Anne Fernald has a great post on the process of selecting essays for a college reader. It’s something I have a little experience with myself, but Anne writes brilliantly about the process.

I also recall another emotion in this process: terror — terror at picking something that wouldn’t really inspire freshmen, but instead annoy, or worse, bore them.

But I wanted to comment a bit more about Anne’s frustration in finding blog posts to recommend. I’d have to agree — it’s difficult to find a single blog post that stands on its own in a collection of unrelated essays. Come to think of it, it’s also difficult to find an essay that does that. We pick essays that respond to each other in some way. Because essayists don’t have the luxury of linking to the texts they’re responding to, they have to give us at least enough context to show us the connection they’re making. Most of the time, when an essay is truly out of its original context — in a magazine, or as a chapter in a book — the cues the essayist provides us aren’t enough. The anthologist fills that gap by placing related essays together in a chapter, or writing an introduction to give needed details.

Newspaper columns are probably the worst, often responding to a particular event that happened a day or two before. When the event is fresh, the column makes sense, but a year or two later, most columns fall flat.

To anthologize blog posts, since the links are where most of the action is, you’d have to actually show what the links are, either with footnotes or by including the linked items in the anthology as well. But even that isn’t as graceful as a sly link integrated directly into the text. Sometimes just hovering over the link is enough — you get the sense of where the link is going and can anticipate what it’s going to say. Sometimes you have to follow the link, read what it says, and then get back to the original.

So I think the only effective way to create an anthology of blog posts would be to do it online, so students can have the experience the way the bloggers intended. Yeah, someone really ought to do that. It still wouldn’t be perfect, because by next semester half the links would be dead, but it might be a start, a way of showing that blogs are literature, too.

For those of you who, like me, are addicted to engaging in a useless bragging-rights competition in which pseudo-students compete for the right to be used as pawns in the corporate mega-marketing enterprise, you’ll be glad to know that it’s

NCAA HOOPS TIME!

That’s right, I’ve created an NCAA tournament pool group on yahoo.com. Originally the group was just for sciencebloggers, but since most of them couldn’t give a noodly appendage for college hoops, we’ve decided to broaden the pool.

Here’s the official instructions on how to join:

In order to join the group, just go to the game front page and click on the “Sign Up” button to create a team. After completing registration, or if you already have a team, click the “Create or Join Group” button and follow the path to join an existing private group. Then, when prompted, enter the following information…

Group ID#: 26228
Password: (email me for the password!)

Feel free to invite others. The prize for the winner is the right to mercilessly proclaim your superiority in a post on Word Munger!