As promised, here are some resources on linguistic diversity in Ghana:

African Languages: An Introduction(a recent-ish reference book, with maps, to get you started - on the shelves in Canaday 1st Floor)

Ghanaian language listings with various additional info included:

CIA World FactBook - check out the Languages section on the Ghana country page... most interesting is to go to the Dynamic Statstics Tables (just click on the Languages link from the Ghana country page) and cross-compare Languages with other variables like Literacy, Ethnic Groups, Administrative Divisions, etc.

Ethnologue: Languages of Ghana - includes speaker population, region, alternate names, language family and dialects, plus link for more information

GhanaWeb: Ghanaian Languages - includes detailed info for government-sponsored and non-government-sponsored languages

So I loaned my laptop to Anne in class today due to the slight malfunction with broken links, since I was able to access Serendip on my laptop. In doing so, I closed Firefox (due to a multitude of distracting tabs open) and opened up Google Chrome. Scrolling through the talking notes, Anne was talking from the projection screen and seemed amused by an "interesting" typo--"Three Men's Texts." But as the typos continued, I remembered about Jailbreak the Patriarchy.

Jailbreak the Patriarchy is a Google Chrome app that switches any and every gendered pronoun on any and every website. Soooo

• his --> her
• patriarchy --> matriarchy
• woman --> man
• feminist --> masculist

and my favorite:

Food for thought at our dinner table.

Of all the words I have ever used to define myself, writer has never been one of them.  Every time I write, I write for someone or something else.  I write papers for school because I’ve convinced myself that school matters, and  I write letters for Amnesty International because issues of justice are important to me.  When I first started writing this web-event, it was an assignment that I “had” to do.  During a round of revisions, I realized that I was writing for myself.  For the first time in my life, I was writing just for myself.  So, this is for me, but I want you to read it.  

Understanding the Evolution of Change

"But above all she must press for a wage to be paid by the State legally to the mothers of educated men. The importance of this to our common fight is immeasurable; for it is the most effective way in which we can ensure that the large and very honourable class of married women shall have a mind and a will of their own, with which, if his mind and will are good in her eyes, to support her husband, if bad to resist him, in any case to cease to be ‘his woman’ and to be her self."

When reading “Three Guineas,” this passage gave me pause to think about what Virginia Woolf was saying about motherhood. She argues that motherhood should be viewed as a profession and also treated like one by granting wages to those who are mothers in order for all women to achieve financial independence. I started thinking about this concept of defining motherhood as a career, and I don’t think it’s an accurate definition today. Some women are mothers who don’t work, some women are non-mothers who work, and some do both; all are perfectly valid options, but I wanted to focus on the issues facing the working mother. Many women in academia have fewer children than they want or have slowed down their careers in order to raise their children. The major questions I had were how do women balance parenthood with a career, why is the share of work in parenting still so unequal, and why is academia specifically so incompatible with raising a family?

LITERARY KINDS: A PROCESS

"For my first paper for the course, Literary Kinds at Bryn Mawr College, I’ll be using Tumblr to do an analysis of what this blogging platform is and the ways in which it can be useful in academic work. It’s going to be crazy meta so I’m going to work hard to keep it fresh and exciting.

In line with the digital humanities, this blog will take the form of an archive - an archive of my thoughts about the medium and how I’ve started to compare this form to others. Additionally, though I do this with aims of a final project of sorts (still to be determined), I want to value the process of learning and I will gladly take any advice that you leave in the comments or my inbox."

(The first post on my Tumblr blog that explores Tumblr as a medium.)

In her article, Lugones discusses this idea of "world-travelling" - switching between "worlds" for the non-white woman. She writes that outsiders (whom she refers to as "women of color in the US) practice necessary "world-travelling". This "world travelling" is being able to exist and integrate in more than one culture ("world"). I do not necessarily disagree with what she says here, but I do have several criticisms of her ideas and her presentation of the fact.

One of the cool things about using Twitter in a class setting is that it allows you to continue the discussion outside the classroom.  For people whose phones have Twitter apps or web access this is pretty easy but you may not have realized that you can also use a regular cell phone to submit and read tweets.

Twitter has an FAQ on phones and also a Getting Started Guide for Twitter via SMS.

In a nutshell here's how you register your phone to your Twitter account and start tweeting via SMS: