Blogging workshop

I thought I'd park the Prezi I'll be using for this semester's blogging workshops here.

Blogging @KU on Prezi

Blogging essay references

References

Barton, D. (2007 2nd Edition). Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell.

Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Bruns, A. & Jacobs, J. (eds) (2006). Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang.

Cheung, C. (2004 2nd Edition). Identity Construction and Self-Presentation on Personal Homepages: Emancipatory Potentials and Reality Constraints. In D. Gauntlett and R. Horsley (eds) Web.Studies. London: Arnold. 53-68

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.) (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London: Routledge.

Davies, J. and Merchant, G. (2006). Looking from the Inside Out: academic blogging as new literacy. In C. Lankshear & M. Knobel (eds) A New Literacies Sampler. New York: Peter Lang 167‐198

Hodkinson, P. & Lincoln, S. (2008). Online journals as virtual bedrooms?: Young people, identity and personal space. Young, 16 (1), 27-46

Huffaker, D. A. & Calvert, S. L. (2005). Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, . 10(2). Accessed 20 Nov. 2008 <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html>

Keen, A.(2008). The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy. London and Boston: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Lévy, P. (2001). Cyberculture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Lindemann, K. (2005). Lives Online: Narrative Performance, Presence and Community in LiveJournal.com. Text and Performance Quarterly, 25(4), 354–72.

Lovink, G. (2008) Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

Reed, A. (2005). "My Blog is Me": Texts and Persons in UK Online Journal Culture (and anthropology). Ethnos, 70(2), 220–42.

Graves, L. (2007). The Affordances of Blogging: A Case Study in Culture and Technological Effects. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 31(4), 331-346

Grusin, R.(1994). What is an Electronic Author? Theory and the Technological Fallacy. Configurations 2.3, The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science, 469-483. Accessed from: <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v002/2.3grusin.html>

Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2007) New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Lankshear, C.& Knobel, M. (eds) (2007). A New Literacies Sampler. New York: Peter Lang.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press.

Ware, I. (2008). Andrew Keen Vs the Emos: Youth, Publishing, and Transliteracy. M/C Journal, 11: 4. Accessed from: <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/41>

Romanticism Redux: blogging as (sometimes) very old literacy practice

Just came across a reference in some old notes on blogging from a few years back.

It's from Joe Clark, a Canadian blogger, who writes:

A blog is a form of exteriorized psychology. It’s a part of you, or of your psyche; while a titanium hip joint or a pacemaker might bring technology inside the corporeal you, a Weblog uses technology to bring the psychological you outside of it. [emphasis mine]

Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog”

Clark is articulating the Romantic view of writing as expression, an exteriorisation of an already fully constituted interiority (my inner self, psyche or the "Real Me").

It's a long way from 'identity performance' and 'distributed selfhood'.

Clay Shirky on blogging

I like these extracts from Clay Shirky - a good risposte to those who claim blogs are trivial, inconsequential nonsense:

... dozens of weblogs have an audience of a million or more, and millions have an audience of a dozen or less. (Shirky 2008: 84)

And it's easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing - why would anyone put such drivel out in public? It's simple. They're not talking to you. 

(Shirky 2008: 85)

We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read. More is different, but less is different too. An audience isn't just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn't just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack. The bloggers and social network users operating in small groups are part of a community, and they are enjoying something analogous to the privacy of the mall. On any given day you could go to the food court and find a group of teenagers hanging out and talking to one another. They are in public, and you could certainly sit at the next table over and listen in on them if you wanted to. And what would they be saying to one another? They'd be saying, "I can't believe I missed you last night!!! Trac talked to you and said you were TRASHED off your ASS!" They'd be doing something similar to what they are doing on LiveJournal or Xanga, in other words, but if you were listening in on their conversation at the mall, as opposed to reading their post, it would be clear that you were the weird one. (Shirky 2008: 85)

References 

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press.

Henry Farrell on academic bloggin

Not sure I'll need this link but it came up in JD's presentation.

Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or professional grievances off their chests or, like Black, to pursue nonacademic interests. Others, perhaps the majority, see blogging as an extension of their academic personas. Their blogs allow them not only to express personal views but also to debate ideas, swap views about their disciplines, and connect to a wider public. For these academics, blogging isn't a hobby; it's an integral part of their scholarly identity. They may very well be the wave of the future.

[...]

Why are so many academics beginning to blog? Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. Academic blogs, like their 18th-century equivalent, are rife with feuds, displays of spleen, crotchets, fads, and nonsenses. As in the blogosphere more generally, there is a lot of dross. However, academic blogs also provide a carnival of ideas, a lively and exciting interchange of argument and debate that makes many scholarly conversations seem drab and desiccated in comparison. Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won't replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.

Henry Farrell on academic blogging

Blogging as new literacy practice (sorry make that practices)

In a discussion board forum, Julia asks:

[1] From looking at blogs and perhaps drawing from your experience of blogging, do you consider blogs to exemplify new literacy practices?

