No Autorun for you!

So this is me, beating my poor old mac with a stick. I like macs, I really do. But when they put out their requirements for running software, they should be honest. The old 800Mhz processor might run the software, but it won't DO anything. It sits there, it spins. So although I could try and create an autoran pretty little introduction to my assignments CD, you're not getting that. Because if I have to watch the pretty little spinning disk thing for one more minute I'm going to lose my mind. Also, because autorun.inf files for windows can't be directed to an html file, they have to be directed to an exe, and I'm not writing something in C OR downloading an application to do that for me.

So neener. You get to open the index.html file yourself, which isn't all that pretty. I'm saving the pretty for the course website I'll be building over break.

Somehow this struggle has got me to thinking about how I can talk to my students about "good" writing. We all know it's impossible to define. We all know it might not really exist. But because students will want to know what I think good writing is, I know I have to come up with some course appropriate answer to that. Given that I'm already having them write proposals and design plans for written work, I think I can use those proposals and design plans to get at this idea that "good" writing or communication are those things that adequately convey the point the author wished (if not several others unintended but maybe better) to the given audience. I'm having them define their audience and goal first, so these proposals and design plans work as a sort of starting point on talking about rhetor intent and finished product and how the two relate, but also how sometimes rhetor intent doesn't have anything to do with how we receive something as well (particularly, the creative non fiction unit will allow me to do this, since it's easier to control how a person responds to an essay than to a story, which is ONE of the reasons I want to keep that contrast in my syllabus, and it's also why I think we've been hung up on five paragraph essays for so long: the audience's experience is very controlled, they get what they expect, but that's not how real communication works... even if you want it to... so by mid class that definition of "good" communication should be all nicely complicated, but I'll still have students trying for it with the design plans, and thinking more critically about using a variety of ways of reaching their audience.....

And damn that's a big paragraph.

But I got to thinking about that because of me trying to find a "pretty" way to present my course materials. I can't say why it matters, it's some odd compulsion that I picked up from being a tech comm major. I just don't have time to really show off right now, so you get a very simple html file instead. My intent was to use director to make an autorun.exe file that would play when you put the cd in. That didn't happen. Did this project fail? Well... no. I just had to reconfigure things. As much as that frustrates me, that reconfiguration/revision thing is part of this course too....