The Blog Ate My Homework

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.... That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."—C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

The blog ate my homework. As a teacher of online classes, I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation on these very words to account for missing or incomplete assignments. It seems that the mysterious world of cyberspace has replaced Fido as the number one repository for misplaced papers and failures of accountability. So before I move on to the more up-beat portion of my post (not to mention somehow tying it neatly back to C.S. Lewis and/or the application of Web-based tools in the library), let me take a moment to vent. With my students, it (it being the application of cyber-based excuses) usually starts with "I posted it yesterday, I don't know where it went," usually moving through various and creative mumblings about "lost in cyberspace," and generally ending somewhere around the ever-alarming "I forgot to save," or the only-slightly-less-startling, "No, it's not in my Sent folder or my Outbox. But I know I sent it." Okay, I know in technological terms, I was born last week, but do my students think I was born yesterday? (Er, I guess that's a rhetorical question.)

Anyway, lately, I've been charged with my own homework assignment, which is basically to comment on library applications for various Web-based networking tools from Flickr to Facebook and beyond. My initial reaction, at least to the available krl2pt0 articles, was not too distant from that of Underground Dweller, who wrote, among other deeply pithy things, "I can see where the blog stuff could be useful for committee communications, but it also seems like every separate blog and email account just adds to side work and pulls us away from our primary work duties." On the other hand, like Underground Dweller, I am not unwilling to learn these things and see great opportunity for growth and communication with, say, departmental blogs, leadership blogs, or even procedural wikis. (Is an ILL Wiki of interest to anyone? You tell me.) As far as further comment at this time, I will have to say, the blog ate my homework. This is especially apropos as, in a moment of the deepest irony, my entire blog entry disappeared and wouldn't come back even with repeatedly desperate pounding of the Control + Z keys and even though it's been autosaving every 5 minutes since I started. Just so you know, I had to write it over. And the first one was better.

Because of that, I will have to talk about C.S. Lewis next time. For now, I leave you with the epigraph above and Lewis' wonderful words-to-live-by from The Silver Chair. These words have comforted me in some of the darkest places in my life, and—while I don't exactly consider blogging a dark moment—still, I find food for thought in Lewis' rather allegorical musings from the Underland Kingdom in The Silver Chair as we muddle along in our various virtual worlds.