For the next few days, my “Five Years Ago” block at right will be filled with post-Katrina posts. After all these years with the blog, it still feels very odd to have such a record of past trauma, the detail of what was going through my head in those days when I desperately needed someone around me to understand how bad things were in New Orleans.

The power of this kind of record is part of what makes me agree with Paul Carr’s assessment: what I’ve gained in immediacy and community via Twitter, I’ve lost in preservation, longevity, even permanence.

It’s this kind of thing that has me torn between the precious little time I have for this kind of writing and the desire to keep those thoughts somewhere I might get back at them five years from now.

I’m way more pressed for time than I’d like right now, finishing up a bajillion details involved in moving myself and a subset of my stuff across the country for the next ten months, but I want to be sure to take a second to note the absolute awesomeness of Anthologize, the new WordPress 3.0 plugin developed by the One Week | One Tool workshop, sponsored by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. The plugin is designed to take you from blog to book — or, even better, from many blogs to many kinds of book-like outputs. I’ve only just begun playing with it, but can easily imagine it become a key part of my Intro to Digital Media Studies class, and I can also see its utility in repurposing thematically-linked blog posts in more permanent, more “official” form.

Huge congratulations to the Anthologize team, and I look forward to watching — and participating in — the project’s further development.

My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now available at a new URL). There are certainly many more academic bloggers than there were in 2005, and there are even some whose blogs are taken seriously as the key venues in which they’re publishing their work. But I’m curious about the degree to which attitudes about blogs have changed — both whether they have, and why. Is it only the rise of social networking systems that privilege immediacy (c.f. Facebook, Twitter) that have lent the relative leisureliness of blogs a kind of seriousness? Is it that we’re using blogs differently, now that we’ve got other outlets for the top-of-the-head thoughts that used to land in venues like this one?

Among other things this weekend, I’m re-reading Fanon for Monday’s class. Fascinating to see today’s five years ago post pop up.

Um, yeah. I’m sure that’ll work.

[11.08 am, edited to add: Ed Champion has published a very interesting interview with the FTC's Richard Cleland on these new regulations, and particularly how they might affect book review blogs.]

I do not know whether to be amused by the irony or horrified by the passage of time.

Just utterly tyrannized by the to do list. Once the grading and the thesis drafts are out of the way, there are classes to prepare for, a grant proposal to be written, and a 15-minute presentation to be carved out of a 40-page chapter. Plus a journal peer review, a dissertation report, and a tenure review. And then there’s that little book project of mine with the looming deadline.

All of which is to say that once some of the small urgent stuff gets out of my way, and I can pay attention to the bigger important stuff, I’ll hope to have thoughts worth writing about, not to mention a moment in which to write them.

I’m deep in the thick of the best semester I’ve had in several years, so it’s taken some doing to pry me away from teaching in order to see what teaching-related stuff is going on out there in the blogosphere. Having spent some time poking around, though, I’ve found a bunch of exciting stuff for this fortnight’s only one day late Teaching Carnival! Before we start, a few reminders about the nature of the ride, a warning to keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times, and a big thank you to our guide last time. Now, off we go!

Lots of folks other than me are having good semesters, and are doing some cool stuff:

• Collin Brooke updates us on his experiment with his graduate course.
• David Silver took his class on what sounds like a yummy field trip to North Beach.
• Scott Eric Kaufman builds on his “how to teach film responsibly in a comp class” essay (also linked in the last TC) by posting more of his teaching notes on film (also a bit more), as well as thinking about teaching comics (of which there’s also a bit more).
• Chuck Tryon’s graduate course on teaching with technology is producing some fascinating posts.
• The Undergraduate Historian discusses the research essay.
• Lanette Cadle and her class are working on a basic writing wikibook.
• Michael Arnzen’s students produced some impressive collages.

