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Monday, June 30, 2003

Something I wrote up for my students to think about.. [p.s.: want to meet this week on Thursday afternoon... I don't think I work on that day, PLUS you two could come and see MY house??]

Questions to ask yourself about blogging:

Am I being truly ME through my writing/ my blogging? Am I putting on a different persona? Do I write a certain way to attract readers (be funny versus the reality that your day stunk or that you are not funny in offline life)? Do you edit words to sound more like YOU or more unlike YOU to attract readers or to make yourself feel better?


What parts of your life do you leave out?

Are you a better communicator online than offline? If your friends and family read your blog, would they automatically know it was truly you? Would they be surprised? Why?

What would really really be interesting to me is to have all my friends.. boyfriend especially.. keeping a weblog. THEN I could see from their perspectives. THEN maybe I could understand them.. him.. better. Ugh.

I was talking with the boyfriend long ago, and he brought up the movie idea of having a couple.. just one of them or both keep journals (paper ones) and when one of them dies, the other reads the journal ONLY to find out that the person was extremely unhappy in the marriage (or relationship) or with her/his life in general when the other thought he/she was happy, etc. It was a gloomy idea, I thought (being the optimist I am most days), but it is probably really realistic. After talking to Tamara at Betsy's the other night, I thought "Yea, how do we know the people on these blogs ARE REAL. .. or ARE TELLING THE TRUTH..??" Do they have a persona they are acting out?

Then comes the biggie: AM I BEING TRULY ME ON MY BLOG? Or do I sugar coat it because I want my readers to "read" me as someone else? How do I know I am being me? Because I don't edit, I just throw words on there as they come to me? Or since I am a word geek, maybe the real ME would change words?

I think I am onto something. Either that, Or I am going slightly insane. [Could be this job.]

Thursday, June 26, 2003

So, you must be an Aquarius too then? We are water-bearing, independent women. That makes sense. Cool beans.

I have yet to read Kevin's new stuff (ssshhh.. don't tell him), but I'll get there before next week. I think I might use those good old tetrads in my thesis paper.. brainstormed with Tamara and the girls at Betsy's last night about thesis ideas. I have way too many roaming in my brain now.

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

I'm being a slacker at work. It amazes me how different tasks on a computer lead to different levels of ambition for me. If I was blogging or reading blogs or just basicially searching online right now.. I would and could do it ALL DARN day. But this editing and formatting b.s. .. ah! ew! My brain is frying more from this than my occasional beers at the Turf. I am serious. I really do need a job blogging.

Personality. Yea. Kevin, I need to work that into my thesis. I also need to brainstorm- brain fart- on what I might just write about. Lucky for me, I actually want to dive into it this summer. Get a headstart.

I think your ideas on how we each are affected by writing online are pretty close to truth. I am an exhibitionist on my personal blog. Sometimes it's hard to not be on my class blogs or my teaching one. When my students "discover" my personal one, I do feel a little ashamed of some of the stuff on there. But, hey, I am human first before teacher. I told myself I would be "raw" on my blog. Let it all out. My students that read it now say that it really reads how I sound or talk in class.. they can hear me. That's gotta be a good thing.

I was told once by a good friend (ok, ex on the "good" now) that I write very "sophomoric" for all the education I have had. I took that as an insult (and a punch to my ego), but now I am thinking.. hey, it's my inner child coming out. A big hug blogging OUTERING. :-) What's neat for me is that on the second day of class this fall I am going to have the students fill out various types of personality tests. I think it will be interesting to have them connect that to their dislike/like of blogging later in the semester.


Has Kevin been on here lately?? :-)

Monday, June 23, 2003

Cindy, you and I will slowly out-blog (or equalize the blogging with) Kevin here.

I totally agree with you on the street preaching thing. I get more turned off by those people. Their approach is all wrong.

AND Yea, I think we do have a third point... Our "writing space" helps students in various ways become better writers (or at least MORE aware? MORE attuned?) through various genres all the while opening up their writing community to a whole bunch of people. It almost forces them to be exhibitionist (I wrote THIS, check it out.. or I THINK this, so what's it to YOU?) or, maybe, just more extroverted. Maybe our survey should include whether the students think it brought them out of their shells as people/writers or if it just enhanced their already out-going personality. Kevin, remember that one girl's research in "Electronic Communication" connecting IMing and Personality. Have we thought of incorporating that. That is why Lynne thinks she'll never be a big blogger.. man, I actually remember stuff from a class a year ago?

Maybe that should be a chunk of my thesis? Enhancement of the Blogging Writing Space: Writers or non-Writers.
*I think that I wouldn't have gotten into blogging as much as I did if my personality was more introverted. I would have kept to my private paper journaling.

Friday, June 20, 2003

My thoughts EXACTLY. I just thought it was funny. As if people would listen to a street preacher and think "Oh my.. I must stop blogging IMMEDIATELY! How horrible of me to write my thoughts down!"

