Stock and Flow at Orange Crate Art

There's a way of thinking about blog content as stock and flow. Flow is made up of the short, day-to-day posts that constitute most blog content, including mine. Flow posts are usually interesting at the time they're written (if the writer is any good!) but they are somewhat ephemeral.

Stock posts are the ones with staying power -- they're usually lengthier, more thought out, and on topics of greater concern.

A few of my stock posts are Walking Away from Omelas, Jumping into the Deep End, Living with the Chicken Heart Every Day, and much of my Universal Media Syndicate criticism. (Reading those titles, I recognize my weakness for title gerunds. Sorry.)

One of my favorite blogs, Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art, has a very nice mix of stock and flow. The flow tends to be about music, grammar or old office supplies (yes -- from pencils and erasers to staplers), while his stock is almost always about teaching at the college level in the age of the interweb.

And Michael has some truly great posts on this topic:

• How to e-mail a professor
  
• "Extra credit?"
  
• On "On the New Literacy"
  
• Re: the Beloit Mindset List
  

All great, great stuff, and there's much more than that. One other favorite is called Reinventing the wheel, which, while brief, provides such a clear statement of its problem that I have kept the link handy for a time when my daughter questions why writing papers is important if everything we need to know is in the Wikipedia.

I think Michael should collect his teaching-related essays into a book, or at least booklet, depending on the length. I'll do the layout for free!