{"id":3273,"date":"2021-03-23T22:30:39","date_gmt":"2021-03-24T02:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=3273"},"modified":"2021-03-23T22:30:39","modified_gmt":"2021-03-24T02:30:39","slug":"o-tempora-o-moira","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/o-tempora-o-moira\/","title":{"rendered":"O Tempora! O Moira!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing the idea of forensic work on my own project archives, certainly old enough now to deserve an “ancient” subdomain<\/a> though I aspire to a “gems” subdirectory too<\/a> (a fella can dream):<\/p>\n

From 1997 to 2000 I taught a first-year composition course based on Greil Marcus’s anthology Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.\u00a0<\/em>The course was my first substantial foray into web publishing as a pedagogical strategy. You can read more about it here<\/a>. I still think of this course as one of my boldest and most successful forays into what we would now call open education. It was Web 1.0, relied on the tilde folders on the Mary Washington College web server, and involved hand-coded HTML and software like Dreamweaver that, to be honest, I never really mastered. I had a partner-in-crime-and-creativity Bill Kemp, and together we pulled it off. usually with panache. In the process, we also co-created some great memories for ourselves and with our students.<\/p>\n

When we published our students’ final papers to the Web, we included this statement, one that is breathtakingly naive in retrospect but was deeply and sincerely meant:<\/p>\n

For as long as this College maintains a web site, your work will be out there with your name on it.<\/em><\/p>\n

The whole idea was to do the very opposite of what David Wiley (whom I would not meet for another decade!) so aptly termed “disposable assignments.” <\/a>In many respects, The Great VCU Bike Race Book<\/em><\/a> (thank you, Jimmy Ghaphery<\/a>!) was the spiritual descendant of Stranded<\/em>–but that’s another blog post.<\/p>\n

Now, of course, the Stranded <\/em>site is gone. The College is gone too, and is now a University. And Bill Kemp is also gone, passing away in the late autumn of 2019.<\/p>\n

The art of losing, as the poet wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I thought, and still think, that\u00a0Stranded<\/em>, our first-year composition course, was a thing of rare beauty and intensity that elicited some dynamite writing out of our students. The web publication was also a thing of beauty, but that was down to Bill, who had a much keener interest in and talent for web design than I did at the time (or do now, I imagine). As I think about finding the original files to at least suggest what the site looked like, if not to resurrect it entirely, I recall that Bill made the beautiful home page for our course with a resource called “Moira’s Web Jewels.” There are still examples on Pinterest and elsewhere of what these “jewels” looked like. But Moira’s site is long gone, and doesn’t yield its treasures on the Internet Archive past a few fossilized impressions.<\/p>\n

But I have a hunch I have saved these files somewhere, and that I might be able to piece something together, if only for my own satisfaction.<\/p>\n

And in the meantime, I did find this benediction from Moira in an Internet Archive snapshot:<\/p>\n

\"Moyra's

I’ve seen her name spelled Moira and Moyra. I don’t know which is correct.<\/p><\/div>\n

I found great joy in the creation of\u00a0Stranded<\/em>, the course and the website and the conceptual framework. It deserves an archive. Perhaps once I step through the door into summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continuing the idea of forensic work on my own project archives, certainly old enough now to deserve an “ancient” subdomain though I aspire to a “gems” subdirectory too (a fella can dream): From 1997 to 2000 I taught a first-year … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/moyras-web-jewels-closes.jpg?fit=671%2C624&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-QN","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3273"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3276,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3273\/revisions\/3276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}