Weblogs: February 2006 Archive Page

--Ex 1-4c: A Clever Blank-Verse Entry on Your Blog (Intro to Literary Study (EL150))

I know they're only doing it because
I've made them; still, it thrills me every time
My students write in blank verse on their blogs.

With a few clicks of a mouse, Pleasants can navigate the Web site for Goochland County's Byrd Elementary School and access the Web log kept by her daughter's third-grade teacher, Ellen Robinson.

As all Goochland teachers have been required to do this year, Robinson keeps a school district-sponsored Web log, or blog -- a kind of diary of her class's activities. --Lea Setegn --Reading, writing and blogging: Goochland teachers show off students' work, share learning tools on Web logs (Times Dispatch)

Part of a bouquet of blogging-related news items on Steven D. Krause's site.

Were I duplicitous and talented enough I could convince you I'm anything: a ninth grader with body image issues . . . a divorcee with nothing left to live for . . . or a graduate student about to hit the job market. This entire blog could be an elaborate scam designed to evoke undeserved sympathy from you. To wit:

How do you know I'm a cancer survivor? I've mentioned it a couple of times. But am I to be trusted? --Scott Eric Kaufman --A Post in Two Parts: The First Will Bore You; The Second, Infuriate (Acephalous)

Found Poetry Exercise: So Rich with Lines I Could Post (Seton Hill University -- Home Page)

I can't remember when I first noticed it, but that's a "Blog!" link on the SHU home page. I'm delighted to see the value of SHU blogging reflected in such a visible way.

While the context suggests that the link will point to a place where prospective students can blog, the link points to the always useful SHU Admissions weblog. Of course, there is a wealth of other blogging going on at SHU, and which might also be of interest to prospective students.

I'm not feeling well enough to do this subject justice, but I can still copy and paste. So, in honor of all the great blogging at Seton Hill University, I present this "found poetry" exercise. Blog on, my friends!

So Rich with Lines I Could Post

First let me say that I am more than excited to finally be reading this story again.
The Bush Administration walks a fine line when it comes to finding out
the wolverine is the big pimp daddy of the animal kingdom.
he seems to be waiting for Ceasar to act and then he will counter-act

"separated" was the box I checked off
In the final pane, Snoopy asks, "Sick doesn't count?"
I have enough boxes for the first fifteen craftsters
our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share

She would rathter be ignorant of the affair
the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool
Upon arriving to campus Tuesday evening, you will meet other sleepover guests
This process continues until all the pieces in the room have been judged five times.

I love the way Cleopatra is described. She is the one who really rules
she is somehow better than he is, as a member of the "secret society"
Last semester, it was OK to uses APA Citation. Now we have to use MLA
do you think that love can work in something like politics?

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave ?new economy? a few years ago?

Shouldn?t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one - especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn?t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers? --Trevor Butterworth --Time for the last post (FT.com)

The point of blogging isn't that you can easily read what other people write. It's that they can easily read what you write. It's not the reading that's a new component of the blogosphere, it's the writing.

One might imagine what would have happened to the future of the essay if Rousseau had contemplated and feared negative public response to his love of self-pleasure and resisted exploring his emotions in such a way (i.e., if he doubted whether self love would be a ?serious? topic). Or what if Cervantes took the ?novel? form of the novel so serious that he could not mock his own novel?s origins and purpose, as Don Quixote does in its beginning pages? Would this medium be the same as it is today?

To break this sense of seriousness, academic bloggers would benefit by engaging with the potentials this medium offers writers and by allowing themselves the opportunity to experiment. In a professional environment like ours, where experimentation is typically admired elsewhere (poetry, fiction) and downplayed in our own practices (exams, dissertation writing, outcomes statements, academic publishing), finally academia has the opportunity to play with digital form, content, and genre in ways previously denied because of the difficulty of learning hypertext or setting up webspace on university servers. --Jeff Rice --Serious Bloggers (Inside Higher Ed)

SHU bloginator Karissa Kilgore, who's been thinking quite a lot about a similar issue relating to facebook, pointed this article out to me. Thanks, Karissa!

Blogging Slowdown (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm going to slow down my blogging here for a while, because I'm in the process of moving to a new server. I've got a backup of the site as of sometime yesterday, and I'm not sure whether I'll be able to get another backup before the new site goes online.

The problem is that my ISP, supplehost.com, has stopped responding to my e-mails. The blog is still working normally, but I haven't been able to make changes to my website for about 2 weeks now.

It shouldn't be any real trouble moving the website so that it operates in house, but the blog is a bit trickier.

The blogs on blogs.setonhill.edu aren't affected. They're hosted by another ISP, and for the moment I rather like the idea of having content on two different hosts, so that if one server goes down I can still get work done through the other. If it's all hosted on-site, and something goes wrong, I'll be where Moses was when the lights went out.

Update. 11 Feb

As is usually the case with these sorts of things, it's taking longer than usual, so I'll go back to blogging as usual and I'll have to see whether I can get a more recent update of the site to use when I'm finally ready to make the switch.

Michael Kinsley made me laugh a decade ago when he argued against Web populists replacing professional writers, saying that when he goes to a restaurant, he wants the chef to cook his entree, not the guy sitting at the next table. I'm not laughing anymore: When there are millions of aspiring chefs in the room willing to make your dinner for free, a least a hundred of them are likely to deal a good meal. --Jack Shafer --Not Just Another Column About Blogging: What newspaper history says about newspaper future. (Slate)

Expiry Date for Courses (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In my in box today, a question to ponder. What courses from your program should not be accepted for transfer credit after 10 years have passed?

If you started a science major 10 years ago, and took some foundational courses, and then dropped the major, how much of what was then considered cutting-edge knowledge would be obsolete if you went back to school a decade later? At least some of it.

An English student who learned literary theory 10 years ago may not be up on the latest trends, but should ideally have been exposed to research methods that would make it fairly easy to catch up on a level sufficient for undergraduate work. (Besides, plenty of English academics do their job just fine without paying much attention to the developments of the past decade.)

While the culture of journalism and the methods of delivery have changed, the bedrock principles of journalism (the difference between edtitorializing and reporting; the relationship between expected depth and time until deadline; the importance of checking your sources) are pretty stable.

What about writing for the internet? In 1996, when the World Wide Web was young, and graphical browsers were just starting to introduce the internet to large numbers of people who were not computer specialists, Jakob Nielsen wrote Writing Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace and In Defense of Print. Both of these contain dated information (one so dated that Nielsen added an update), but once again, the principles are still solid. A set of handouts I wrote for the Engineering Writing Centre in 1998 are still pretty accurate. A page I wrote called "Annotate Your Lists of Links" covers most of the basic concepts that I now teach in the context of writing for weblogs.

Since new media genres are constantly emerging and changing, it's likely that the content of the "New Media Projects" course that I'll teach for the first time this fall will look very different from what it will be in 2016, but I suppose I'll still be teaching interactive fiction, and I hope I'm still teaching it in 2026 and beyond.

In all my classes, I'm most interested in teaching process, which changes more slowly than the content.

Yes, the actual steps you take in order to get text onto the internet has changed in the last 10 years, but the process of prototyping, beta-testing, and quality control is still the same.