I have made a few things that people have found useful and/or fun. Help yourself!

annotated bibliography on computer programming & literacy

In 2012, I created an annotated bibliography of sources that connect computer programming to literacy. (I originally made it available on Scribd, but then they started charging for access.) It's a bit dated now, but still potentially useful. You can download it here in [pdf] or [docx]

conference paper title generator

For the 2008 Watson Conference at the University of Louisville, I developed this conference paper title generator site to demonstrate how fun and productive even simple web scripts can be. Type in your topic, and the site will give you a composition and rhetoric conference paper title, complete with colon, parentheses, and scare quotes!

notes on Maurice Black's dissertation, The Art of Code

Here are my notes in doc format on Maurice Black's 2002 dissertation, The Art of Code (University of Pennsylvania English, 2002), which is only available via requesting the physical copy, as far as I know. I learned about this dissertation from reading Nick Montfort's notes on it. It's pretty interesting, and perhaps one of the first software studies dissertations, although no one called it that then. Here's the beginning of Black's abstract on it:

The Art of Code originates at the nexus of literature's and computing culture's related but distinct aesthetic systems. Arguing that software's increasing abstraction from hardware has defined computer programming practices for the last half-century, this dissertation shows how that abstraction has shaped the aesthetics, politics, and professional culture of programming. Specifically, the dissertation examines how some programmers have adopted a literary approach to coding, describing carefully crafted code as “beautiful,” “elegant,” “expressive,” and “poetic”; writing and reading programs as literary texts; and even producing hybrid artifacts that are at once poems and programs.

Read the rest of the abstract here.

blogs! tools for teaching

I designed the blogs! tools for teaching site in 2006 to help college writing teachers use blogs productively in their classes. At the time, there were not as many straightforward yet comprehensive resources available on teaching with blogs. Several people at the UW and elsewhere have told me they found the site useful as they began teaching writing with blogs.

free resources online

The free resources online site gathers many of the online resources available for copyright-free or creative commons-licensed resources. It's particularly geared towards the teaching, research, and presenting that academics do. I presented it at the CCCC Computer Connection in 2008.

guide to the internet for my mom

I co-produced this streamlined guide to fun stuff on the internet for my mom for Christmas 2008. It includes links to free university lectures, news sites, podcasts and other free goodies offered by the web.