Thursday, June 19, 2003

maybe we should rethink blogging... because apparently blogs are evil:::
"I ran into this corner street preacher and turned my camera on him. He started preaching louder into the camera about how God is going to pull the plug on America in 2005 if we don't return to the bible, something about 66 years from the start of WWII. I let him go on for a looooong time about this, then when he started repeating himself I said, "Can I ask you a question? Do you know what a blog is?" I tried to explain blogs to him, and how he could use one to deliver his (completely insane) message. You know, preaching my own sermon about the Good Blog. He says, "Unfortunately, your program comes into conflict with God's laws." Holy crap - blogs are breaking God's laws? Apparently blogs, not to mention all communication technology and reflective surfaces, are breaking the 2nd Commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. But, but... "If you see yourself reflected in my eyes, does that make me evil? Does it make you evil?" Yes, I'm afraid so. Also, God is going to destroy the world. So dear friends, I must retire this blog and go live in the desert where there is no water to see my reflection. I am now Syphlidius, the Naked Nomad of Tomorrow. Join me, won't you? Just don't look into my eyes."

Been zooming around Blogger.. reading blogs. I miss doing this. Found this guy's... the blogumentary. Plus, I set up my 110 class blog. It's such a clean design.

Cindy, you must have forgotten that us poor mac users don't get the handy little globe + chain icon so that we can easily make links in blogger. Sybil and I always have to hand code our links.

Team, I am trying out another blog host: Radio Weblog . You will see my initial responses to the tool. Could be useful for those of us with 24/7 internet access, but not a tool for students who are mobile or without computers.

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

A thought about our "Understanding Weblogs" paper--email gets pushed aside or obsolesced. Here is what a weblogger says "This could do to sharing KNOWLEDGE what e-mail did to get people to communicate!
"

Thursday, June 12, 2003

So, what d'yall think of the new interface? Still no link icon for us mac users? Cindy, do you have a link icon?

The blog from Betsy's class last fall (2002),my 120 class blog from this spring(2003), and my individual teaching blog which needs some much needed UPDATING.

-One thought for blog changes this fall.. I'll keep up my ind. teaching blog much much more so students can see my replies and entries faster and better.. still continue to use a class blog first (connects both classes and conversations in both)... and allow a day for the computer lab to have them "try out" individual blogs. They can always delete them.
-I think I will, as well, have my final in-class essay be asking the students what blogging is good for.. etc.

Sorry I haven't been on in a LONG time, Kevin. Am reading through our stuff right now in between doing my formatting work at Microsoft. This blog was a great idea... record-keeping!!

Friday, June 06, 2003

I've been following Samantha Blackmond's work this week because she is friend of Debra's and Mark's, and because she is teaching a course on gender, race, and technology even as I write. I am thinking about the value of a course blog like hers, or our like ours, to someone not in the course.

I was struck by how many students were willing to say things like "I don't like theory," this is hard and therefore boring--the kinds of things I know I hear from my students on an all-too-frequent basis. As a lurker, I find it worthwhile (reassuring and depressing) to see these thoughts made visual.

I was also impressed by the quality of responses, the amount of writing going on, the interaction--in general, making a class like this visible reflects really positively on the students and the instructor (despite what I said above). Maybe we just need to be selective about the class blogs we preserve and promote ; )

After looking at our data, in which students enjoyed the expressive / social function of weblogging, I was interested to see how academic this blog is. A close analysis would probably reveal quite a bit of "group building" going on, but none of the "venting", getting things off my chest preferences of our students.

More later, perhaps. I might even ask to send these students a quick survey--I'll have to check our IRB statement.


Thursday, June 05, 2003

Got a great new link courtest of Samantha Blackmond's site--a colloquy hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education, with Eugene Volokh as the "expert". Here are some highlights:

Question from Jim McGee, adjunct Kellogg School:
We've been talking about blogs as a publication avenue. What about blog technology as a
research tool - something along the lines of a dynamic research notebook? How do you see blogs
helping as a source for working out ideas along the road to eventual publication elsewhere?

Eugene Volokh:
I've thought a bit about this, and I think it's theoretically possible -- I just haven't seen this work
out concretely (my blog posts have sometimes led to op-eds, but not to scholarly articles), and I'm
not sure how likely it is to happen. I suspect that much depends on people's personal research
styles: Some people may find blogging a valuable source of inspiration or interaction with other
researchers, while others might not.


Question from Susan Herzog, Eastern Connecticut State University:
I recently read that some English professors are using blogs to improve the writing skills of their
students. Are you aware of this use of blogging? If you are, could you provide some URLs? Even if
you aren't aware of such use of blogs, could you comment on the idea? Thank you. Susan

Eugene Volokh:
Sorry, wish I knew more about this, but I don't.

Question from tom abeles, editor, On the Horizon:
I am wondering what the half-life of "blogging" will be. Some are maintained by "trusted"
individuals who scan the wild west of the web for information and may be,shortly, replaced by
intelligent "bots". Others appear to serve the same world as "talk radio", or, in The Academy, an
unconstrained rhetorical statement or question proferred in a conference or seminar to gain "air
time" for a position- sound bites with a life time of the Mayfly- rising and falling more quickly than
an article in a scholarly journal- Perhaps a gold mine for future cultural anthropologists looking for
a thesis?

