Thursday, February 02, 2006

My Project

While I am not preparing a memo, like you I have a research project I am working on.

I am disatisfied with the textbooks that are available for the course in Business and Administrative Writing (ENG W331) I teach on a regular basis. I want to write a textbook which will serve as the basis for the course. And while I could market it to one of the textbook publishers (I have done textbook work for Longman in the past) I am inclined to self-publish the book. The reason: textbooks are very expensive, and I'd rather have the ability to charge my students less than the textbooks that are currently available, and funnel any earnings back into developing a better writing program at the university. In other words, I'd rather the money be used locally, instead of going to one of the three or four major international companies that control the worldwide textbook market.

My goal is to have a draft of the text completed by 1 July 2006. That will allow me the summer to revise it, publish it, and get it into the system where the text can be ordered by the bookstore, or by individual students on line. I hope to begin using the book in the spring semester of next year.

Some blogs I noticed today:

Angielski has some great observations about the Light conference: http://www.angielski66.blogspot.com/

Sarah has some interesting comments on the obesity discussion, and some of you have responded: http://www.sarahwriter.blogspot.com/

Brandon has a fabulous discussion on journalism. He talks about the Poynter institute, which is an important resource for those of you intererested in journalism: http://www.brandonrentfrow.blogspot.com/

Some interesting thoughts from Blogger18622 on the John Law article. The responses by the class are also interesting: http://www.bloggeripfwblogger.blogspot.com/.

Amie also reacts to that article: http://www.researchmetodsdesertrose.blogspot.com/

John talks about a writing project, and shares a story. This is interesting work:
http://www.canoemidewst.blogspot.com/

I think I've finally commented and linked to each students blog at least once.

1 Comments:

Blogger Worth Weller said...

Hey Stevens - nice blog, and I see you are using it as a classroom teaching tool. Very cool. And nice to see it is so up to date.

Here's my blog, which I also use that way too (as well as to vent!).

http://wellerw140h.blogspot.com/

I'm going to post a link to your blog on my blog, and I'm hoping we can build a blogging community this way.

4:56 PM  

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