Many of us are nonetheless faced with the semester’s frustrations:

• Sisyphus, for instance, struggles with ambivalence.
• Professor Unexpected Terminal Degree faces thoughtless language amongst her students, and finds a great way to deal with it, but then hits the trifecta: absences, tears, and plagiarism.
• Dr. Virago wonders whether some dissertation directors have too much power.
• Dr. No, however, dares to ask that question.
• Flavia is tickled by a comment in her course evaluations.
• And ScienceWoman reminds her students that she’s human.

Lots of us are similarly thinking about the relationship between our lives and our jobs:

• Dr. Crazy, for instance, ponders the relationship between identity and academic life.
• Julie Meloni points out the value of staying politically neutral in the classroom.
• Mike Edwards ponders the quotidian nature of heroism.

And we’re not the only ones:

• David Silver’s twitter assignment leads to a great discussion of the value of asking students to do public, internet-based work under their own names, with key input from the students themselves.

Many of us are pondering the future of the profession, our fields, or our institutions:

• Horace ponders the MLA’s Teagle Report and its recommendations for the future of the English major.
• (At the risk of over-blowing my own horn, I’ll point out that I did too, but a bit more, um, against the grain.)
• Dave Parry argues the case for the elimination of tenure.
• Steve Krause considers the library website of the future.
• Annie Em gets the wake-up call from the new epistemology.
• Alex Reid answers the question, what do you do with a degree in English?
• And JBJ altruistically offers to stretch outside his field, for the good of the institution.

Others of us are less sanguine about things, though:

• Mills Kelly worries about the relationship between good teaching and the cash nexus.
• And it will not shock you to hear that lots of us are thinking about the grade inflation and student effort, including Timothy Burke, Robert Farley, Scott Eric Kaufman, Dr. N, Hube, and Jonathan.
• Analepsis uses the issue as a teachable moment.
• Silvia ponders the disconnect between faculty expectations and student perceptions of responsibility for their own learning.
• Dave Mazella thinks about teaching p*rn, and returns to consider student resistance.
• Dean Dad considers the effects of student fears of failure.

Finally, this episode of Teaching Carnival could not be complete without a section devoted to the Facebook TOS dust-up of February 2009:

• Rana presents an excellent analysis of the issue.
• Amanda French compares the new Facebook TOS (now the old-new Facebook TOS, I guess, sort of like New Coke, so I guess we’re all drinking the Classic Facebook TOS now!) with the terms of a number of other social media sites.
• Chuck uses the occasion to think about public media 2.0.
• And several of us invent our own new TOS.

That’s it for this carnival! Tune in, well, 13 days from now for Teaching Carnival 3.3, hosted by the probably more responsible and on top of things Alan Benson, and remember, tag posts of yours or other folks with “teaching-carnival” on Delicious or Technorati if you’d like them included.

I’m ostensibly up tomorrow as host of Teaching Carnival 3.2, but poking through Delicious and Technorati is turning up little in the way of submitted material. If you have written or read posts in the last two weeks that should be part of this carnival, shoot me an email at kf at plannedobsolescence dot net. I’ll be happy to include them, and will hope to get the festivities underway tomorrow!

If you’ve bothered coming round these parts lately, you’ll have noticed that things were loading excruciatingly slowly, a problem for which I was starting to blame my hosting provider. But this morning, for whatever reason, I decided to take a look at my code and see whether one of the scripts I’m running in the background here might be responsible.

And lo but the source code for my index page had a buttload of spam links embedded in it. And so I set about searching through my php, trying to figure out which file was generating these links.

Both index.php and wp-content/themes/MY THEME/header.php appear to have been hacked, and a very long bit of base64 code embedded in them, which was apparently what (a) was generating the links, and (b) was causing the page to load so slowly.

But there are also a few mystery files that have popped up in my directories, about which I can find no information online. I’m waiting on a response from my hosting provider’s support folk, to see if one of these files belongs to their one-click install process. If not, I may have to do a fresh WP installation, just to be sure that nothing else has been compromised.

And of course, the ritual changing of passwords.

So, word to the wise: if you’re running WP, and things seem to have gotten oddly slow, it might be worth a sec to check your source code.