Also wished I could have seen the Cinderbox 18 performance. Julia and her husband Alex are good friends of ours (my wife and she were roommates for a few years) and all her performances under Lucky Plush Productions have been amazing.

Just had to plug my new Guitar Hero band… I think you hit a nail on the head when you mentioned persistence. I know I’ve been very persistent about honing my new Guitar Hero skills, and I’ve watched the teens being just as persistent. Win or Lose they keep trying and what’s not good about that??

I can relate to your comments about Blackboard! To me, that environment seems so static or artifical. I am not sure what the exact word is… For some reason, I think the the Blackboard discussions do not seem to generate any further debate or thinking and the posts/comments are usually so short. Like you said, these discussions tend to be general agreement. Sometimes I wonder why the discussions are not really discussions: is it the Blackboard environment, the types of questions we are asked to respond to, or if some of us just do not want to disagree?? I don’t know. For my graduate assistantship, I am helping one of the professors with her reference class and am trying to think of new ways to generate more in depth discussion. This semester we are experimenting with blogs – so we will see how that goes!

In one of my classes, we had class online and had “discussions” on several different topics via blackboard (in my opinion, the whole experience was very unproductive). Can you imagine that?