A well-known writer

Here is an anecdote passed along by Annie Dillard:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”

“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know . . . . Do you like sentences?”

The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentence? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin . . . . (The Writing Life 70)

Bloggers often plainly like writing, but it is not clear how many like sentences. If more did, we might run into more posts that are about sentences or that are about writing in more old-fashioned ways — sort of like the Paris Review interviews with writers, where people talk about nuts and bolts, where do you write, how do you revise, how many pencils do you sharpen at the start of each day to get yourself into the psychic space of writing, that sort of thing. Where are the posts quoting amazing sentences, not amazing ideas or amazing news, but amazing sentences from favorite bloggers? And the discussions that follow, suggestive, enthusiastic, reverential, trying to figure out how those sentences work and how they got written and how you and I could write some sentences like them.

Where are the blog posts about prose?

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Emerson on blogging

(I’m addicted to squinting while I read. Try it!) The great American essayist can help us with the problem with “pointage,” those posts that do little more than point to other posts. In the final paragraph of “Quotation and Originality” Emerson said:

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

In other words, it is an essential trait of human intelligence to work with the world by reinventing it, by borrowing elements of this and that, attaching them sideways and upside down to other strange elements, and thereby making some new worthwhile thing. Human beings must create, not just replicate, not just follow procedures, not just obey. Otherwise, no joy there is. (I’ve been watching Star Wars movies with the kids this week.)

In “The American Scholar” Emerson also said, One must be an inventor to read well. We cannot even have a fruitful relationship with our own experiences, including our reading experiences, without making what we see our own. We see new ideas and events from the context of our past experience, for one thing.

As a writing habit, as a habit of mind, undigested linking swears an oath to a nearly mute humanity, one able to say little more than, “I point to this!” It testifies to how little one can think and still produce words on a screen. We can do better.

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The personal side

Halley Suitt essays on the urgency of personal writing in the blogosphere: And, as you’ve probably guessed, I think of Anne Frank as a blogger, she says. And in a longer piece she tells the history of blogging, in part, as an opening into the personal that was driven by the different uses women saw to make of the software.

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A collective course blog

This fall I’m teaching W350 Advanced Expository Writing, and I’ve announced a focus on style for the writing assignments. I think I will try for a single blog, a collective blog, for this course, in which students and I will gather examples of good prose style, reflect on the techniques we find in them, and try to name principles we see at work. Perhaps we will revise and assemble some of our work into a manual of prose style at the end, a site that might be of use to others. Students in later semesters might use, extend, and revise the site. It might be best to use Wiki software for our collaboration on the manual.

We can refer to scholars of style as we do our work — how can we bring the ideas of Hazlitt on familiar style into our discussion, for example? Which of their terms and concepts speak most powerfully to a practicing writer today? How do we translate the advice of a theorist into our own daily composing pratices?

I haven’t worked out the other assignments for the course yet. Students are required to do a research project, for one thing.

As you can see, this course design continues my interest in using blogs in settings that pay attention both to process and to product, using the blog to help enrich the process but not letting it be the only or final product. And I want the product to have a sense of audience and wider use. If blogs help us create and test knowledge, then publishing a web site with the results invites people to use that knowledge.

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Wiki progress report

Tim Bray’s first encounter with a Wiki site leads him to notice that people are more able to work together in a radically open environment than he expected. He calls the process reverse entropy, a making of structure when one would expect things to be falling apart. Still, he has the urge to assign an editor to Sam Bray’s new site devoted to the Echo Project, which aims to improve syndication technology in the blogosphere. In a post called “Stamp Out Creativity Now,” Bray soon reports reservations about the undisciplined content of the unfolding site that may be due to the radically open Wiki process, though.

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The First Stone

Joel Bleifuss of In These Times has started a blog associated with the magazine, an interesting hybrid. A periodical is probably a good place to test the dynamics of a site that has both relatively static and dynamic elements — the month’s issue and the dialies of the blog. The Michiana Chronicles contributions to the WVPE web site have an opportunity to work both of those ways — posting the newest piece along with two or three others from previous years that still have a seasonal interest, say, along with the larger archive. I remain interested in the static and dynamic mix for course sites, partially because a teacher of writing, research, critical reading and thinking skills must be teaching process and benefits by any method that slows the process enough to make the parts more visible, more open for consideration, and partially because of the sense of urgency and audience we gain by making something that others can use.

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A writing course blog assignment

First, the model. From Making Sense: Constructing Knowledge in the Arts and Sciences, edited by Bog Coleman, Rebecca Brittenham, Scott Campbell, and Stephanie Gerard, I am interested in Wanda M. Corn’s work on that famous painting of the farm wife and the husband with the pitchfork. Her essay, “The Birth of a National Icon: Grant Wood’s American Gothic,” investigates the painting itself, the writing that has been done about it, its cultural context, its relation to the life and other works by the painter, and the parodies that have been made of it. She provides a fine model for students of a complex study of a cultural object. A longer version of the essay was also published in Art the Ape of Nature.

I see this essay as a model we can study and emulate in this fall’s W140 Honors Composition course. The students will all be members of the Honors program, and we will have the pleasure of a slightly smaller class size, 15. We will meet in a networked computer lab once a week and in a seminar room once a week, and I can probably have a laptop and projector there in the seminar room if I schedule ahead. So we can easily use a weblog this semester as part of our study of expository writing.

The course requires a research project, and I would like to use student blogs to help them slow down and make public and, I hope, strengthen the stages of their research and research writing. We will use a single weblog on pMachine, but each student will have a category for posting his or her entries, so the category feature will imitate free-standing individual blogs. This will deprive students of a few blog features, like page design and a free-standing blogroll, but it will have the advantage of gathering all of their blogs together for easy reading — the class will be frequent readers and respondents to each other’s work. The View All link will allow each of us to see all the newest entries very easily.

Students will blog their research process as an aid to creating a polished research product. They will create something meant to be of use to others. I will ask them to choose an object, event, practice, or person of wide cultural interest and importance, as Corn does, and to use blogging to gather and evaluate the materials already existing about their topic. As the weeks go by, they will, as Robert M. Holland, Jr. advises, begin drafting a guide for other researchers who are interested in their topic. The guide will include an annotated list of resources, a description and history, and a discussion of its cultural roles, its cultural contexts, and its role in cultural struggles or debates.

Aside about plagiarism: it might be possible to help students work past some of the temptations of plagiarism by adding this requirement — if a source is not introduced and discussed in your weblog, you cannot write about it in your final paper. This would mean that students would have to start digesting their sources, which would help with the quality of the project as well as get us past some of the pitfalls of plagiarism.

Let’s say that students must create four or five weblog entries a week. In the early weeks these might survey web and more traditional sources addressing their topic and its contexts. They would provide links to the sources, summarize them, and begin to evaluate them. They would stop from time to time to sketch their growing sense of the topic’s character and importance to certain cultural processes or debates.

Classmates would be responsible for keeping up with several blogs by other students and writing comments about what they find there, helping each other extend their thinking by asking clarifying questions and discussing the most interesting discoveries. They would also see good examples in each other’s work and be able to try new techniques in their own writing as a result. We would spend some time each week looking at good things people are doing in their blogs and learn together what makes blogging better.

As the weeks go by, students would stop searching from time to time and write short pieces in which they attempt to consolidate some portion of the work so far. Just as Dave Winer, say, stops occasionally and adds a bit of an essay to his collection of short daily postings, the students will try to see what their work has been adding up to and take a provisional stand on some portion of the topic. Upon posting this, we will all give feedback, and the gathering and thinking will continue from there.

All through the semester the students will keep a collection of links to their sources, so the annotated section of the project will grow steadily, in public view. About 2/3 of the way through the semester they will start drafting the other prose sections that will, with feedback and revision, go onto a class site presenting the final projects.

Perhaps that web page could be called Studies in Culture or Studying Culture or Guides to Cultural Reseach. I might write an introduction, and then from a central table of contents we would link to each student’s project page. This page would be presented as A Guide to Research on Such and Such, and would contain the annotated sources and the prose piece placing Such and Such into its cultural contexts. In a final course paper, students might evaluate the collection of sites, or they might try the assignment Ed Folsom used to give at the University of Iowa and give detailed feedback to 5 or 6 of their classmates.

Assuming all goes well, I would want to keep these guides on the web and add new guides in later semesters. I’m sure students will learn from the example of previous semesters, too. We might also ask students to end the semester with advice to other students about the processes of blogging and research writing. In the best of all possible worlds, I would create a guide each semester along with the students — I could use the materials in a later course, certainly.

