Friday, February 24, 2006
According to McLuhanist Jeff Rice, blogging should/could enhance experimentation and playfulness within academic discourses, but instead it has enhanced seriousness, hand-wringing, and, and anxiety.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
p.s. I told Wade King (my dept chair "down here") about this site. So be good and don't swear... ;-)
Hi all.
Teeny tiny update on my end: I'm teaching at NDSCS now (45 miles south of NDSU in Wahpeton, ND) full-time, and I haven't used blogs during my first year here... I think I wanted to ease into the new atmosphere with as little problems as possible (I didn't know if students here used technology a lot or if they even had a lot of computer labs, etc) and now I feel comfortable enough to use blogs. So, TA-DA, I will in an online LITERATURE classroom this fall (World Lit 240).
As for blogging, I have kept up with my personal blog and teaching blog (both found on Xanga, and I only give out the teaching one: www.xanga.com/teacher47) the most... friends and family (people who I have somewhat introduced to blogs) have gotten me onto MySpace, BeBo, and some MSN blog type thing. I always return to Xanga simply because a) I have a "history" with those spaces (been blogging on those blogs since '02 I think), b) the format works well for me (I can use HTML if I want to, but I don't have to... they still don't have the same interface, however, for Macs as they do non-Macs), and c) I know, to a point, who my audience is on those blogs or lack thereof... (many more people check out MySpace and MSN... and BeBo is relatively private = more for my siblings and I to share photos with close friends, etc.).
What I would like to do is go back to my class blogs (I think I have at least 4 semesters worth?) and analyze them the same way I did the BisonBlog (when it was alive and running - damn hackers). I also am excited to see how blogs affect the literature classroom since I have only used them in composition courses, and I may use any outcome from that course to present at a conference next year...
Recently, I attended the Southwest Texas PCA/ACA conference, and a few of the sessions on blogging had "old" material in my opinion. Many people/teachers/grad students are still just beginning to use them in their research (as academic blogs or K-Logs) or in their classrooms. Some had things to say about the future of blogging, but I wonder what they do for students? I think they will always be around, so how can we use blogs to their full potential? And while one grad student was trying to define the "perfect blog pedagogy," I simply want to figure out all the possibilities of using them. Just like with the separate pedagogies I was taught (expressivism, social epistemic, etc), I am certain that a blog pedagogy can look many different ways and merge with other pedagogies too... Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself since many critics will say: "Wait, blogs are full of crappy writing," but I'd like to use my thesis and the outcome of my class blog analysis to prove more people incorrect. [Ooooh I would also, someday, like to analyze IM in comparison/contrast to blogs.]
Okay. Back to grading. [Peace out from NDSCS.]
Teeny tiny update on my end: I'm teaching at NDSCS now (45 miles south of NDSU in Wahpeton, ND) full-time, and I haven't used blogs during my first year here... I think I wanted to ease into the new atmosphere with as little problems as possible (I didn't know if students here used technology a lot or if they even had a lot of computer labs, etc) and now I feel comfortable enough to use blogs. So, TA-DA, I will in an online LITERATURE classroom this fall (World Lit 240).
As for blogging, I have kept up with my personal blog and teaching blog (both found on Xanga, and I only give out the teaching one: www.xanga.com/teacher47) the most... friends and family (people who I have somewhat introduced to blogs) have gotten me onto MySpace, BeBo, and some MSN blog type thing. I always return to Xanga simply because a) I have a "history" with those spaces (been blogging on those blogs since '02 I think), b) the format works well for me (I can use HTML if I want to, but I don't have to... they still don't have the same interface, however, for Macs as they do non-Macs), and c) I know, to a point, who my audience is on those blogs or lack thereof... (many more people check out MySpace and MSN... and BeBo is relatively private = more for my siblings and I to share photos with close friends, etc.).
What I would like to do is go back to my class blogs (I think I have at least 4 semesters worth?) and analyze them the same way I did the BisonBlog (when it was alive and running - damn hackers). I also am excited to see how blogs affect the literature classroom since I have only used them in composition courses, and I may use any outcome from that course to present at a conference next year...
Recently, I attended the Southwest Texas PCA/ACA conference, and a few of the sessions on blogging had "old" material in my opinion. Many people/teachers/grad students are still just beginning to use them in their research (as academic blogs or K-Logs) or in their classrooms. Some had things to say about the future of blogging, but I wonder what they do for students? I think they will always be around, so how can we use blogs to their full potential? And while one grad student was trying to define the "perfect blog pedagogy," I simply want to figure out all the possibilities of using them. Just like with the separate pedagogies I was taught (expressivism, social epistemic, etc), I am certain that a blog pedagogy can look many different ways and merge with other pedagogies too... Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself since many critics will say: "Wait, blogs are full of crappy writing," but I'd like to use my thesis and the outcome of my class blog analysis to prove more people incorrect. [Ooooh I would also, someday, like to analyze IM in comparison/contrast to blogs.]
Okay. Back to grading. [Peace out from NDSCS.]
Sunday, February 12, 2006
I thought I had activated the comments; might need to test them with a new post.
Cindy emailed me last night to say that she found a course that had assigned our essay, "Remediation, Genre, and Motivation," and that got us emailing and talking about finishing a second article we were close to being done with, but had let slip through the cracks.