[2] Do you think that it is possible to keep a blog and still be of an ‘old’ mindset?

Here's my response:

[1] I think blogs simultaneously exemplify 'new' and 'old' literacy practices.

Blogs are over a decade old now (Happy Blogiversary) and there are now millions of them used for very different purposes.

It's inaccurate to homogenise blogging as a practice that can be ascribed to any one particular mindset. Like the term literacies, blogging probably needs to be conceptualised as a set of contextually defined practices (note the plural).

Some - but not all - uses of blogging might be said to exemplify new literacy practices where the text-making processes incorporate some features of digital textuality as defined by Guy Merchant (linking to other texts, embedding media, blurring of generic boundaries etc.).

[2] In spite of the affordances of blogging software, there is no reason why a user should not use his/her blog as a tool for verbose reflection (i.e. for monologuing, sounding off, one-way traffic) in an 'outsider/newcomer' mindset way without reader comments, links, quotations, blog roll, tags or embedded media content.

The possibilities for social interaction may well be bypassed by some blog users who see the tool as an online word processor - a bit like Word, or, more accurately Google Docs. For example, an undergraduate might use a blog to make reading notes that will be integrated into a essay; a tech-savvy postgrad might make notes of conference papers attended on an iPhone or ultracompact laptop.

My own use of blogging is more 'outsider/newcomer'; I use it to 'bookmark', tag, selectively quote from articles I've read, web sites I've found etc. that I think will be useful in my professional life. These notes could then be cut and paste into emails or discussion board posts, or I could send a link to the post to interested colleagues. For example, I've mentionned the Michael Wesch videos to a couple of people recently. I probably need a blog post with links to them that I can share quickly.

The next bits are more notes to self ...

Blogging characteristics and affordances:

• minimal technological barriers to participation
  
  
• dual structure - primary posts and secondary comments - supports dialogue, feedback, review, sharing (but also clearly demarcates readers and writers in an old skool way)
  
  
• RSS feeds can be enabled allowing users to subscribe to new content
  
  
• blog rolls linking to favourite blogs or on shared subject (creation of loosely coupled online learning communities)
  
  
• tagging allowing ease of searching

Some social consequences ...

• gatekeeper' model irrelevant (sorry Andrew Keen) - we're all publishing/broadcasting now (even if it's to nano-audiences)
  
  
• publicising the private - (see post on Keen and Emo and Clay Shirky)
  

Lawrence Lessig on Andrew Keen

Here's Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, on Andrew Keen (the full article is well worth a read though):

I think it is a great thing when amateurs create, even if the thing they create is not as great as what the professional creates. I want my kids to write. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop reading Hemingway and read only what they write. What Keen misses is the value to a culture that comes from developing the capacity to create—independent of the quality created. That doesn’t mean we should not criticize works created badly (such as, for example, Keen’s book…). But it does mean you’re missing the point if you simply compare the average blog to the NY times.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/05/keens_the_cult_of_the_amateur.html

What a great, no-nonsense ripost to all those who claim blogs, YouTube etc. are drivel.

Today's Blogging Workshop

Here's my presentation for today's workshop on blogging:

| View | Upload your own

Eduspaces is an HE-oriented social networkign site with a useful blog (e.g. mine).

Articles on blogging

Got a package of course info for MSc in e-learning today (quite exciting being a student again).

Thought I'd do a bit of reading on the blogging side of things (even though I think I'm fairly up to speed on this).

Here's some of the preliminary reading:

McClellan, J. (2004) 'Inside the ivory tower'. The Guardian. September 23, 2004. Retrieved, August 29 2007, from: http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/comment/0,,1311177,00.html

The article starts small: a postgrad using a blog to record ongoing research, reflections, resources etc. before moving out to a bigger picture of blog uses in HE: individual and group blogs for sharing ideas with a wider community, or as a course noticeboard.

A couple of particular strengths stick out:

1. the blog as a form that encourages peer review and obliges authors to refine ideas (Esther MacCallum-Stewart calls the blog a "mind gym")
   
   
2. the blog as a form that breaks down the boundaries of HE to engage with a greatly expanded readership.

The article ends on a warning note that HEIs are increasingly locking down content behind password-protected systems. My view is that this may be so but nothing prevents academics setting up their own externally hosted blogs on third-party sites.

Siemens, G. (2002) The Art of Blogging - Part 1: Overview, Definitions, Uses, and Implications.
Retrieved, August 29 2007, from:
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm
A very early article, predating the Web 2.0 hype. A useful collection of definitions of blogging from the pioneers. The Andrew Sullivan line that blogging is somewhere "between writing a column and talk radio" captures nicely the blog's dual structure of primary and secondary content. The focus isn't really on HE and the game has moved on a little since 2002.


One link doesn't work (http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/matrix.gif

Cult of the amateur -v- the tyranny of the guilds

There was a provocative article in last week's Observer on Web 2.0 and blogs (Enough! The Briton who is challenging the web's endless cacophony, David Smith, technology correspondent
Sunday April 29, 2007 The Observer).