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A spark

It would be interesting to follow the ripples from this 6/22/03 Breslin column, A Fate Sealed Under Secrecy, about the loss of American rights — see what happens to it as it makes its way around the blogosphere and elsewhere, see how the ideas and facts are worked with by other readers and writers. A test case for the democratic blogosphere and the second superpower. Via Christopher Lydon. See the comments, too.

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Being more helpful to readers

I have enjoyed Fred’s blog, but the brief 6/24/03 post on Krugman (five words long, with a password-guarded link to Krugman’s column in the NY Times) and the comments that follow it show how easily one can obscure what you hope to offer in a message:

Bureaucracy in Action, 11:20 AM by Fred
Paul Krugman asks good questions.

Here are the comments:

Article title please?

For those of us who aren’t signed up to receive the NY Times, could you please provide the title of this article, so we can get it via Google’s news site? Thanks.

Posted Tue 24 Jun 1:23 PM EDT by Elayne Riggs
Elayne, it’s called “Denial and Deception,” and its in today’s New York Times.

Posted Tue 24 Jun 4:35 PM EDT by Fred ( : )

Thanks!

Thanks, it’s been reproed in at least one non-NYT place already. Here’s the Google URL:

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/opinion/

24KRUG.html?ex=1057118400&en=
2072e6d04973450c&ei=5062&partner=
GOOGLE]http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/opinion/
24KRUG.html?ex=1057118400&en=2072e6d04973450c&ei=
5062&partner=GOOGLE[/url]

Posted Thu 26 Jun 10:05 AM EDT by Elayne Riggs

Questions about what?

We’re one blog post and three comments into this discussion and a passerby is still offered no clue what Krugman’s article is about.

Posted Fri 27 Jun 10:30 AM EDT by Ken Smith

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An overview

Scot Hacker provides an overview of blogging for the journal Macworld.

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The second superpower

James F. Moore wonders whether the new communities forming on the internet will become a second superpower. The article now, the book later, then the talk shows. At stake, he says, is world peace; the tool, open dialogue among wider groups of people. Blogging as a democratic practice.

PS on 8/12. Andrew Orlowski traces the term back to a comment by Patrick Tyler in the NY Times, but others disagree about his interpretation.

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Breaking news

The courses at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School share course materials on the web. One small feature worth emulating is the Breaking News section of each course site, where the professor can leave updates for students that they will be likely to find. A W250-style pMachine course site would benefit from that feature.

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Journalism list

CyberJournalist offers a collection of three kinds of journalism sites.

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The virtue of literary form

Writing about the nature of journalism’s famous inverted pyramid story structure, Chip Scanlan shows how the restrictions of a literary form can change a writer for the better. Of the pyramid, he says:

It’s also an extremely useful tool for thinking and organizing because it forces the reporter to sum up the point of the story in a single paragraph. Journalism students who master it and then go on to other fields say it comes in handy for writing everything from legal briefs to grant applications. (6/23/03)

The restrictions of the form force the writer to make judgments, often under time pressure.

The inverted pyramid and summary lead can be a challenging form for some journalists. At least, it was for me when I began reporting. Summing up three hours of a school board meeting or trying to answer the five Ws about a fatal car accident in a single paragraph, then deciding what other information belonged in the story — and in what order — was arduous and frustrating, especially with the clock ticking to deadline.

Also, as a beginner, I usually didn’t have the knowledge of the subjects I covered to easily answer the central question posed by the event: What was newsworthy about it, and in what order of importance? I resisted the disciplined thinking the pyramid demands, and like many reporters, scorned the form as uncreative and stilted. I preferred the storytelling approach of the fiction writer to the “just the facts” style of the reporter.

Instead of giving readers a loosely-constructed stream of brainstorming, writers who train themselves in one or more forms of writing change and grow to meet the demands of their forms:

Over time, it became easier, and I came to see that the form helps develop the powers of critical thinking, analysis, and synthesis that are the foundation of clarity in thinking and writing. The inverted pyramid is a basic building block of journalistic style.

Students whose teachers ask them to blog but who give them few other restrictions to the assignment may miss out on this opportunity for development. I suspect that the blogger’s freedom can be reduced without damage if a teacher introduces a discussion of effective traits of form — journalism blogging, for example — using good models that teacher and students all gather in their web research. Students could write a guide to the particular literary form they want to practice on the web, collecting and annotating strong and weak examples and preserving these for future classes to extend and refine.

The inverted pyramid is not the most likely form for some bloggers, but it has a name and a well-documented history. Scanlan provides links to other articles on journalistic forms: a history of the inverted pyramid, the hybrid of narrative and pyramid called the hourglass, and other hybrids called the five boxes and the nut graf.

Teacher and students might also take on the project of naming other, less journalistic blogging forms, tracing their history, analyzing and exposing their strengths and weaknesses, and practicing and mastering them.

See also Scanlan’s long list of other resources on writing, creative nonfiction, the personal essay, editing, and journalism. Don’t miss the Fall 2000 special issue of the Poynter Report on the personal essay.

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Authentic

Sam Ruby is working on some of the technical questions about the software that supports the weblog way, but he starts his essay with this definition:

Authentic Voice of a Person. Reverse Chronological Order. On the web. These are essential characteristics of a online Journal or weblog. #

I asked the computer to check Meg Hourihan’s essay on blogging for the word authentic — no show. Catherine Seipp’s article — no show. Dave Winer’s essay — no show, though he is interested in “the unedited voice of a person” — a sense that the writer is shaping her presentation of content and self, rather than having it shaped or reshaped by editing or pressure from others. He says, “as long as the voice of the person comes through, it’s a weblog.”

Back at the office we would probably want to distinguish between some essential voice that one person owns and a range of choices about speaking and relating to audience and occasion that a person makes. If you control those choices, something about you is imprinted on the prose, no doubt, and that is in some ways you, but it is not authentic in the flatter way I think many people might mean.

I often draft sentences that say “such and such seems to” and as I revise I usually strike out “seems” for a more dynamic and confident verb. The first version might be authentic, from one perspective, but the second version is almost always a better, more lively sentence, more fully reflecting the movement of my thought, less cloaked in mannerism, more actively in touch with the particulars of language and the specificity of experience. I’m still in there, but differently. Authenticity doesn’t get at it, really. Craft, trying for craft, might be better.

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A topical collection

Sheila Lennon’s collection of garden blogs is a hint, I think, of the sort of annotation project I have thought about for students, though I would like to see students group and annotate their finds more thoroughly, and maybe write an introduction to the collection, as if they were curating an exhibit. They might also prepare a syndication page for those interested in the field, as well as a parallel collection of garden web sites. The job would be to add some value to the materials assembled by searching.

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To move the story past

Ed Cone has a phrase about writing that makes a difference — maybe all journalists say it this way, I don’t know:

The next day I interviewed Rick Boucher for my weblog. The article I posted before noon on Wednesday moved the Orrin Hatch vs. the Web story well past the version the bigtime exec’s paper posted at its site that evening. It didn’t just feel like reporting, it felt like a scoop. (6/23/03)

I should gather other terms like it, since some students need a series of explanations for a new task that comes to them as a challenge. Write something that builds on and moves the story past what others have already contributed. Or moves the idea past, in a certain kind of project. For some students, it is a way of asking them to practice going beyond summary. For writing about texts, see also the Kurt Spellmeyer phrase about interpretation meaning to say what the text hasn’t already or hasn’t quite said.

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Corporate blogs

The New York Times today suggests some of the risks and requirements for corporate blogging. The article probably applies to a college blog too. A blog creates a more informal relationship with the community that an ordinary college web page, requires a sense of voice, and can’t be completely controlled by P. R. or law offices if that voice has a chance to connect with the audience.

“The Corporate Blog Is Catching On” was written by Thom Weidlich.

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Two links for the price of one

It took me a couple of months to notice that some bloggers were economizing on their links to people, giving one link through the first name and another through the last name. This is kind of nice, since it gives more for a reader to follow up on. The shortcoming is obvious: you have to get in the habit of checking to see whether a blogger is doing this or not, or you will miss it.

Example: at the bottom of this page, journalist and blogger Ed Cone offers two links through the name of Jack McCook.

