"Movie Night of the Living Dead," or "MNLD" as I'll be referring to it here, began in the Fall of 2010 (which, depending on when you read this, could be oddly recent or eerily distant) as a project for one of my first-year writing courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I tasked my students with the creation and maintenance of a blog for the duration of our 15-week course, a task I had never assigned any of my classes previously, and a task I decided to share in. (As I told my students, "This ship [the blog project] could either sink or sail, but if it sinks at least I'll be on it with you.")
Although I was not new to the notion of blogging, I realized that nearly all of my previous online exploits had centered around topics so obscure that my class would likely find reading my work to be a chore. And since, as we all know, college students the world over rarely, if ever, find reading to be a chore, I clearly needed a new topic and a new blog. But, what with my affinity for the obscure I decided against completely abandoning my former blogging tendencies, and instead simply toned them down a bit by taking a topic that most of my students were familiar with (movies) and adding an adjective that many weren't so familiar with (zombie). And MNLD was born!
