I have recently learned that I will be teaching a senior seminar in the Spring 2010 semester, and I’m using this blog entry to think through an idea I have. If I get a little feedback, that would be excellent as well.

The senior seminar is an important capstone for the English Major experience. The seminar I took as an undergrad confirmed my desire to go to graduate school and pursue the career I now find myself in. So when I think about what would be valuable in a seminar now, I look back on that one and recognize the responsibility that I now have.

I need a topic and/or focus that meets as many of the following criteria as possible:

1. It is an interesting topic. A topic, that is, that I will enjoy learning about, and a topic that will attract motivated students to enroll.

I’m currently in the process of setting up Drupal sites for my classes, and I’ve run into a dilemma. Should I use a wysiwyg editor or not? I personally don’t care for them, but would students feel more comfortable composing blog entries in an environment that looks a bit more like a word processor?

In the past, I’ve argued that a plain text editor really leaves more control in the hands of the author, and control is what it’s all about. When a student wants to emphasize text in a blog entry, the path through learning how to properly write an <em> tag pulls them through a thought process that encourage reflection on why and how some text is emphasized. It also gives the student a glimpse under the hood, which — in a day when HTML skills are increasingly less a gateway to web literacy — starts to reveal the layers of software and platform underlying the Internet Explorer / Facebook concept of the web that might otherwise be the default.