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Slow down and talk about it

Here is an interesting idea from Halley Suitt’s Weblog — linking the blogosphere to the writing of much earlier American and other writers. Halley starts with Emerson on self-reliance. But here’s the problem — instead of pointing to the whole essay, quoting bits of it and talking about those bits in light of current writing practices, we get a very brief and general headnote and then a cut and paste of the whole Emerson essay. That’s a good idea going sour because the writer doesn’t take the time to do some detail work with otherwise fine material. That’s one of the main weaknesses of many blogs. The power of language is in its specificity: “When Emerson says this, he helps me think about such and such. He leads me to consider X, but when I think about X in light of Y, I have to come to this conclusion . . . .” Not this: “Another thing on that grocery list called My Blog is Emerson. Hurray, Emerson.” All the more disappointing when the Emerson you’re pointing to is on self-reliance. Let’s get serious; let’s slow down and talk about the good material we have in front of us. Let’s stop pointing and think together.

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Pottermania

We’re leaving for the bookstore in a few minutes — there is a Harry Potter party tonight. I expect we’ll be reading the book for about three weeks, since we read it aloud. Now there’s an author who knows how to make regular writing build into an extended project. She also helps teach readers how to listen for and do the different voices in her books — scenes like the chapter in which Hagrid fetches Harry from the Dursleys in the first book are several times more lively once you hear and try to act out the tones of the voices. The tensions in the scene come alive and move with great speed through the characters.

I’m not sure I can learn much about blogging from the Potter books, but then again, Bakhtin’s sense that fiction is driven and animated by contesting social and individual voices may be useful in our dailies. We see how much of social life is worked out through the differences in desire, fear, opportunity, and experience that mark each human voice, each social group. Maybe we can listen for these things in blogs and in the sources we study as we prepare to write each day; maybe we can get some of that novelistic, dialogic energy into our dailies; maybe if we don’t we’re just repeating the already known, the rarely thought through and often untested common sense of our social circle. Stock language on one side, dialogic language practices on the other. Maybe all good novelists have something to offer bloggers.

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Foucault on criticism

From Krista at Arete, a long passage from a 1981 interview with Foucault about the social work that criticism does.

A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established, unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based. (So Is It Important To Think?)

It’s a world of surfaces and ideas that support them, then, and to change the world one needs to get past its surfaces to the concepts that quietly justify the social order:

Criticism consists in uncovering that thought and trying to change it: showing that things are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted. To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy. Understood in those terms, criticism (and radical criticism) is utterly indispensable for any transformation.

And it is a world of comfortable people, satisfied with what seems obvious, he suggests. We’re among the comfortable, certainly, among the ones who have trouble seeing past our own assumptions. Daily posts trumpeting familiar readings of experience would be a sign of that; another sign might be never reading or writing about people whose ideas and experiences are very different from our own, or if we do, just touching the surface of their difference and glancing away. Of course Foucault wasn’t talking about blogging, but he was talking about the social practices of thinkers and writers. Daily posts can break through the outer coating of common sense, can challenge what seems obvious, but I suspect that something has to accumulate, to build, rather than to burst out in full and final accomplishment each day.

Two days ago I wrote about Glenn Reynolds and his essay on good blogging. He said one of the key traits was quick response, a sense of lively interaction with events and other readers and writers. That’s a real virtue, I think, but not a sufficient one, if Foucault is right about criticism. We make contact with others, with events, in a lively way, moment by moment, and as writers in daily posts, but we also need to follow the subterranean currents that move more slowly and track them over the months until we can name the course they take and know their character. If we only write dailies, if we only think we’re writing dailies, and not working on something bigger too, I think we’re shortchanging ourselves, not doing justice to our ideas and experience. I’m seeing blogging as a worthwhile process that creates opportunities outside itself for other worthwhile products.

It would be wonderful for students to leave a course knowing both of those things.

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Uniplanet

I have to look into Alexander Reid’s article on Uniplanet, an undergraduate online journal, but sadly I can’t get the journal itself to appear in the browser today. Another time . . . . For now, there is his blog and the article in Kairos 8.1.

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Traits

Glenn Reynolds talks about what makes a blog good. Mainly he wants the writer to have her own voice and respond quickly to unfolding conversations and events. Also, be interesting, write well, and use links.

I suspect that students and other new bloggers will struggle with the voice and with participating in unfolding conversations because they will lack a developed sense of their audience as well as a developed audience. Teachers should probably build into assignments the task of being an active audience for classmates, to help stand in for what might otherwise be missing. Also, students can benefit from learning how to be an engaged audience, too. I say, give structured assignments that include both roles.

People don’t write much on blogs about what it means to write well, do they?

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Blogspotting

MSNBC is happy to help us keep an eye on the blogosphere with Will Femia’s Weblog Central Blogspotting site. Links there, too, to the line-up of blogger / columnists on their staff, like Eric Alterman.

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An unofficial student portal

Not connected with the university or any classes, here is a portal for student blogs at NYU. Unofficial as it may be, I suspect that this service is one more bit of the social glue that makes a university work. Via Scripting News.

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An assignment idea — more about the shirts

Following up on the Gathering post of 6/13 . . . . Students could do some interesting work with the wifebeater shirt — I talked briefly with April Lidinsky about this. With this item we’re at the intersection of fashion, social class, media representation, language change, gender roles, resistance to cultural norms, agency. One web site from the Google search suggests that the term came from the gay community, so there’s a complication, and other sites show some women resisting by reversing the gender role in a version they wear.

There are dozens of web sites that mention the term, many images of the shirts being worn, items for sale, designs with familiar and alarming images on the shirts, some critiques, some sites happily accepting the term on its face value, it seems. A student group could do an analysis of the images, the way the word is used, the history of its use, the types of critique that are made, and an evaluation of their own. They could blog through the process and then produce a web site or web-based multi-media article as the result. A class could do a project like this as a group and then individuals could carry out their own research on another case. Students in a particular course, over the months and years, could build a small magazine of cultural history and analysis. It could be published to the web for students and others to use.

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Blogging place

I’ve run into a few blogs interested in different ways to focus on a place in a weblog, including this one Jeff Sutter passed along today, a site devoted to the architecture of St. Louis. Built St. Louis is, I believe, a combination of two weblogs and a series of links to topical pages, all nicely designed and rich with photographs of the architecture.

It makes a good model for a course-based site, I think. A class could, for example, build a site here in South Bend addressing any of these things: the ethnic history and heritage of different parts of town; the famous and not-so-famous industrial history of the area, the progression of neighborhood and house styles over the decades, a collection of parks / scenic walks / other beauties of the area, one of the smaller towns in the area, types of rural life in our region, tomake some examples.

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This version of the facts

My daughters gave me Bill Bryson’s new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, for Father’s Day. The epigraph, from Hans Christian von Baeyer’s Taming the Atom, reminded me, at the end, of the mark of individual perspective that good writing puts on that portion of the universe the writer has known:

The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: “I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.”

“Don’t you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked.

“Yes,” said Szilard. “He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.” (xiii)

All the more reason, I say, for giving up the habit of merely pointing to other blogs, other web sites. Slow down, write fewer posts but take the time to weigh the materials in front of you and add something of value to the discussion. Everybody, the Creator included, knows the facts already. What we don’t know is each other’s best thinking.

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A call for educators to participate

A conference called BloggerCon is getting under way, and the organizers are looking for educators to lead one of the strands of discussion. Here is the call from Dave Winer:

One of the areas of focus at BloggerCon will be weblogs in education. So we’ve got a couple of people lined up who are scholars who use weblogs with excellence. No announcements yet, but they’re great people.

Now I want to balance that with a couple of educators who have successfully created a network of weblogs in a school, school district, college, university. I’m looking for people who support people who use weblogs, in a context that is not about weblogs, if possible.

My goal of course is to learn from them, and then figure out what the next steps are. What do they need from other educators. What software is missing?

We’ve already got some famous universities, I want to get connected with some not-so-famous universities. Who is leading in use of weblogs in education? Who do you look to for insight and inspiration? That’s who I want for BloggerCon.

If you have ideas, please post them here in the comments section, or send them via email to me at dwiner@cyber.law.harvard.edu. 6/14/03

Links and comments are starting to come in here, including my suggestion:

It will help if you bring in people who see your assignment for them raising two sets of questions, one set about the technology and one set about pedagogy that can make the technology educational. In other words, blogging for school is, by itself, not the same as learning, and requiring students to blog is also, by itself, not the same as teaching. The software is, by itself, not educational, but its structure makes certain kinds of pedagogical acts, including some new ones, possible.

