Weblogs: April 2004 Archive Page

About 45 percent of all faculty members are now part-timers. Each year thousands of people with new doctorates in fields like history and English fail to find the tenure-track jobs they are chasing. In English, for instance, fewer than half of the new Ph.D.'s win tenure-track jobs initially, according to the Modern Language Association.

When confronted with those numbers, the apologists, as the Invisible Adjunct calls them, maintain that there will always be jobs for the good ones. --Scott Smallwood --Disappearing Act (Chronicle)

This link might disappear soon. Via Torill.

Complaints I often hear around campus (our students don?t read/write) are turned on their head when we see the kinds of writing circulating around the economy of expression called the Web. Not everyone?s there yet, but many are; many we don?t realize are our the students in first year writing sitting there bored because of some textbook or uninformed instructor asking them to write about ?a controversial issue? or their favorite shirt. Take it to the Web. There you?ll find the bizarre ideas and beliefs many of us hold linked together in Shaviro?s imagined connected world (Sci-fi? Life-fi as well). There you will create something to write about. --J Rice --More Blog. Less Talk. (Yellow Dog)

Speaker #n will present a statistical analysis of the activity on a student weblog community in order to identify possible correlations which may advance our understanding of the pedagogical value of weblogs. The community is a group of personal blogs, all hosted on the same server and sponsored by the university. Activity on the site will be monitored during the summer break, during which all students will have the ability to continue posting to their blogs.

While most members of this particular community are undergraduates who are required to blog for course credit, but the server does not, at the moment, host any "class blogs". Those students who blog for credit do so on their own personal blogs, where they are given free reign to blog on whatever they wish, in addition to their academic blogging. A small number of faculty and students who are unconnected to the classes where blogging is required nevertheless keep blogs on a voluntary basis. About 5% of the bloggers in the group are responsible for about 50% of the activity on the site, and the voluntary bloggers are well-represented in this list of active users. Preliminary analysis of the ratio between number of posts (top-level entries created by registered bloggers) and comments (brief responses, which can be added to the main entry by any web visitor, including random web surfers) reveals several interesting details: male bloggers wrote less frequently than the female bloggers, but typically attracted more comments per post.

Other areas to examine include the relationship between the blogroll (a sidebar containing a list of a blogger's favorite weblogs) and the classroom seating chart, and the usual computer-assisted textual analysis subjects such as word count, word frequency, and average word length. In order to present this information, an analysis of the peculiar ethics of this particular research situation may prove illuminating. All students who blog for class are informed of the inevitably public nature of their work, which makes the invention of pseudonyms almost pointless (since Google would easily help the curious audience member identify the "real" author of any quoted passage). Information such as average number of posts per month, or average number of comments attracted by each post, is already public (even though only the weblog administrator has push-button access to an up-to-the minute master list). Other factors which may be examined for possible associations include the degree to which the student personalizes the blog templates (leaving it "plain vanilla," modifying it in simple or complex ways), the average number of links per post, and the average number of inbound, on-site, and off-site links per post.

Discovering Metrics for Evaluating an Academic Weblog Community [First Draft of CCCC 2005 Proposal]Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

First draft of my component of a panel proposal for next year's CCCC (I am "speaker #n".)

I was resisting putting in buzzwords such as "emergence" and "network," since I think of this as a practical exploration of just what it is possible to learn once we learn to read all the data that's being encoded in the networks the students form when they link to each other and post comments on each other's blogs.

I can't really come up with a cuter humanities-style title for the paper, not until I've actually got some results to work with.

I was thinking of "Mene, mene, tekel, uparshin," if only to remind me to look for signs that weblogs aren't the heaven-sent answer to every single thing that might possibly be less than perfect in academia.

There is no day on the calendar six months or a year away, when you can say, ?OK, I?m done promoting now, and I can stop.?

Promotion needs to be a significant part of the ongoing work of maintaining your blog.

If I?ve learned one thing in my years working with creative people of all kinds, the vast majority of them want to devote their time to their chosen field ? whether it be writing, painting, sculpture, whatever, and do not want to spend any time promoting. Perversely, they?ll waste a lot of time (and often money) trying to figure out ways to avoid promoting. --Trudy Schuett --Getting Noticed in the Crowded Blogosphere (Wolves)

Via Doctor Daisy, who also offers a glowing report on BloggerCon 2.

