favorite feeds, and no longer did I feel like I had 50 email inboxes that were filling up. Instead, the feeds were just button I could hold the mouse over to check if anything new had been published. This is the way I still use RSS feeds.

In the classroom, an RSS feed aggregator could greatly aid courses in finding the latest on a topic under study. For example, in an ELA class studying Shakespeare, the class could set up an account for news and publication feeds about Shakespeare and his plays. It could be a weekly part of the curriculum to check the class feeds and summarize news on Shakespeare research or performances.

An class assignment of this type would satisfy numerous Common Core objectives. In particular, this standard really jumps out in my mind:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.8
Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the usefulness of each source in answering the research question; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation.

The portions about "using advanced searches effectively" and "assess the usefulness of each source" strike me as particularly relevant.

This activity would apply to ISTE-S (ISTE - Student PDF) in that students would have to "select and use applications effectively and productively" (6.b) and "evaluate and select information sources based on the appropriateness to specific tasks" (3.c).

Learning and Using Wikis

In graduate school, some of my classmates and I had a habit of editing entries on Wikipedia whenever we came across something we found incorrect or poorly written. Also, there is a wiki for college jobs in the field of Classical Studies that an anonymous owner updates annually. Professionals in the market for a position often check it and update it based on job offers and acceptances. Therefore, I was already quite familiar with the nature and function of a wiki.

I have wanted to build my own wiki and learn more about managing a wiki for a couple of years now. It seems like a good way to keep those serving in different ministries of my church informed about ongoing projects. The wiki created for this assignment (http://orderedmusings.pbworks.com) will be a good place to test out how to organize different pages of a wiki. Setting up and editing the first page on PBwiki was easy, but there are several aspects of the layout and widgets that will take me some time to become comfortable using. Also, designing an intuitive page hierarchy in my wiki will require some thought.

If I were to use a wiki in my classroom, it would probably be a place for the students of a class to develop a literary encyclopedia. Each of my classes could create encyclopedia (Wikipedia-style) on a literary work, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for example. Each student would be required to generate a page on a character and to correct or add to another character's page. During class time, I could have the students write plot summaries for each scene as we read them. One of the pages would serve as the To-Do list of characters and scenes that need to be entered.

This use of a wiki supports Common Core objectives for ELA in several areas. Of course there are objectives like frequency of writing (ELA-W9-10.10) and production and distribution (ELA-W9-10.4, 5, 6) that are directly fulfilled in an assignment like this. Additionally, this assignment would hit on all six of the domains in the ISTE standards for students.

My Use of Blogs

The first blog that had any significant impact on me was Vincent Cheung’s now defunct blog on theology and Christian philosophy (www.vincentcheung.com). It was 2004 when a friend turned me on to the blog because we derived so much from Cheung’s regular entries. It was almost like getting to know the man and spend time with him on a regular basis. I recall feeling disappointed when I would check his blog and find nothing new.

From that experience I went on to visit several other blogs regularly. Bryn Mawr hosts a blog dedicated to reviews of published works in the field of Classical Studies (http://www.bmcreview.org/). During graduate school, it was helpful to have a quick place to check the latest in my field. Later, another friend introduced me to a blog where a former Classics graduate aggregated interesting articles on the ancient world, archaeology, and trends in scholarship, sometimes with a humorous spin (http://rogueclassicism.com/). More recently, I have frequented blogs for law and politics like the Volokh Conspiracy (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/) and blogs for religious issues like The Gospel Coalition (http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/).

Blogs are now a regular part of my Web diet.

I do not intend to use blogs with my students this year. The primary reason I am unlikely to use a blog is the focus of my course in the school’s overall sequence. Tenth-grade English at CCHS is used in large part to work on formal, academic style in writing. My impression is that blogs typically engender an informal approach to writing among students. Additionally, my class emphasizes the use of particular formatting (MLA), and blogs seemingly do not lend themselves to reinforcement of these goals.

From a legal and ethical framework, the greatest challenge is the safe implementation of a web publication for children. Certainly, no educational objective is worth harm to a student. It has been a good to read about the different methods teachers use to keep student identities and locations safe. Instructionally, I think the greatest difficulty is for teachers to tie the use of blogs, like many technologies, to instructional objectives. That is not to say that there are none, but many teachers struggle to make the use of technology about little more than novelty. One of the benefits of using technology in the classroom is that doing it well requires a teacher to have a strong sense of alignment between the tool or method and the objectives.