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Gathering

Think of the category of entries that Tim Bray calls Language; think of the years under Hitler when Victor Klemperer risked his life and saved his sanity by faithfully cataloging the abuses of language routinely practiced upon the German people by their dictators, as one of the means of maintaining power. What Bray will do with all his observations I don’t know, but Klemperer, a German Jew, made notes day after day for most of Hitler’s rule and then wrote a book after the war theorizing about tyrannical uses of language. This is a way of doing blog-like work that build into something, an extended intellectual project of value to others, interesting moment by moment but important when it is made into something larger than the dailies.

Here is Bray’s 2/14/03 entry, called Wife-Beater:

There is a variety of sleeveless T-shirt that is called a singlet Down Under (maybe in Britain too?), and a muscle-shirt (mostly on males) or tank-top (mostly on females) here in the New World. It’s a little-known fact that a black singlet is a culturally important signifier of New Zealand-ness. Google suggests that on these shores, a singlet is what wrestlers wear.

I gather that these days some people are calling these things “Wife-beaters” because of their appearance on the perps in reality/cop TV shows. A living language, you gotta love it.

This is clearly a worthwhile blog entry, noting variability in language, which is interesting enough, but then raising the stakes with the class-linked, media-linked term, “wife-beaters,” for the shirts. But the entry ends almost immediately — instead of speculating on the class issues, the media’s love of stereotyping, the ways groups code themselves in language and dress, etc., Bray skips out with a sentence that is little more than a shrug: A living language, you gotta love it. It stops where it should start the serious work of theorizing, of linking one example to another, of testing or resisting what the example seems to show, and so forth. The genre of blog post undermines the opportunity the writer created for himself.

If he had chosen to say more, on that day, or to build, as Klemperer did, for months and years, then it wouldn’t matter how much a given day’s post carried through on the promise of its thinking. If the writer doesn’t build something more, though, then the customs of blogging undermine the promise of the living mind that made the observation, tempting him to abandon what he has just started to create.

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Thoreau on blogging

[If you squint.] In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard paraphrases her teacher’s journals:

To find a honey tree, first catch a bee. Catch a bee when its legs are heavy with pollen; then it is ready for home. It is simple enough to catch a bee on a flower: hold a cup or glass above the bee, and when it flies up, cap the cup with a piece of cardboard. Carry the bee to a nearby open spot — best an elevated one — release it, and watch where it goes. Keep your eyes on it as long as you can see it, and hie you to that last known place. Wait there until you see another bee; catch it, release it, and watch. Bee after bee will lead toward the honey tree, until you see the final bee enter the tree. Thoreau describes this process in his journals. So a book leads its writer. (12)

Yes, it’s not exactly blogging, but the analogy does suggest that we’re missing out if our sense of blogging doesn’t get beyond the dailies and build something. We shouldn’t just login every day and say, “I was out in the yard and saw a cool bee. See ya next time,” even if we finish the entry with a good link to a more famous blogger who’s also seen a bee.

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Annie Dillard on blogging

Well, only if you squint as you read it. So let’s squint at this passage from The Writing Life, where she distinguishes between writing to make a point and writing as a form of inquiry. When you attend to this distinction, she says, you find that

The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back. (3-4)

It’s another way of thinking about the limitation of brief, daily, unedited works. I don’t take the dailiness as a fatal flaw because I think she’s arguing for daily writing all through the book, but as I squint at this passage from this obscure corner of the blogosphere I think we should stop from time to time and try to make something out of the accumulating dailies. Either harvest them for an essay or extend the thinking and write something new in the new territory.

The dailies build community, start an exchange, start to accumulate something, but if we look back a day or two at the A-list parody we see how easy the dailies can become identifiable mannerism and even self-parody. There is a more difficult relationship to writing that promises more, Dillard suggests.

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A corporate model

Michael Gartenberg suggests a model for developing a corporate weblog, starting in-house and then slowly opening up the site to a wider audience. The model may be appropriate for an academic department or a college, too. Via ?

Or, make a living writing your blog, says Glenn Reynolds.

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Pointage and the R-VAT

My favorite line in the long parody of the so-called A-list bloggers is at the end of this:

This new meme here, that new meme there. Here’s some pointage to back and forth between this person and that person on this issue. #

The parodies probably make a couple of main points. 1) that bloggers may have the usual range of self-serving human failings, and 2) that far too much of what gets posted is repeating what others have said and pointing to where they’ve said it.

There should be an Reverse Value Added Tax — instead of taxing added value, as in Britain, tax that which does not add value. Offer something new; make it matter; make yourself and others think.

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True value

Andrew Orlowski suggests that the true value of blogs is to keep socially mal-adjusted people busy and out of other people’s way. (5/30/03) It’s “faux populism,” he says.

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Make yourself care (Make me care, part 2)

Part of a writer’s obligation Michael Stillwell described in a post I linked to on March 14 is recognized by Ben James here:

My blog is extremely tedious, and I’m buggering off for a few days to think of something interesting. (3/16/03)

Or, put another way: William E. Coles, Jr. is reputed to have answered frustrated students who asked him what he wanted in their papers this way: I want what you would want when you were proud of yourself for having wanted it. (See The Plural I.) Imagine the class conversation about that question: what would you want your papers or your web page or your blog to be like if you were proud of yourself for having wanted it?

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Everywhere I look

My parents hired a landscape architect. They were warned, “He’s good, but everywhere he looks he sees water features.” Sure enough, they now own a small waterfall and a very small pond.

Says Dave Winer:

If I were starting a new company in 2003, I would put in the charter that, in addition to whatever else my company did, the new company would be a publication. (6/7/03)

Yes, a complany creating a record of its work for itself and for others. What about a university as a publication? A department as a publication? A course as a publication?

Some of that is a matter of public relations. Who we are and what we have done well, for others to see. Part of it could be to help improve our work. What we have thought and said together that we will want to refer back to and build on later, for ourselves to see. Or that we want to keep talking over right now. That could cover the university or the department.

What about the course as a publication? Making something for others as a goal? Possibly, but also what about making a portfolio for students and teacher, as a record of their work, to talk about and improve now and to build on later? What about a faculty member as a publication?

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Blog prose styles

Sooner or later I’ll have to be able to talk about prose style with students writing blogs. I might as well begin with today’s graceful birthday post by Ed Cone. The writing is very clean, the paragraphs each have a clear focus and advance this tiny essay, and the sentences each build confidently on something that has been announced before. That has been the hardest thing for many recent students of mine — making each sentence work with, work from, what has just been said. When they manage it, their prose changes quickly.

Ed Cone writes with the authority of a seasoned writer, a seasoned journalist, and with confidence that he can be suggestive rather than exhaustive and still do a good job. It is tempting to imagine a longer version of this essay, less a blogger’s piece or a columnist’s piece and more a familiar essay, that slows down and unpacks some of these suggestive sentences. Yet as a reader I know he’s made this choice, rather than fallen into a form out of lack of skill. This is difficult for students — they often need to read more and write more before they have a range of choices at their command, as the seasoned writer does. It would be interesting to talk with students about when they realize that a topic might explode the short form they’ve chosen for it, such as a blog post, and ask for more time and space.

Essayists often choose to present themselves as imperfect beings, as Cone does here. Part of one’s authority can come from a bit of openness that tempts a reader to accept the writer’s words generously. Essayists do much of their work close to home, in their own experience or their own thinking, rather than in the realm of objective reporting, and they depend on the character and authority they project as they portray themselves. The care they take choosing words, writing sentences and linking them to other sentences, reflects well on them.

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The dark side of the force

Sarah Baxter suggests a harsh vision of blog freedoms in this story about bloggers helping to bring down Howell Raines, executive editor of The New York Times, after the recent scandal over the shoddy reporting ethics of Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg:

E-mails, magazine websites and blogs poured out gossip and venom against Raines at a speed that left the slow-footed, bureaucratic newspaper looking like a media dinosaur. Sunday Times (London)

Says Baxter,

Raines’s departure is allowing bloggers to indulge in further self-congratulation. The internet’s new breed of media commentators is already savouring its potential impact on the 2004 presidential race.

Baxter’s piece would be a good one for students to consider as they work out their own sense of the ethics of public writing and blogging. Also, what about seeing how bloggers respond to the portrait? Dave Winer pointed out the article this morning on the prominent Scripting News, so others should see it and comment. He didn’t evaluate the story in any way, though, as he seemed absorbed in a long post about offenses against RSS standards.

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Another form of generosity

Via Arete I notice a faculty version of the generosity that animates many good parts of the web — see the Foucault and other course outlines of John Protevi, for example. One of the primary traits of the web is its ability to create opportunities for generosity to others, yes? See also the prospectus for the Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy as a use of the web as an aid to collaboration on a large project.