Crunch Time: Seton Hill Blogs Bursting at the Seams

Blogalicious... bloginator... "blog rally"... my students have been fiercely you-know-whatting, in order to fulfill the broad, very general requirements of their blogging portfolios. These range from the typical "write a blog responding to book X" or "blog about classroom activity Y," to "disagree politely with one of your peers" to "write a blog entry that sparks a discussion on your blog". One prompt, "Blog about how your English major affects your work in non-English classes," has sparked some soul-searching in the "Intro to Literary Study" class, which I think is welcome in this foundational course for all our English majors (lit, creative writing, and journalism).

blogs.setonhill.edu is down

I've notified the server admin, who says he'll won't be able to look at it until early this evening.

A shout out to Rachel Crump, who was just about to give an oral presentation on Dungeons & Dragons when the blogs went down at about 3:45 ... she had prepared thoroughly enough that she did a smashing job anyway, but what a nightmare!

I always bring a plain paper version of my talk, since I've seen plenty of presenters who were depending on technology crash and burn.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: "Score a few points for Bud!"Dorky but bookish (therefore fun) 'open the nearest book to page 23' meme

Found in several places this week. The one that actually prompted me to post was here.

There is still the childhood picture just where it?s always been, right above "I was born Justin Allyn Hall in Chicago at 12:01pm on December 16, 1974." And there in the heart of the page is still the one-line paragraph that first woke me out of my early Web-surfing coma: "When I was eight, my father, an alcoholic, killed himself; much of my early writing wrestles with this." The minute I read that I knew this was not going to be your typical mid-90s nerdobiography. And eight-and-a-half million gut-spilling Web-autobiographies later, it still holds up. --Rob Wittig reviews Justin's links. --Justin Hall and the Birth of the 'Blogs (http://www.electronicbookreview.com)

Via Jill/txt.

There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging ? but the discussion of it is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, as so many claim it is, what was the question? As with the discussion of electronic voting, there is an assumption that there barriers have been put in the way of a democratic and public activity. It follows from this view that the Internet in general, and Weblogging in particular, are conscious answers to these challenges. Nico Macdonald --The future of Weblogging (The Register)

Testing my new RSS feed

I am having some trouble coding up my new RSS feed. If you've got a content aggregator, and you'd like to let me know how my feed works for you, please let me know.

BTW... What's a content aggregator?

Diaries and journals are a longstanding fixture of writing and foreign language classes. Journals are also commonly employed in other subjects, including lab notebooks in the sciences, and sketch books and portfolios for teaching the arts. Teachers often encourage students to keep notes of their own, and sometimes use these notes as an additional indicator of their progress. The earliest uses of weblogs thus far have been as replacements for writing journals. Despite difficulties, there are several advantages to the use of weblogs in this setting, especially in that they provide a more immediate and social environment for writing (Kajder & Bull, 2003), which when combined with the improvements to student writing that seem to accrue simply by moving to a computerized form of journals (Goldberg, Russel, & Cook, 2004), represents an obvious area for experimentation.

There has been a move over the last decade toward using portfolios of student materials to improve evaluation and learning. --Alex Halavais --Weblogs as 'replacement' educational technology (Alex Halavais)

Friday afternoon I had the pleasure of sitting through a number of final presentations from graduating English majors. My colleague Mike Arnzen blogged about the online portfolios that some students chose to produce instead of traditional 3-ring binders.

While praising the information management and convenience of the online portfolios, Arnzen also noted a few downsides -- one of which was the fact that an e-portfolio is geared towards serving up the final product, rather than presenting a coherent reflection on progress.

