I decided to drill down the categories I’m using with Furl to make them even more specific to individual areas within the departments. So now I have categories and feeds for general English, English literature, English compostion, English media, etc. Toss a few more viewRssBox macros on my links page and now I have a whole bunch of automatically added links that are separated out by content area. Now I know there are some limitations here. Obvously, these lists can get pretty long, and they’re not going to be in any real order within each category (aside from the order in which I Furled them.) And, the biggest hurdle right now is getting people to go to the links page to see the new links. It’s not like a news post where I can have Manila send an e-mail to the recipients. However, Furl does have a save and e-mail function. Hmmm…I wonder if my English Department would like to get a notice when I add a link, and then have the links page as an archive. More playing to come, obviously.

Last summer when we were at the beach in Assateague, I happened to meet a recent Puliter Prize winning author from the Washington Post. At the time, I asked him if he might be interested in mentoring one of my students through his or her Weblog when my Journalism 2 class started. Well, guess what? Journalism 2 class has started, and he’s agreed to be a mentor. Too cool. So tomorrow, one of my students will have the lucky opportunity to start working with one of the best journalists in the world. And I know that I could have done all of this with e-mail, but the fact that we’re going to be making it happen in a Weblog will allow a lot more people to share in the experience as well. More updates later this week…