Neologism: "Blender Blog"
When I first introduced my Seton Hill students to blogging in 2003, before Facebook had mainstreamed social networking into a neatly wrapped package, my students posted a mixture of personal and academic material. Now that even my committed bloggers do most of their social networking elsewhere, I have started pitching the academic blogs as a more professional practice for real-world writing. But my student Andy LoNigro just posted a thoughtful reflection on the weblog taxonomy promoted by Crawford Kilian in Writing for the Web 3.0. Andy pushes back a little, in a way that makes me think that perhaps the reports of the death of social blogging have been greatly exaggerated.
As it happens, in another class I teach a design tool called Blender 3D, and there are plenty of hits for "blender blog" in that sense.
I began to think about what categories our blogs for Dr. Jerz would fall into? I first thought about a category called Academic Blogs but what we write isn't always for academics. We have the opportunity to express our freedom and creative abilities. The more I looked into it and thought about it I realized that my blog here at SHU has an aspect of each of the categories that Kilian talks about in this section, thus creating a blend of all of them spawning the name: Blender Blog. It's like taking all of the cateogories and throwing them in a blender. -- Andy LoNigroSo, will "blender blogging" catch on? My colleague Mike Arnzen coined the term "pedablogue," I use "xenoblogging" in my blogging rubrics, and my former student Evan Reynolds coined the wonderful term "drive-by blogging" (to describe the sudden bursts of not-too-terribly-focused blogging energy necessary to catch up when a blogging portfolio is fast approaching).
As it happens, in another class I teach a design tool called Blender 3D, and there are plenty of hits for "blender blog" in that sense.
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I'm having a good time lurking on your students' blogs. If you or they want to raise questions directly to me, I'll be delighted to try to answer them.
And here's a question for you and your students: My publisher wants a fourth edition of Writing for the Web by next spring. Any suggestions on what new material it should include, and what I might drop?
Cheers,
Crawford
I like that phrase -- "blender blogs." Andy makes a smart observation. They do serve many purposes. Perhaps they're even schizoid -- or perhaps they're not blended or synthesized enough.
Personally, I'd still like to see less homework, more self-expression, and more organic interaction on the local blogosphere. Surely the evolution of Web 2.0 and the rise of social networking is not entirely to blame for the shifting sands of our local online community. I'm wondering if the blogosphere's portal page is overloaded with homework assignments (and comments on them), leading to a lack of interest in cross-readership. Perhaps if our portal to the online community was somehow more inviting and even less academic-seeming, it might encourage more interaction among peers? Maybe course blogs need to be filtered out? Maybe if the Setonian online interfaced with blog postings from the NMJ site (i.e., an rss feed of staff blogs; or a 'best of the blogosphere' department), it might pull in more readers and raise interactivity? There may be some creative solutions at fomenting community that haven't been attempted yet. How do the social networking sites that students find attractive invite and solicit interactivity? That might be a starting point. Blog interest can be cultivated.
I did try to privilege group blogs somewhat, so that the individual homework blogs don't completely overwhelm the other stuff. Yes, I could set up some alternate feeds, or set up something so that every post with a tag "public" would "stick" to the top of the portal, or maybe set up a "recommend this link" feature that would let anyone post a SHU url that's worth considering.
I have been working on getting the students interested in doing a little more with the Setonian Online, but in the recent past students have not been interested in the doing the work that would come with moderating comments on Setonian articles.
Thanks for your feedback. I do think there's a crop of committed and creative writers in "Writers for the Internet" right now, and many of them will be taking EL150 with you next term. There are some teachers who, rather than have students blog through the whole course, just have a blogging unit for a few weeks. I'd be happy to help you set up some different kind of blogging activity, if you like, that would emphasize more personal blogging and less "homework." Let me know what you think.
Hi! Thank you so much for your interesting blog
I'm a Russian student at the English faculty and I'm really interested in everything that you write.
Now I'm searching for informarion about neologisms in advertising, but I'm not very successful at that.
May be I search wrongly? What should I write in google in order to find what I want?
I tried to write neologisms in advertising and new words in advertising.
May be there are other words for the same matter?
Can you help me?
email me, please...
If you're writing a paper, then you should probably not be using Google as your primary research tool. I suggest that you ask your teacher or a librarian for help finding an appropriate database that lets you find good, peer-reviewed academic sources.