But my freshmen who have been blogging almost since the first week of school will have a tremendous archive of material to consult when they are seniors. Those students who choose to submit electronic portfolios will probably be the ones who have taken plenty of new media journalism courses (and if I'm the instructor, I imagine they'll be blogging). To compensate for the weaknesses of the online portfolio genre, and to help students take fuller advantage of the strengths of the online medium, perhaps we need to rethink the reflective introduction assignment, which currently assumes that the student will write an ordinary prose essay. For those students who choose to submit an online portfolio, perhaps that introductory essay needs to be rethought as a series of individual blog entries, which themselves contain links back to important blog entries from the past. Thus, instead of clicking on items in a table of contents, the evaluation of an online portfolio will be like reading a hyperlinked narrative, written with the full knowledge that the very nature of the WWW means that the reader of an online portfolio will be reading the same way he or she reads any online text -- looking for bold keywords, bulleted lists, subject headings, and links, and slowing down to read in more detail only when the text is particularly interesting.

Link found via KiarosNews.

Much of the Blogosphere's current claim to fame, of course, has to do with its outward criticism of already established individuals and institutions. Blogs have been responsible for keeping Big Media on its toes and correcting common errors, misjudgments and mischaracterizations that have been spread by Big Media regarding various important stories and issues. Blogs have also been responsible for taking on powerful individuals for their errors of judgment. The crucial role blogs played in causing former Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott to step down from his position after making comments that were perceived as racially insensitive and nostalgic for a time in which bigotry towards African-Americans was the order of the day remains notable for all those who have kept close tabs on the development of the Blogosphere. --Pejman Yousefzadeh --The Blogosphere: All Grown Up Now (Tech Central Station)

A great link from KairosNews.

Check out this news item from Userland CEO Scott Young who started getting calls from Chris Allbritton's NYU students yesterday who were doing a story on blog software companies... --Student Journalists Outed Via Weblog (Weblogg-ed)

One more hazard of edublogging to worry about!

Most of what is being said regarding blogs in composition has been said before. Looking at the ?Guidelines for Using Journals in School Settings? approved by the NCTE on Commission on Composition on November 28, 1986 drafted by [Toby] Fulwiler, it seems that the basic assumptions of learning through blogging have been stamped as legitimate. Jeff Ward --Journals [and Blogging] (This Public Address)

Jeff's bulleted list is a great reminder that few things are really brand new. Of course, traditional journaling in academia doesn't introduce the student-author to the benefit of links, searchable archives, near-instant feedback from readers, etc. So there's still plenty of room for new research into blogs.

Writers have always used the net to distribute novels and poems that could appear in print. But there's a tradition of experimenting with online forms such as email and chatrooms to tell stories that could only work online. Writers are taking this further by working with blogs. Indeed, with their short daily entries, reader feedback and links to the net, blogs seem purpose-built for creating episodic stories. Jim McClellan --How to write a blog-buster  (Guardian)

This article quotes Jim Munroe, a Canadian new media artist whose work I enjoy immensely. (He made the short film ">interactive," and just the other day I enjoyed watching his narration of scenes from Grand Theft Auto III, "My Trip to Liberty City".)

Lawley is not alone in looking to blogs as a potential escape from the "course as online powerpoint slide" stranglehold of today's commercial course management systems. Charles Lowe of Cyberdash.com recently published an account of his own experience using open source weblogs (PostNuke) to support his online writing class; in a companion piece he compares PostNuke to Blackboard, and finds Blackboard lacking.

And he is not the only one coming to this conclusion. Laura Gibbs, in her blog post "Blackboard, Students and Publishing on the Web," pretty much captured the differences between a blog-based online learning experience and one provided by the traditional vendors when she said "Blackboard lets faculty members share documents with students, but it does nothing to promote web publishing by students." --John Kruper --Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille's heel?  (The Electric Lyceum)

At Seton Hill, we actually have two different systems -- one for administering grades and course registration, and the other for content management. While I find our CMS cumbersome, next year I will probably use it to let students upload copies of their papers. I don't really have that much of an opinion about our registration/grade reporting tool, since I've used it only a couple times -- just to log on, enter midterm or final grades, and leave. Yes the interface is clunky and stupid, and yes it's insulting that the web-based program expands to take over my whole screen, so that I can't open my spreadsheet gradebook in one window, and copy and paste the grades in another; instead, I have to print out my grades, switch to another window, and type them in from the printed page. Stupid. Annoying. But I so rarely need to use that program that I don't get worked up about it.

While the MoveableType back end is much better designed, because I use it all the time, even the minor annoyances consume far more of my time than the major annoyances in SHU's course registration program.

