thanks for not being a zombie

How about Teaching Carnival, Backstage (rather than Teaching Carnival Raw) to describe the constantly updated RSS feed of links related to teaching in higher education? The monthly or bimonthly Teaching Carnival would proceed basically along the same lines as the other blogging carnivals out there: History Carnival, Philosophers' Carnival, and Poetry Carnival, for example. Every one or two months, a different editor (me first) will round up a bunch of links to blog posts related to teaching in higher education.

Scott asks a question in the comments to a previous post, and I thought I'd try to explain myself a little better.

Content

In terms of content, anything goes for the Teaching Carnival, as I recently wrote Scrivener, from "I can't believe summer's over and I'm headed back into the classroom" to "Here's a complete version of the syllabus I've been working on" to "Wow, that was a weird first day of class!" to "Check out this assignment I've been using." Anyone who teaches in higher education is welcome to contribute, from grad students to senior, tenured professors.

Teaching Carnival, Backstage

The "Backstage" version would just be the links that aggregate over time between the montly or bimonthly regular versions. There would be no difference in the content of the links that appear in either version.

I'm imagining, however, that "Backstage" readers would find many, many links contributed by many people through, for example, their own del.icio.us accounts (which are free) in which they use the teaching-carnival tag. If you use blogging software that features categories (like WordPress or Movable Type), Technorati will automatically grab any posts that are categorized as "teaching-carnival." If you use Blogger, which doesn't have categories, you'll need to add your own Technorati tag to each relevant entry like so:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/teaching-carnival" rel="tag">teaching-carnival</a>

Teaching Carnival

By contrast, the regular version would have a narrower selection of links as well as some commentary and organization provided by whoever is editor at the time.

RSS Feeds

"What's RSS?" you ask. Live in confusion no more. You can use desktop software (e.g. NetNewsWire) or web-based software (e.g. Bloglines) to subscribe to the RSS feeds of your choice.

The advantage of Teaching Carnival Backstage is that anyone can make their entries part of the RSS feed. You do not have to wait for whoever is putting together the regular Teaching Carnival to notice what you've written. You can add your posts using any of the methods described above. Another advantage is that, given how very many academic blogs are out there, the open RSS feed could help under-read blogs get more exposure. And finally, readers of Teaching Carnival, Backstage would be provided with a constant and easy-to-sift stream of teaching-related blog entries from a wide range (I hope) of blogs.

Currently

The del.icio.us links for Teaching Carnival can be found here. So far, they are overwhelmingly by me, although Marcia Hansen added a couple, too. Technorati has only picked up one link, at the time of this writing, which you can see here. The first installment of Teaching Carnival will feature a link to an RSS feed for Teaching Carnival, Backstage that mixes all the feeds from different sources together.

Any questions?