Eugene Volokh:
There are indeed many different kinds of blogs -- but that just shows the dangers of trying to
generalize about "blogging." It wouldn't make much sense to make general pronouncements about
the "bookosphere," because there are so many different kinds of books. That's even more so for the
"blogosphere." Nor should it worry us that 90% of all blogs might be bad for various reasons. As
Sturgeon's Law puts it, 90% of *everything* is crap -- 90% of books, 90% of blogs, 90% of music,
and so on. So long as people can find the good stuff, the value of the medium is defined mostly by
the amount and quality of the good, not by the fraction that's bad.


The article also links to

Monday, June 02, 2003

Some actual notes to get started:

Year of the Blog (2002-03): A little narrative that might say something about Cindy and Kevin following Sybil down the blogging path. Blogs really hit the big time, with the *books* being the clearest sign, perhaps, that blogging was moving out from obscurity to full light of day.

Case studies typically are driven by hypotheses: they are investigations of ideas. I think we were driven by a couple of ideas:
1. Could weblogging help students be better readers and writers? Quote R. Blood on this one.

"The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions. Blogging every day, he will become a more confident writer. A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts. Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world; he may begin to experiment with longer forms of writing, to play with haiku, or to begin a creative project--one that he would have dismissed as being inconsequential or doubted he could complete only a few months before.

As he enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective. His own reactions--to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the media--will carry more weight with him. Accustomed to expressing his thoughts on his website, he will be able to more fully articulate his opinions to himself and others. He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead. Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration.

His readers will remember an incident from their own childhood when the blogger relates a memory. They might look more closely at the other riders on the train after the blogger describes his impressions of a fellow commuter. They will click back and forth between blogs and analyze each blogger's point of view in a multi-blog conversation, and form their own conclusions on the matter at hand. Reading the views of other ordinary people, they will readily question and evaluate what is being said. Doing this, they may begin a similar journey of self-discovery and intellectual self-reliance." Well, maybe we can paraphrase. I think we will want to acknowledge some of the more recent work that has been done, but emphasize that most reports continue to be anecdotal.

The other theory that drove us was remediation: would students write journal entries, notebooks, or filters? What were they familiar with, and what would make sense to them? Blood had already commented on the explosion of journal weblogs, the marginalization of filter blogs, and it seems to me that our case study only confirmed this.

We will need a methods section that describes all the information gathering that we have done, the sources of information (from surveys to blogs to papers about blogs to observations).

If we pull the string correctly, I think we can get our two driving questions to dovetail into an analysis of students drawn primarily to the expressive / expressivist qualities of blogging, that the journal is by far the more popular genre being remediated, and that the desire to filter, especially, seems to be weak on the part of students. Notebooks occupy a comfortable middle ground. Maybe we should fold "collaboration" in to this analysis: students do seem to want an audience for their reflection, they do seem to want to know what others are thinking.

One student in 110 really understood the possibilities of filtering, and the academic potential of weblogs. Sybil, can you also link us up to the blog you did in Betsy's class? That would seem to be a record of a much more academically oriented weblog. If you go to Dr. B's site (linked earlier), you will find other grad classes using weblogs in a similar fashion.

And I do think we should write about individual blogging styles (and teaching styles): I was just reading your 120 weblog, Sybil, and I can't imagine students being quite so expressive / personal in my classes -- grad classes being an exception.


Blogrolling ate up lots of time with no good results yet. I even messed up our template a bit--at least on my screen. How does the actual website look to one of you (or any visitors).

I just stumbled on Blogrolling.com, a service a bit like "Quick Topics" only this time you build your blogroll on their server, then copy and paste the code into our site. I'll let you know how it goes.

These tools are great, but somebody has to bring 'em all together into a single interface. Microsoft, anyone?


I visited "Year of the Weblog" again and started following some trails.

Charlie Lowe, from FSU, comes up, of course: five reasons to use blogs in a course:
1) Individual blogsites are personal writing spaces--drawing upon the journal analogy--which students can/may/will feel that they have some ownership.
2) Blogsites are obvious parts of the World Wide Web.
3) Community blogsites privilege teacher writing less than proprietary CMS's.
4) Community blogsites as I have used in the class above, because they are not gated communities and because of the chronological posting characteristics of blogs, are easier to keep up with.
5) Via linking, blogging is a good way to teach students to create connections to electronic texts, making stronger the connection that the writing they do is part of a larger discourse. If they feel a part of a discource, they may be more interested and/or more willing to participate in it.

I actually got to the post above from Samantha Blackmond's Blog--she's a prof at Purdue who blogs, MOOs, and teaches classes I would love to sit in on.

And from her site I got to a nice set of tips, like Charlie's, from James Farmer. He has been musing about pros and cons of weblogging for a while, and has filtered some nice discussions / articles.

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