Another thought... while it's possible to set up a course so that a student must participate in Blackboard forum or post on a blog, the motivation to do is smaller, since the penalties for not doing so (or simply for not doing so today) are infinitesmal compared to the penalty of not getting any courses at all. How frequently do students need to add or drop courses, anyway? Yes, that's important technology to provide, but the tools to let students do that don't have to be perfect, because students have to register for classes if they want to be a student -- just like I have to report the grades, or I'm not doing my job. The interface can be less than beautiful if it gets the job done.

While I can see that the administrators -- who are usually the ones making the decisions regarding the purchase of courseware and registrationware (sorry for the dorky neologism) would think otherwise, I would prefer that my teaching not be leashed to software optimized for the occasional (once-a-semester) administrative needs of registration.

My students can still register for courses using the university's system if I ask them to blog. But Kruper makes a good point -- if my specialty were teaching human anatomy or French verb forms, I wouldn't have nearly the motivation to learn all this technological stuff. There would be other technological solutions that would appear to meet other, more immediate, needs.

In an online world where bloggers' frenzied mutual promotion seems increasingly the norm, the Wiki emerges as an oasis of dignified restraint. It was invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who now works for Microsoft. But the underlying idea of the Wiki - a Web page that anyone can edit or even delete - could hardly be more antithetical to the Redmond way. In a sense, the Wiki is to the blog what open source is to proprietary software: a communal effort where group dynamics rather than a leader's fiat determine the end-result. --Glyn Moody --Of blogs and wikis (Netcraft)

Wikis are a great tool for collaboration and concensus-building, but who wants to be entertained, amused, and challenged by the collective opinions of a faceless group that has carefully formulated its opinion into a seamless collaborative text? These tools serve different purposes. (Hat tip: Culturecat.)

A new development in composition appears and those interested in that development use CCCC as a place to find each other, to learn just how much interest exists in the new development. Often the SIG tries to map the field, figuring out what's in and what's not, trying to locate the work in relation to other work.

For instance, in 2001, we indexed 32 sessions under the heading "Internet/Web," but the term blog (or even weblog) never occurred. Lots of "cyber" and "virtual" and "digital", but no blog. So blogs seem to be new--and some of us think they could be important for courses in first-year composition. --John Lovas --Blog Three Hundred Four [Blogs and CCCC] (A Writing Teacher's Blog)

A very informative post, not just about the growth of blogs in the rhet/comp field, but also about the structore of the 4Cs (the big annual conference for writing instructors).

Small academic organizations looking for publicity but lacking the funds for a web designer, teachers interested in exposing their students to feedback from real-world audiences, and individuals who simply like to write may all find weblogs valuable, even outside the setting of a composition classroom.

We already see barefoot and pajama-clad students in the classroom; I think it's high time to make the classroom more visible to the student 24/7, preparing them for the life-long learning habits and intellectual attitudes towards life that our catalogs and recruitment brochures promise they will acquire by the time they leave.

Bloggers who are excited about their work tend to intersperse required blog entries with personal ones, reading and commenting on blog entries written by students who are not in their classes; this can energize a whole community. Several students directly compared blogging to discussion boards, and explicitly stated that they did not put as much effort in their discussion boards because they knew nobody outside the class would ever read their work.

While blogging has percolated past the computer programming, new media, and journalism departments, and is making inroads in composition and literature, the potential for blogging in first year experience, recruitment, retention, and alumni relations is almost completely untapped. (Collaboration, anyone?)

(A "Teaching and Learning Forum" at Seton Hill University.) --Dennis G. Jerz

--The Blogosphere: What's in It for Me? (An Introduction)Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just presented to a small group of faculty, staff, and administrators. Mike Arnzen also presented his professional development website, Pedablogue.

Web loggers, or bloggers for short, are that new breed of armchair documentarian, chronicling the day's events -- politics, sports, music, arts, family, dating life, anything -- on Web sites that are updated daily, or several times a week. But unlike a newspaper Web site, which brings a new front page with new stories each day, yesterday's blog musings generally aren't wiped out by the next day's postings. Scroll down, and see what was on the blogger's mind yesterday, last week and last month. --Pittsburgh goes blog wild (Post-Gazette)