It gave (unnecessary) publicity to Andrew Keen's forthcoming book on "digital narcissism" (laughably entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy).

However, it did provoke an interesting response the following week from an academic who sees blogging, social networking etc. as continuations of an earlier radical tradition of published dissent from formerly marginalised voices (e.g. The Black Dwarf). Here's the response in full:

Don't bash bloggers

In his rush to dismiss bloggers, Andrew Keen ('Enough!', News, last week) seems to be unaware of the very history of journalism. We need only to consider the English radical press of the 19th century to find powerful examples of writing that can be thought of as the precursor to social networking on the web. The 'pauper correspondents' of political newspapers such as Black Dwarf were not professional journalists, but members of communities who found their rights threatened. In similar fashion, the citizen journalism of the present day offers those who find their voices marginalised or misrepresented by the mass media the opportunity to speak in their own voices from within their communities (think of South Korea's successful OhmyNEWS).

Keen's desire to separate the author from the audience also flies in the face of the practice of journalism. I first read the work of music journalist Paul Morley in his self-published fanzine, Out There. It is as a fan that Morley, like so many amateur and professional journalists, remains a member of an audience, of a community. It is when we lose touch with our communities that we begin to lose our humanity, and our writing loses its relevance.
Dr Chris Atton
reader in journalism
Napier University, Edinburgh

Beyond e-moderating

I've just finished doing a course called Beyond e-moderating and need to get together with two other colleagues who've also done it to see if it's worth running at our university.

There's an ambiguity to the title: beyond e-moderating in the sense of 1) more advanced/developed e-moderating or 2) there's more than just discussion boards now.

The course seems to want to keep both possibilities available in tension: more of the same (albeit extended and developed) for some people, other things (inc. blogs and wikis) for others.

On the recent course I was on, some participants expressed a scepticism of blogs and wikis (why though if they're already signed up to the value of online interaction through discussion boards?). Others, however, enjoyed engaging with other tools for online publication and collaboration.

I think it would be interesting to run the course internally but I think I'd like to see more on the use of blogs and wikis (possibly even something on synchronous working - virtual classroom or IM) in the context of the bigger picture of getting students to reflect, publish, give, receive and act on feedback, work together, generate and share ideas collaboratively etc..

I don't think that there's one right tool for all of these kinds of different but overlapping activities.

Capturing the "now"

Here's one thing I forgot to add in my earlier post on blog affordances:

... blogs seem to be really good at allowing you to capture the 'now' of your thoughts or project development.

Here's my kitchen this morning ... (better than yesterday)


Here's a picture I took on my way to work (Surbiton to Kingston along the Thames):


Here's what I'm thinking now: should trees have blossom this early? is it another example of the effects of global warming?

E-tivity 5.1: Course Report

I'm going to start working on E-tivity 5.1: Course Report here. I'll make a start then re-edit ...

E-tivity 5.1: Course Report
Purpose: to reflect on the value of the course.
Task: Prepare a report, of no more than 500 words, that identifies the key e-moderating skills that you need to develop that will make significant differences to the development of your own participants as online learners. Post your report in the Forum below.
Respond: to the reports of others by identifying helpful perspectives that the participant may have missed.

Areas for further development/reflection:

1) So many virtual spaces: discussion forums, the blogosphere, chat rooms and wikiworld. Affordances. What are their relative merits? What can they each do that the others cannot? My initial thoughts are:

• Blogs: good for getting one to articulate arguments to an imaginary interlocutor (does it matter if a blog has a readership? is presenting ideas to an imagined readership suffucient discipline?); good for linking to relevant sources - repository of references for self as well as sharing; good for day-to-day unfinished reflections that you can return to (either edit or new post); a source document for an essay, report or longer piece of writing. Question: should you assess a blog? Potential for designing out plagiarism quite high? Ownership model: individual.
  
  
  
• Wikis: great for finished products (e.g. e-tivity, group presentation). Spoke to colleague in nursing about her midwifery students: small groups working presentation of physiological changes to women's bodies during pregnancy, each group looking at different trimester. Wikis would be perfect here. More thought needed on discussion that needs to take place around the wiki. Synchronous and/or asynchronous? Ownership model: group/democratic.
  Some research into the use of wikis in education
  
  
• Discussion boards: good for brainstorming, socialisation, development of cohort identity and sense of purpose. Great at idea generation but not so good at creating a finished article. Ownership model: group/democratic.

2) Assessing online: guidelines for academic colleagues. A colleague today asked me how could we encourage staff to use discussion forums without first doing the e-moderating course or similar. Many colleagues are assessing online participation in online forums. I wonder how sophisticated their assessment criteria are. I'll try to track the quote down later, but I remember reading an article that argued that students' learning improves when they come to hold the same understanding of quality as that held by their tutors. One way of doing this is by being more specific about the criteria by which we assess online participation. I'm glad I had the chance to thrash some ideas out about this. However, Rachel's experience makes me think I'm at a really early stage of my reflection on the practicalities.