{ The Comp Blog }

Craig Saper's article Blogademia should be useful and relevant to our study. He has interviewed a handful of academic bloggers, suggested the idea of "gossip knowledge," and envisions blogs as 21st century academic tools.

This whole issue of Reconstruction is about blogging--will need to read more.

Thinking about the paper we are working on, and the value of the tetrad. Also how to represent it. The list of blogging characteristics at the start of Bonnie Nardie et al's paper is good--keep in touch with others, thinking through writing, express ideas, follow issues--but if we think about a tetrad as the electrate version of the list, it provides us with four lists occupying roughly the same space, with items on the list interacting.

I have been thinking about our paper sections, and toying with the idea that we tell our stories chronologically, but we highlight, or do something interesting, with our key ideas--bold, different font, etc.--and then end the section with our personal tetrads, finishing the paper ultimately with a really complex tetrad. We would need to include in that final tetrad the possibility that some items might be both obsolesced (serious academic work--obsolesced by extensive and intensive blogging), yet retrieved by strategic, ten-minutes-a-day bloggin.

This final image might seem and feel a bit like a data cloud.

Trying to catch up on some recent and not so recent blog scholarship.
The Learning Blogosphere (2006): a video presentation by Alex H. The drill instructor and hippie approach contrasted. Sees blogging as a gateway to learning beyond the class; sees the blogosphere as a sphere of incidental learning, somewhere between authoritarian and laissez-faire approaches to education.

Carolyn Miller and Dawn Sheppard, "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog" (2004). I was particularly interested in checking out the "social actions," which get summarized as intrinsic / expressive and extrinsic / community building. The article doesn't get very fine grained, and I think some subsequent scholarship even suggests that the extrinsic (to find community) has been a very small part of blogging. People tend to share their blogs with the people they know, and the wider audience, while important to some, is not important to many.

Charles Tyron's "Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Writing" tells a good story about bloggers' interactions with his students, and he generally believes that blogging has had a postive impact on his class, but he doesn't actually provide a study, and he does admit that some do not like writing in public, and others do all their blogging at the end of the semester.
Pedagogy 6.1available to subscribers.

Not finding anything about long-term bloggers / blogging, although I am sure it is out there. Better check robot wisdom.