Sunday, February 12, 2006
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.
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