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A page design

I like Chris Pirillo’s blog design quite a bit — it stretches my sense of the options quite a bit and mixes styles successfully, I think. One complaint: on my screen, at least, the handwriting font sometimes rests right on top of the legal pad lines, making it harder to read.

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Distant voices

I know you through your words, if you write. A little bit.

Looking back on three months of nearly daily writing, I see that one of the pleasures of blogging is the upredictable chance for trading ideas with interesting people one would otherwise never have known. That’s different than the experience I usually have with writing poems or reports for the office. One rarely hears back about a poem; you often get a reply about workplace writing, but it is usually about the workplace rather than about yourself. Blogging is a bit like writing essays for the radio — sometimes you hear back from someone and a conversation begins. You figure out something about the person by what catches her eye in your prose; you figure out something about yourself by how he reflects your prose back to you. So, I can turn that opening phrase a little:

I know myself through your words, if you write. A little bit.

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Intel series

Something to watch for:

Four teachers who are using a new Web publishing technology to motivate students, build online collaboration, and enhance learning opportunities share their stories in a special series scheduled to launch in late June on An Innovation Odyssey, a feature of the Intel® Innovation in Education Web site. The Intel Innovator

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A syndication model

Stephen Downes provides a complex example of a site devoted to syndicating sources on education. He offers an RSS feed of its own, so faculty and students could have it piped into their own sites. With something like this, you find some duplication of entries as news makes its way around the blogosphere.

It might be a good group or class project to create a page like this to serve people interested in a topic, and then to annotate it or create a guide to its use. They might index or create a library of important posts, too.

Tony Byrne provides a more industrial view.

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A page design

I like the clean Digital Banff page, though I would have to improve my css skills to borrow its techniques, I think.

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RSS overviews

Mark Pilgrim provides a two-part technical introduction to syndication, iwth other links at the end of part 2. Jay Cross gives a more general introduction. I’ll have to give a more detailed look at Syndic8, too, said to be a collection of more than 13,000 public xml feeds.

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Why blog at school?

Phil Windley offers some good reasons in the abstract of a conference panel on blogs in education:

Among the problems cited by educators in teaching critical thinking skills to students are the lack of access to primary sources of information, the inability of students to experiment with thoughts and concepts before committing to them (on a test for example), and the difficulty students have getting multiple, valid outside reviews of what they are thinking. Weblogs are a solution to these problems. Weblogs allow teachers to guide informal classroom activity and to see student’s work before its time for the test or final paper. Students gain a vehicle for creatively experimenting with thoughts and concepts and easily accessing, cataloging and storing outside information related to their interests. This panel will introduce the concept of weblogs, or blogs as they are commonly called, discuss what makes them different from other websites, and talk about how they can be used to enhance classroom education. The panel will consist of weblog experts from around Utah and be moderated by Phil Windley who operates a popular technology blog at www.windley.com and has first hand experience using blogs in an educational setting. #

He also offers some links to other sites.

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A model assignment

From Clint Wrede at the University of Iowa, a nicely-worded semester-long weblog assignment, for a library science course on electronic publishing, that can serve as a model for others.

Wrede also does a nice job creating a one-page project history that could be of use to students and instructors who would like to document the research process. The topic: baseball box scores.

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Words words words

The entries from March 7 to May 31 add up to more than 25,000 words. The quality varies so much from day to day, from sentence to sentence, but I have to say that this is more prose than I almost ever write in that period of time. That’s been good for me, though maybe not for anybody else.

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Small pockets of structure

I know I haven’t mastered the full argument of the John Udell talk, but I’m charmed by this passage he quotes from Joshua Allen, from an essay called Naked XML, on usefully-structured information:

Professed reverence toward XML is not proof that someone has apprehended the true beauty of the semistructured data model . . . . The lesson, of course, is that real-world information is chaotic. In any but the smallest “proof of concept” systems, the best that one can hope for is to be able to recognize small pockets of structure within a sea of otherwise unstructured information.

Udell asks, “How do we create ‘small pockets of structure’?”

The software writers want to create systems that help make that possible, but the content writers are always responsible for sentence-by-sentence decisions that make structure and meaning. We add a few tags to the content when we enter it into a blog, and the content management system or template sorts with the help of those tags, and perhaps in a few years fabulous new things will become possible through the sorting. But for most students and teachers, the issue remains the ability to write sentences that link with other sentences, to revise and improve them, and to present them in useful ways for audiences — creating small pockets of structure on the page, on the screen, in the mind of writer and reader, perhaps in a community.

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WebRings

Consider webrings as a site for student research on a given topic, a site of research in internet organization and communication, and as a possible goal for students creating a topical site. See, for example, the BioScience ring, the Nature Photos ring, or the Wildlife and Nature Photography ring.

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PBS NewsHour weighs in

I just found out that there was a longish segment on the PBS evening NewsHour show on 4/28/03. The transcript includes Terence Smith summarizing the form this way:

Weblogs are public web sites characterized by brief, time-stamped entries in reverse chronology, often laced with edge and attitude. They customarily include hypertext — links to other sites favored by the author — and some now include still photos, video, and audio.

The story makes for a friendly introduction or overview.

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Experiments in collaboration

Dan Gillmor experiments with collaboration by inviting readers to help him think about his book project. He offers a series of stories intended for the book and asks for comments about any of them. He proposes that much of the book’s work be extended on a web site.

A wilder dream is the Openlaw site, which is trying to take collaboration into the realm of legal practice.

Openlaw is an experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum. With your assistance, we will develop arguments, draft pleadings, and edit briefs in public, online. Non-lawyers and lawyers alike are invited to join the process by adding thoughts to the “brainstorm” outlines, drafting and commenting on drafts in progress, and suggesting reference sources. #

Their list of electronic tools for research and collaboration is impressive.

Both models should be worth watching.

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Steve K. says no

Are blogs good pedagogical spaces for collaboration? Based on the experiences of a recent semester, Steven D. Krause says no and offers a copy of the conference paper where he says why. He draws this distinction in the paper:

If you have a piece of writing that you want to “deliver” or “publish” as a more or less finished text, put it on a blog. If you have something to say to a particular audience in order to enter into a discussion with them, put it on a mailing list.

He describes a pretty loose assignment, though, which leads me back to thoughts from earlier posts here: that weblogs are like other kinds of assignments for writing classes, which need clear goals, clear tasks and responsibilities, and a structure that allows time for such things as informal writing, feedback from others, further deliberation, and revision or further composing. The structure doesn’t just happen for most students.

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A consortium of doctoral students

PhDweblogs is a blog linking the work of Ph.D. candidates from several nations who use blogging in their work. It looks like they have more than 50 participants right now. Participants like Clancy Ratliff make this a good resource.

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Twice or not at all

Austrian essayist Karl Kraus on reading seriously:

My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once. #

Or on the power dynamic we rarely acknowledge in education:

What the teachers digest, the pupils eat. #

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Chronicle chat on blogging

On Wednesday, June 4 at 1 p.m. Eastern Time the Chronicle of Higher Education will host a live web forum on academic blogging. Transcript to follow.

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Journalism review

Nicely edgy pieces this week by Ed Cone remind me of the need for journalists who review the work of other journalists. I’ll keep an eye out for people already doing the work, such as Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review. Students should be able to use sites like this to gather ideas about the nature of strong and responsible blogging. They might start with Mark Glaser’s interpretation of the role played by bloggers in the fall of Trent Lott.

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Foucault on getting a life

In an interview, Michel Foucault reflects on self-knowledge and making something of yourself:

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

He may be onto a bit of the engaging character of writing in general and blogging in particular — a sense that through one or another of the cultural games available to us we can shape ourselves and move toward something we desire to accomplish. You work out each day at the gym or the martial arts studio; you draw on sheet after sheet of blank paper; you fill computer screens with your sentences. Any of these things serve to make something in the world by and as you make and remake yourself.

Blogs may have some advantages for our day. They don’t require other people to be in the room, so our happy individualists can practice their skills without denting their dignity by submitting to a master or teacher. Like the first few days of taekwondo, they are easy to begin and some of the results are immediate. (The most powerful results are not immediate, probably.) They can be a way of engaging the wider world that otherwise might be happy to ignore the individual, or at least they provide that dream. (Cool, someone in Kamchatka is listening to me! Or might!) But overall I still imagine that the real virtue of blogging is the long effort and risky experiment, rather than the joy of one’s easy opening remarks.

Original source: Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault – October 25th, 1982. From: Martin, L.H. et al (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. pp.9-15.