If I were to use a blog, it would probably be as an additional outlet for creative writing. The class has a segment near the end of the year on Poe’s short stories, and I ask the students to write in Poe’s style. It would both the Creation and Innovation and the Communication and Collaboration standards for students to post their short stories with some image, requiring that each student respond to another’s post by identifying the elements of Poe’s style in the student blog entry.

Back to Blogging

It has been more than three years since I last blogged. In that time many things about my life have changed. However, using a blog for self-expression and easy publication remains a great tool.

I intend to return to posting my occasional ruminations here at Ordered Musings. This is a convenient place to work out my thoughts and keep notes that I might not otherwise record. Just looking back at this blog showed me how many moments of inquiry can become launching points for creative expression. In all honesty, I don't even remember writing those posts. I remember being surprised by the word butter in the LXX, but I have no recollection of Homeric apostrophes. It's a sad admission.

What this demonstrates, however, is how useful a blog can be for chronicling all sorts of journeys in life.

LXX Word - butter

During a divine visitation to Abraham, God and a couple of angels enjoy buttered biscuits and steak for lunch.

Gen 18:8
LXX: ἔλαβεν δὲ βούτυρον καὶ γάλα καὶ τὸ μοσχάριον, ὃ ἐποίησεν, καὶ παρέθηκεν αὐτοῖς, καὶ ἐφάγοσαν· αὐτὸς δὲ παρειστήκει αὐτοῖς ὑπὸ τὸ δένδρον.

Vulgate: tulit quoque butyrum et lac et vitulum quem coxerat et posuit coram eis ipse vero stabat iuxta eos sub arbore

KJV: And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat.

Of course the word βούτυρον caught my eye. Time to look it up and find out if it is the cognate for English's butter. Sure enough.

LSJ:
βού-τῡρον, τό, butter, τὸ πῖον τοῦ γάλακτος Hp.Morb.4.51, cf. Arist.Fr.636, Plu.2.1109b, LXX Ge. 18.8, Sor.1.86, Dsc.2.72, Edict.Diocl.4.50:—also βούτῡρος, ὁ, Gal.13.527. 

OED:
Etymology:  Old English butere weak feminine (in compounds buttor-); < Latin butyrum, < Greek βούτυρον.

Adam Parry on Apostrophe in Homer

 In my previous entry on apostrophe, I speculated that occurrences of second person address used by the narrator in the Odyssey might be best explained as remnants of a previous placement of the Eumaeus sequence. Perhaps at some earlier point in the Homeric tradition a character within the narrative address Eumaeus instead of the narrator, thus making the lines preceding a speech of Eumaeus second person by formula.
 Of course more research is needed, and I began with Adam Parry's 1972 article, which argues that formulaic expressions and epithets in fact contain meaningful content and are for audience response.(1) Also, Parry (1972, 10) argues that meter would never have been an obstacle for the creation/composition of epic verse. For example:

It is time we stopped saying that the poet must have said a thing in this way because no other way existed for him to say it. We do not know what existed, either potentially or actually.

  First, Parry covers the apostrophes in the Iliad addressed to Patroclus. Parry sees in Patroclus the counter-paradigm to other major characters in the Iliad in that he alone is "gentle" (meilikhos). Patroclus, according to Parry, drives the plot of the Iliad in that he alone can tell Achilles how heartless he must be to ignore the suffering of the Greeks. Thus, Parry sets up Patroclus as the sympathetic character par excellence, to whom the bard speaks with great affection. In this case, if Parry is correct, apostrophe indicates a heightened emotional importance of the person addressed in that context.
  Second, Parry discusses the apostrophes involving Menelaus in the Iliad. Parry argues that Menelaus has more at stake in the Trojan war than just glory and honor in battle; he is upholding his right as a husband and leader among the Greeks. The theft of his wife must be requited. Additionally, the gods, Athena and Hera in particular, have a special interest in Menelaus' cause and survival. His moral authority as the mistreated host and husband of Helen keeps the Greeks in the moral high ground. Parry also adduces evidence that Menelaus is a gentle and sympathetic character who stands as a contrast to others, especially his brother Agamemnon. Parry (1972, 19) summarizes his understanding of the apostrophes of Menelaus in the following excerpt:

All these apostrophes appear in scenes which especially reveal aspects of Menelaus' character that the poet elsewhere is at pains to throw into relief; and they occur in connexion with those persons, Patroclus and Achilles, whose relationship with Menelaus again throws light on his character. Did the poet carefully plan out these subtle details of the poem's architecture? Not exactly, we may guess. Rather he had developed, over the years in which he had sung countless versions of these stories, a precise conception of Menelaus' character and his relation to other characters which made these details, including the apostrophes, fall into place.