One of the first things we will have to do is write about the role of weblogging in our lives the past 3 years. I was labeled the academic blogger in our draft, and I haven't changed much. I stopped using my TeachingBlog in 2004 in part because of software issues (Tinderbox was installed on the computer I used the least), in part because of my teaching load spring 2004 (ironically I quit blogging during the semester when I taught my first online class--i was just typing too much as it was), and in part because I was spending too much time blogging and not enough time writing articles. I didn't give up on blogging, but tried out other software (most notably tried to get our ITS department to install Moveable type (no luck), then Typepad) and tried to encourage others to blog by setting up a Typepad account for other.
In the fall of 2004, I noticed that a lot of the new Graduate Teaching Assistants liked to assign journals and short in-class writings; I thought about what we had learned from our research, and realized that rather than assign "blogging," what we need to try to do with our students is assign "Ten Minutes a Day." I returned to Blogger to set up my own new site called "Ten A Day", but I also started a journal / blog on my laptop--entries that I either didn't want to post / share, or just entries that I could write without connecting. I encouraged my students to find the medium, or combination of mediums, that would work for them: pen and paper, blog, computer files, or some combination. I didn't study this in any systematic way, but I noticed that it worked really well for some students, so-so for other students, and was just a pain for others--the typical three-pronged breakdown.
I haven't kept up my 10 A Day habit, for some of the usual reasons, but this semester (spring 2006), I returned to another old blogging habit: Bloglines. I am asking my graduate students in Rhetorics, Poetics, and New Media to maintain K-logs, and we are all using Bloglines because of the nice reader-writer interface. I am really enjoying the feed-reader--hadn't really gotten excited about this in 2002-03--because so many great weblogs and news sources are feeding their info.
I still haven't found the perfect interface yet, though: Bloglines doesn't seem to support comments, no community blogging. Blogger is still great for communities, and it now has the feed, but not the reader (true?). I loved the categorizer in Tinderbox (actually and agent) and in Typepad, but neither of those are free. Drupal seems robust and powerful, but I can never get any help installing it, and when installed by the ACM guys, it got hacked and shut down.
So, in a nutshell, I am still an academic blogger, looking for the right software, unable to settle into one place, one url, one online identity. I wonder if rhetoric/comp types had started reading my blogs and adding me to their blogrolls if that is the kind of community and motivation that would have kept me going?
I think I have really explored "Blogging as social action": blogging as filtering, blogging as note taking, blogging as journaling (although of an academic sort), blogging as community building (locally, rather than dispersed), and I am only now seriously undertaking bloggings as a read/write dynamic through Bloglines.
Let's hope this post can be a start to getting us all back in the game.
One of the first things we will have to do is write about the role of weblogging in our lives the past 3 years. I was labeled the academic blogger in our draft, and I haven't changed much. I stopped using my TeachingBlog in 2004 in part because of software issues (Tinderbox was installed on the computer I used the least), in part because of my teaching load spring 2004 (ironically I quit blogging during the semester when I taught my first online class--i was just typing too much as it was), and in part because I was spending too much time blogging and not enough time writing articles. I didn't give up on blogging, but tried out other software (most notably tried to get our ITS department to install Moveable type (no luck), then Typepad) and tried to encourage others to blog by setting up a Typepad account for other.
In the fall of 2004, I noticed that a lot of the new Graduate Teaching Assistants liked to assign journals and short in-class writings; I thought about what we had learned from our research, and realized that rather than assign "blogging," what we need to try to do with our students is assign "Ten Minutes a Day." I returned to Blogger to set up my own new site called "Ten A Day", but I also started a journal / blog on my laptop--entries that I either didn't want to post / share, or just entries that I could write without connecting. I encouraged my students to find the medium, or combination of mediums, that would work for them: pen and paper, blog, computer files, or some combination. I didn't study this in any systematic way, but I noticed that it worked really well for some students, so-so for other students, and was just a pain for others--the typical three-pronged breakdown.
I haven't kept up my 10 A Day habit, for some of the usual reasons, but this semester (spring 2006), I returned to another old blogging habit: Bloglines. I am asking my graduate students in Rhetorics, Poetics, and New Media to maintain K-logs, and we are all using Bloglines because of the nice reader-writer interface. I am really enjoying the feed-reader--hadn't really gotten excited about this in 2002-03--because so many great weblogs and news sources are feeding their info.
I still haven't found the perfect interface yet, though: Bloglines doesn't seem to support comments, no community blogging. Blogger is still great for communities, and it now has the feed, but not the reader (true?). I loved the categorizer in Tinderbox (actually and agent) and in Typepad, but neither of those are free. Drupal seems robust and powerful, but I can never get any help installing it, and when installed by the ACM guys, it got hacked and shut down.
So, in a nutshell, I am still an academic blogger, looking for the right software, unable to settle into one place, one url, one online identity. I wonder if rhetoric/comp types had started reading my blogs and adding me to their blogrolls if that is the kind of community and motivation that would have kept me going?
I think I have really explored "Blogging as social action": blogging as filtering, blogging as note taking, blogging as journaling (although of an academic sort), blogging as community building (locally, rather than dispersed), and I am only now seriously undertaking bloggings as a read/write dynamic through Bloglines.
Let's hope this post can be a start to getting us all back in the game.