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Ed Cone on Kraus

Today Ed Cone was able to use my favorite Karl Kraus aphorism, “baking bread from breadcrumbs.”

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Summary judgment

Tom at Commonplaces ends a discussion of Derrida-bashing with this nice description of the problem of summary judgment in blogging or in other writing:

Summary judgments tend to elide the question of whether one has read the person one is judging — read them aright or at all. If you wish to deliver yourself of a judgment about a writer, you could do worse than offer a passage from her or him, and your reading of it, to support your case. Especially when you’re dealing with folks whose lives’ work was, in many ways, an inquiry into the act of reading. #

In other words, we have an ethical requirement to grapple with the specificity of the other’s language and experience if we really want to speak respectfully about their work. This is a clue to the problem with a lot of blogging. Students won’t pick this up by wandering the web, I’d say. We’ll have to wrap blogging projects in good teaching about the skills and ethics of careful reading and adequate response.

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Blogging about place

Lisa Thompson has pointed out a movement of bloggers writing about place. These are good examples of people with interesting and often lovely projects, and they provide examples for student work — in our department, say, one could ask students to prepare a topic-centered blog like these for the W250 Writing in Context course. I’ll try to assemble more examples of these — see in the Links collection already the Wild Skye, Donegal Hedgerow, and Skye Flora sites, not all blogs, though.

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Resource page

The Common Dreams News Center provides a huge number of links to news sources on the web. One might ask students to browse through a site like this one and report back from time to time on an issue, or create a smaller collection of annotated links to sites or to articles that would serve as an aid to research on an issue. See also their NewsWire.

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That’s not writing, that’s typing

Via Thoughtsignals I find William Gibson’s 5/2/03 post arguing that blogging’s informality dooms it from the chance to produce the results we expect from serious writing. In a general way I agree, except that serious short-form writing on the web can be as rich as other serious short forms — good columns or editorials, notes and comment pieces from the New Yorker, etc. But there is much laziness (or something) to combat before we get there — I think Ed Cone may be hinting about that this week in his entries about InstaPundit: 1 & 2. We might need a weblog journalism review, for one thing. Somebody should grab the domain name!

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What makes a blog a blog?

See today’s posting by Dave Winer called What makes a weblog a weblog? and his comment about how he wrote it:

I did something different with this piece, I didn’t publish it for a few months. I started writing it as soon as I got to Cambridge in March. We did about ten Thursday night sessions. I polished my skills as a user, and watched other people learn weblogs, saw what they got, and didn’t. I asked other people for ideas of what made weblogs different from professional pubs and Wikis. I thought, and I wrote, and deleted, and wrote some more. In other words, I did something rather unlike a weblog to try to get to the core of what one is. So if you ever doubt that I believe in other forms of writing, put that to rest. There are occasions when you want to spend a fair amount of time reflecting and editing. Some writing that isn’t like a fresco, writ in quick-dry plaster. #

I wonder what will happen if he has more time to converse with the writing faculty there — these kinds of posts might develop more of a discussion of the nature of writing and even the pedagogy that can support students as they try for new skills.

It makes me wonder, also, whether one might work on a natural history, a developmental theory or a life-cycle, of an increasingly skillful blogger.

What I’m doing here is hinting that a good writing teacher could take his ideas further; I guess it’s time to stop complaining about the other guy’s writing and get to work.

Furthermore: most of Dave Winer’s essay is a catalog of technical options, good to have, good to think more about.

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Passion statement

Fred, the somewhat anonymous government lawyer who writes as the Bureaucrat by Day, provides a mission statement for his blog, expressing a need for a louder voice in public affairs. He says:

It’s a time for anger, excitement, and passion. And this blog is the perfect place to do so. As I have written before, blogs are the new broadsheets.

The role of passion in public debate, then. Fine, but for the classroom, blogs need to be more than passion alone. We are responsible for the history of our disciplines, the skills necessary to practice them, the research necessary to improve them, the open exchange necessary to test them, and the teaching necessary to pass them along. Passion energizes them all, but so do pride, ethical standards, and curiousity. Blogs may need to be adapted from their wild state for the best classroom use.

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Foucault on polemics

One way of elucidating the differing natures of blog writing might be to turn to the distinction Michel Foucault draws between polemics and what he calls “the serious play of questions and answers.” In distinguishing between the two, he says “a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.” In an interview he describes the increasingly rare, always difficult ethical path with some urgency:

In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.

The alternative, so familiar to us from public figures who would much rather win arguments than anything else:

The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is [h]armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

I see that the root for “polemic” means of or for war, which is the grimmer part of the dictionary definition that is otherwise far more polite than Foucault’s. Much is at stake here.

We might ask students to locate some passages of polemic and some passages of the serious play that Foucault admires. They could write about the differences in their blogs and compose a set of guidelines for ethical writing as a result.

Original source: The interview called “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations” was conducted by Paul Rabinow, translated by Lydia Davis, and published in the “Ethics” (vol. 1) of “Essential Works of Foucault”, The New Press 1997.

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A strong introduction

See Barclay Barrios’s generous introduction to blogs for teachers called The Year of the Blog: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom.

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A page design

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a clear, very compact design for its columnist page. See also their neat idea called Webtowns, in which they give information about various areas they serve along with links to recent stories about the area.

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A Donegal hedgerow

I’ve been enjoying my visits to A Donegal Hedgerow, thanks to the frequent brief posts and many photographs by Stuart Dunlop. He is using a digital camera for one year to record flora and fauna from a 3/4 mile stretch of hedgerow in County Donegal, Ireland. He suspects that the hedgerow is hundreds of years old.

I noticed that lovely bird song began coming through my speakers a moment after I arrived at the May portion of the site. Because there are so many pictures, I had to be patient as the pages loaded slowly when I was using the older modem from home. Perhaps cutting the site into weeks rather than months would help out computer users with older, slower equipment?

The site is a pleasure, a good example of using a blog-like structure to follow one’s interests and offer something lovely to others. Students might compose a site like this, following an interest for a semester, working to accumulate something of use or pleasure for others. Or they might catalog and annotate web sites that concentrate on a particular interest like this.

Most of the photographs are close-ups — I would enjoy a few more shots of the broader landscape as it changes through the seasons, too. Mr. Dunlop has granted permission, so I will post one of his photographs here — from May 5th, the white flowering hawthorn. Thank you.

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A small assignment

In the past I’ve seen students and teachers do good things by following up on daily discussions with questions or class notes. Several variations are interesting: two students keep detailed notes from the class discussion and copy them for classmates before the next session, and the class reviews these at the start of the next discussion, revising and clarifying as needed. Or, each student brings two questions to class based on the previous discussion or on a new reading, passes these in on a slip of paper, and the teacher reads them aloud anonymously and the discussion starts from there. Or students pass in one or two questions at the end of the period that they’d like to see addressed next time. Or students write for one minute at the end of class, giving the teacher a sense of what they have understood from the discussion. Or the teacher starts the period by asking a student to summarize the highlights of the previous session, using memory or notes.

These give the teacher new ways of knowing what students are understanding or not, and they also share some of the responsibility with students for shaping subsequent discussions. Let’s imagine doing some of these things on a class blog, though.

Two students could be responsible for writing class notes and posting them before the next session, certainly. They might be asked to write two sets or to collaborate on a single set. By posting, the class starts to build a record of its deliberations that students can return to and reflect on. The teacher can assign this as a standing assignment, and follow up on it by asking students to quote from the class notes in a later paper, say. Or two or three students might be asked to work up discussion questions for a new reading a few days in advance, post them, and then start the discussion of those questions as comments below the post. Or other students might be asked to comment before the class meeting. The teacher can review these posts before class and know much more about how the students are processing the material to be discussed in the next session — a technique I learned from my colleague, Eileen Bender.

I also imagined that a teacher might require students to learn the names of their classmates — a good assignment for small to medium-sized classes anyway — and then they could take turns blogging highlights from class discussion, including the best two or three comments and questions offered by classmates on a given day.

The variations seem endless. The process should invite students to take a more active roll in processing class discussions, and it should create a record of the course that students can build on in later assignments.

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A stock of mannerisms

One way to read Ed Cone’s spoof of InstaPundit today is to say that blogging can become a stock of mannerisms rather than a progression of linked, unfolding thought. From a writing teacher’s point of view, it’s a familiar struggle. See The Plural I by William E. Coles, Jr., for example, that wild novelization of a college writing class. The teacher and students work up a list of stock moves that students make in weak papers, give them memorable names, and use them to test the seriousness of the thought in papers written later in the course.