Footnotes:
(1) Parry (1972) "Language and Characterization in Homer" HSPh 76: 1-22

Apostrophe in the Homeric Narrative

  Although the Homeric narrator maintains a third-person narrative for the vast majority of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, in both epics the narrator departs from this format and directly addresses a character within the tale. This is referred to as apostrophe by scholars.(1) Apostrophe is the rhetorical figure used when a speaker "turns away" from one topic, person, or grammatical construction to another.(2)
  Lengthy and formulaic texts like the Homeric epics naturally train the reader to expect certain expressions and create a sense of appropriate dialogue for the reader. The text teaches the reader how it will communicate over the great length of the text and which characters "should" say what types of things. I do not mean that the the poetry, read or heard, has the intended function of instructing readers and hearers in metapoetics, but that this is one natural result of the experience with the epic poems. In other words, because the narrator of the Odyssey describes the action of the narrative in the third person for the first thirteen books of the epic, the reader naturally develops the expectation that this is the mode of narrative expression. Consequently, the appearance early in the fourteenth book of a second person address from the narrator to one of the characters jars the reader.
  When I encountered this phenomenon during my reading today (Od. 14.55), the shift to second person narration immediately struck me as odd, and I wondered if there were not some textual problem. After a quick check, de Jong (2001) set me on the right path. This has, of course, been noted for some time, and scholars debate the significance of it. These apostrophes in the Odyssey are particularly striking because they only occur at the introduction of the speeches of Eumaeus, Odysseus' pig farmer. Here is de Jong's brief comment on this phenomenon:

Whereas in the Iliad several characters are apostrophized, this happens in the Odyssey only in the case of Eumaeus: cf. 165, 360, 442, 507; 16.60, 135, 464; 17.272, 311, 380, 512, 579; and 22.194. Scholars are divided as to whether the apostrophe is merely a technical device to accommodate names with a difficult metrical shape, or is a narratively significant device designed to focus on or sympathize with characters. The apostrophes of Eumaeus always form part of speech introductions and it would be forced to claim a special effect in all cases. Taken together, however, these passages do reveal the sympathy of the narrator for this gentle character. Only the narrator, Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope address the swineherd by name; the Suitors refer to him as ‘swineherd’.(1)

  I cannot help but wonder if the narrator's second person address to Eumaeus alone in the Odyssey does not represent the epic in a previous form. Although much needs to be researched, I am inclined to think of these apostrophes as remnants of an earlier placement of the entire Eumaeus sequence. In simple terms, the epic trains the reader to think of the narrator using only third person address and the characters alone capable of second person address. So, instead of believing that something unusual has occurred in the Homeric tradition at each apostrophe, it seems possible to view these instances in light of the process of tradition creation. At an earlier point in the tradition of the Odyssey, the Eumaeus sequence might have been spoken by a character, retold by Odysseus after the defeat of the suitors. At the point in the tradition in which the Eumaeus portion of the Odyssey is crystallized from oral performance into written text, it has been moved to another point in the narrative. This would explain the second person addresses.
  More investigation is necessary. This might not answer the reason for the occurrences of apostrophe in the Iliad. Also, there might be a correlation between which character is in dialogue when an apostrophe occurs.

Follow-up sources:

Parry, A. (1972) ‘Language and Characterization in Homer’, HSPh 76: 1–22

Matthews, V. J. (1980) ‘Metrical Reasons for Apostrophe in Homer’, LCM 5: 93–9

Block, E. (1982) ‘The Narrator Speaks: Apostrophe in Homer and Vergil’, TAPhA 112: 7–22

Yamagata, N. (1989) ‘The Apostrophe in Homer as Part of the Oral Technique’, BICS 36: 91–103

Footnotes:
(1) de Jong (2001) A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey, 345.
(2) Anderson (2000) Glossary of Greek Rhetorical Terms, 25 and 16-17 under alloiosis.