What do I want, every posting to be a developed essay? No, but it would seem to me that some postings need to head in that direction and others need to have the specificity of idea and example that will start to carry some weight and create a worthy persona for the writer at the same time. Yes, some writers will be playful, like Cone today, some will be lyrical, some will be more journalistic or whatever, but some elements of what makes writing good elsewhere seem to apply here in the blogosphere. It is useful to think of there being no difference between good writing here and good writing there, even thought there probably are differences.

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College web news services

Three college newspapers have won awards as the best college internet news services, according to CyberJournalist.net. See the main site for a variety of other blog and web resources, such at the list of journalism blogs, their blog on news blogging, and more.

They also point to a fascinating site, Deep Throat Uncovered, produced through college courses at University of Illinois, investigating the identity of the mysterious Wategate informant. It’s an amazing example of collaborative work in the classroom and beyond. #

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Theory and practice

Two substantial articles have come my way this week, full of ideas and resources.

From Web Tools Newsletter, a new offering on Interschool Online Collaborative Projects.

From Oliver Wrede at the Vienna Blogtalk conference, a theory of pedagogy paper on Weblogs and Discourse.

And now I find another by Andrew Grumet, undated, perhaps a little older, but containing many resources and at first glance no tongue in cheek about its title, Deep Thinking about Weblogs.

And a long essay written by Joi Ito and others in a Wiki about weblogs and democratic process — see section 1.9 for a description of the composing process. See Joi Ito’s Wiki about the nature of Wiki, too.

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A page design

Butterflies and Wheels offers a bright, clean page design — easy to draw the titles out from the text, for one thing. I also like the “More” pages where you see a fuller listing of articles, eg., or items from other categories. And they also offer fairly detailed introductions to their favorite books, such the Essays of Hazlitt.

Other interesting features: a quotations page, a series on poor rhetoric, and a series on poor argument.

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Links

A Donegal Hedgerow
Alan Levine
Andrew Sullivan
Arete
Babel
BloggerCon
Bloglines
Blogroots
Brian Alger & Rick Pan: Inside Learning

Bureaucrat By Day
Butterflies and Wheels & Blog
Christopher Lydon and BOPNews
Clancy Ratliff
Commonplaces
CounterPunch

Craig Warkentin
CyberJournalist.net
DCMetroBlogMap
Democracy Now
Ed Cone
Field Notes
Free Pint 111 & 112

Glish
Good News India
Greymatter
Greggman
Jill Walker 1 & 2
John Robb
Joi Ito

Jose Luis Orihuela
Kairosnews
Mark Tosczak
Matt Barton & Wiki
Mortensen & Walker
PhDweblogs
Plasticbag

Oliver Wrede on discourse
Random Walks
Randy Brown
Rebecca Blood
Rhetorica & Professors Who Blog
Robot Wisdom / (value)

Scripting News
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Bray
Warblogs:cc
Web Tools Newsletter
Weblog Cyberjournalistes
Weblogg-ed
Weblogs at Harvard Law
Weblogs: A Swiss Army website 1 & 2

Weeblog
We::blog
Wild Skye & Skye Flora

This includes the major links through May 10.

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Covering an event

David Weinberger is blogging from the blog conference in Vienna this week, summarizing events as they take place, which is interesting enough, but he also offered a list of links to bloggers who are also covering the event. This should provide a couple of dozen perspectives on the conference — good. Even better might be an aggregated version of their posts.*

But for the classroom, take away two ideas: reporting an event as faithfully as one can and preparing a site with a variety of perspectives on an event. For event, we might mean a weekend conference, a visit by the governor, the state primary for the next presidential election, or whatever. The plastic, elastic web.

*I saw later that two bloggers were aggregated as semi-official recorders of the event.

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Photo blogs

Don’t forget the big article on photo blogs in the Sunday Times today.

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Philosophy in development

Dave Winer just posted a link to a 4 year old essay in which he explains how to use template and data base-driven software to make writing for the web easier. It was a sweet vision:

What’s needed is a way to put the right software in front of the right keyboards, so people who love to write for the public and who do it well, have an easy way to do it. A place to be heard. A place to teach and learn. A place to be powerful and feel the power of others.

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A draft assignment

For the next four weeks, scan the news aggregator at least 5 times a week and occasionally pick out an article to study more closely. Choose articles that interest you and that help you think further about one of the 4 social problems we are addressing the course. When you have chosen an article, read it closely and prepare a 100-word summary to post on your blog. Then discuss two or three ways the article helps you advance your thinking about the social problem you have chosen as your focus. Select and write about at least one article a week, and also write about 3 articles every two weeks, for a total of 6 by the end of the assignment. During these four weeks, also read the posts made by classmates who have chosen the same social problem. During the fifth week, discuss what you see as the important findings and disagreements in the posts by you and the others who have been writing about the same social problem.

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A draft assignment

For Monday, find an article that interests you from the last four weeks of the NY Times. Use Google to find a dozen blogs that have followed up on the article or the events that inspired it. Post links to the article and the blog entries and discuss the types of responses, their range, their strengths and weaknesses, and their value to readers. Then for Wednesday post a list of your suggestions for quality blogging, based on your findings. Read and respond to several of your classmates as they offer their suggestions, and in the days following refine your list as you consider their ideas and experiences. For the following Wednesday, post your revised guidelines for quality blogging. Come to class ready to discuss your final version in light of these exchanges of ideas.

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I wonder about process and product

I wonder if skillful and experienced bloggers love the process not just because it helps them build something — a community, an item of commerce, a better idea, something we might call a product — but also because the process is a building of self and enriches the product at the same time. And I wonder if we should assign students to make a product as part of a course blog in order to increase the odds that they will come to know those two rewards of the process that I just mentioned. As if the assigned product can help lead to the true process. Maybe.

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Taking the long view

Robert Atwan, in the Foreward to The Best American Essays 1996:

Montaigne equipped his home office with one of the earliest book-lined studies, where he loved to spend his time browsing. His mind too mercurial to concentrate wholeheartedly on any one volume, he would “leaf through now one book, now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments.” An idea took hold: he began to write just the way he read. His medium became his message, and the personal essay was born. (x)

A time of social and technological change, a change in the ways of reading available to individuals who had time to think and write, and a new or newly energized genre emerges.

Or, from Geoffrey C. Ward’s introduction to the same volume:

I never seem to tire of hearing that things are not as simple as they seem, which may in part explain why so many surprises, large and small, lurk in this collection . . . . I envy you the chance to read these pieces for the first time, to discover for yourselves the familiar in the unfamiliar — and to be surprised. (xiv)

Ward hints at the process of mind at work in the essay, which reminds me of some of the best writing I run into on the web. Two things: pulling back the curtain to reveal a clear complexity, and finding patterns we understand in unfamiliar realms. Both imply both the joy of speedy perception and the labor of clear thought, I think.

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Resources for wiki and edublogs

Ed Tech Dev on Wiki resources.

Alterego on edublog resources.

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A research project

Following up on the issue and method of the blogosphere stories piece from Microdoc News, a teacher and students could pick a few dozen articles from web and print sources and see how they live on, or not, in blogs and print media. I would suggest that some of the pieces be challenging to popular opinion, such as “Embed Catches Heat” by Ron Martz, which is about people’s resistance to certain kinds of war reporting (Editor & Publisher 5/15/03). Students could report their findings and, following Microdoc and others, theorize about the exchange of ideas in our society, the health of our democratic literacies . . . .

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More page designs

The news service called AlterNet provides at least three good examples of page layout that might spark the thinking of blog page designers: their main page, their MediaCulture page, and their Mobile Edition.

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Bloki for collaborative composing and editing

The Wiki-like software called Bloki looks good for collaboration among students during composing and editing. I threw up a simple set of files, called Links, in just a few minutes, including the colorful annotation included in the hi02 posting. That feature could easily be used in student feedback groups.

I wish the names of documents could include spaces, but it appears that they cannot. I suspect that you can’t see this feature unless you register at the Bloki site, but each document is preserved in each stage of its history, so you can see all the edits and additions that have been made, as in this example for hi01. The software is very suggestive for writing classes, team projects, collaborations between classes from different universities, etc.

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Blogging Headline News

Major syndication of blogs at BHN, Blogging Headline News.

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A clean page design

Tom Watson, British Labour MP for a place called West Bromwich East, has a blog about his work in Parliament, amazingly. It is also a good example of a clean page design.

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Catch (phrase) of the day

Based on a study of 45 “blogosphere stories,” Microdoc News says, depressingly, that stories that gain momentum in the blogosphere are often those that have been “branded with a keyword” — not so different from what we expect on the television news. It is interesting to see the few types of posts that make up the process: lengthy opinion pieces that focus a discussion and build on a collection of relevant links, brief posts that do little more than approve or disapprove of an earlier post or portion of a post, and summaries that assess the work done so for by bloggers and other writers on the topic.

So the real work, it appears, is done by people reading and interpreting and evaluating in some detail — in other words, the usual blogosphere or anysphere work of careful and critical thinking. Apart from the way the blogosphere widens the cast of readers and writers, the report might as well be describing any good to average collection of journalists, yes? There is no magical democracy in the blogosphere, the report would seem to suggest. Everyone should get serious, improve their skills, and put in the hours good work requires.

The author of the Microdoc piece is Elwyn Jenkins. The site’s name shifts from page to page, for some reason. See also the position paper on blogging.

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Model magazine site

I’d say that the Grist site is a very nice example of a blog-style magazine design, and it is also a good example of an editorial group filtering and focusing the content they find at a wider range of sites. Students could pick up either or both aspects of the model. It would be good to ask students to consider the sources for a half dozen of Grist’s posts and see what kind of work they are doing with the source material. Then students could write an editing guide of their own and try it out as they contribute to a topical site of their own.

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Wikipedia as model

The Wikipedia, “a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate open content encyclopedia,” is a fascinating model for topical collaboration appropriate to a course, service program, or academic major. We see from the main page that the project is a normal Wiki, the radically-open collaborative web software that allows any reader to contribute new pages or edit old ones. We see from the list of poets who should have articles, but don’t yet, how easy it would be to set up a skeleton for students to flesh out. We see from the editing area for one of those as-yet-unwritten pages how easy it would be for students to contribute something. And we see from the general introduction to the WikiWikiWeb and its practice area, the WikiWikiSandbox, it’s very easy to learn.

And by the way, here is a lovely article in the Wikipedia about Humphrey Bogart. The revision history shows the main people who composed and edited the piece and how they did it, and the examples of actual editing are of interest not just as signs of good prose work but also as clues to how powerful the software is.

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CSM on blogging

The Christian Science Monitor weighs in on blogging, noticing the freedom, the gossip, the fairly mundane chance for educators to have students post assignments.

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Abraham Lincoln on Powerpoint

A nice reminder, via Ed Cone, of how we may be driven off the path by our technology — Peter Norvig’s Powerpoint version of the Gettysburg Address.

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Elastic design

If I am reading correctly, the pMachine software that supports the page you are reading now also supports the amazingly different design of the AlwaysOn site, which just goes to show how radically weblog software allows us to distinguish form from content, if we wish. That is a good reminder to me, at least, about one element of this realm. I can imagine a few faculty members on a campus setting up good uses for blogs and perhaps drawing others in, but in a better world you might have a series of designs available from IT as the starting point for interested faculty, students, and staff to work from.

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A class-constructed site

Students in an American literature class constructed this site devoted to “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is suggestive of some of the ways students and faculty could link web resources, including primary and secondary sources, and a variety of web discussion tools to create something of use to others. It isn’t a blog, but one might play out some variations that take advantage of the ease, the serial nature, and the archiving of blogs.

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Syndication wish list

I spent an hour or two learning more about syndication this morning. It seems to me that a campus interested in offering a flexible weblog program (for programs and work groups to post their work, for faculty to post their work, for faculty to use in courses, for students to use as course assignments, and for students to use as major portfolios or as individual blogs) should set up a variety of syndication options that users could quickly build into their pages. So that needs to be supported both by the software and by the IT group supporting the software.

We would want to be able to syndicate the student blogs to a course page, campus blogs to a campus page or series of campus pages, a variety of non-campus blogs to a variety of campus blogs, and news sources to course and individual blogs. You might want alumni from your major to be turning to your department home page for updates in your field, for example. You would want students to be able to read the blogs by their classmates easily, starting from an aggregator. You would want campus public relations pages to pick up the best of campus developments quickly.

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Bombs Over Bloghdad!

In Bombs Over Bloghdad! writer Patrick Otlewski recently concluded a semester of required blogging with this remark:

Yesterday was my last final exam of my entire undergraduate career. As I walked out of the test room, I took all of my papers from the entire year and dumped them into the garbage can in the back of the room. Done and done. Now I can focus all of my energy into making this blog kick some major ass. Yee-hah! (5/8/03)

I’ll see if I can persuade Patrick to say a word or two about his experience blogging for a course and his enthusiasm to continue. Patrick?

And as a writing teacher I would love to know more about his decision to pitch a year’s bundle of college papers while in the next breath pledging himself to continue writing.

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Anniversaries / keeping at it

On the occasion of an anniversary it might be good to think about what makes for persistance, strength, growth, success. It would be good to interview students who persist with their blogs after the semester ends, for example, and ask why they think that might be so. I’ll see if I can find a couple of people to speak up about that. Maybe their teachers would have a clue, too. It would also be good to read in the archives of some long-lasting blogs and look for clues about enduring, evolving, reinvigorating . . . and what else, I wonder? How do college students connect to writing as a generative process, say, or how do they make enough connections to others through the blogosphere to build a lively sense of community, or how do they understand the genre and find some passion for it? How else to explain it?

April and I were married 14 years ago today. My parents were married 49 years ago last week.

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A lively designer / a school site

Lots of nice design work by Bryan Bell at his site — via Scripting News. I especially like the way he’s used vintage local photographs to set up his own site. See also the school blogs that appear in his design for the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School, and their page on theory and practice.

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Keep stretching

I find I have to keep stretching my ideas of what is possible, and that’s a pleasure. I just glanced through Alan German’s moment-by-moment blog of Dave Winer’s May 9th talk at Dartmouth, posted during the talk itself in small chunks through a wireless network hookup. The world or is it the word, the word or is it the world, might someday move much faster than we now imagine.

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Something lovely

I ran across a site by Mark Rosenfelder devoted to the process of creating languages. It has lovely invented alphabets and describes dozens of elements of language creation. We should all find work that has something playful about it, yes?

Here is a sample of the script:

And here is the alphabet itself:

What does it have to do with blogs? This is at least a reminder to myself to include images when I can, but also a small testimonial to the blending of play, beauty, and technical knowledge on that site. Aim high . . . .

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A good model for a resource site

Though it is not their purpose, the Web Tools Newsletter is a very good model for a resource page that students or groups of students might emulate as they do research. See, for example, the issue on Online Communities for Professional Development.

The newsletter is not presented as a blog, but one might adapt the task to a blog format, producing elements of the final product over a period of weeks and offering them in a blog. This would be one way of helping some students get past the crippling habit of quickly assembling research and then seeing what they can easily say based on what they have in front of them. This would start to unpack or demystify the thinking and other elements of good research.

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Basic questions

In the 5/3/03 post on Persian Blogger Chronicles: An ethnographic journal on the world of Persian blogs, Alireza Doostdar offers several paragraphs on “why I am blogging, and why I am blogging the way I am blogging.” As we can see from the sub-title, the blog will use anthropological methods, which will be interesting to watch develop, but I like the two questions and want to keep them in mind as a possible task for students. See the early paragraphs of Robert Holland’s essay on academic writing, in which he proposes asking students to write about their academic discipline in three ways: in what sense is it academic, in what sense is it a discipline, and in what sense it is theirs?

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Local visibility

Dave Winer sketches a plan for a university to increase its visibility through blogging. He’s talking about big-name schools, but the idea seems pretty interesting for a regional university like ours. How about starting with an informatics course in which students design and carry out a weblog about the university, trying to make a parallel web site, as blog, that is more dynamic than the university’s web site?

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Writing good links #2

As I’ve said, students need a guide to writing good links, to speed along their early work. # Let me continue that project now.

A few principles might be gleaned by newcomers to blogging from this short post (5/8/03) by Ed Cone:

“Does the beauty industry hate women?” Body Shop founder Anita Roddick says yes at her weblog (via Lex Alexander).

1. Cone offered “weblog” as a link to Roddick’s posting on the subject, rather than to her main page, where even a few days after the original posting it is slipping down the page toward its retirement in the archive.

2. Cone offered “Lex Alexander” as a link to the writer who tipped him off about Roddick’s post. That’s a courtesy to both reader (you and me) and writer (Roddick), I think. Cone himself may want to go back to his source and think more about how Alexander views Roddick’s ideas. The “via” wording is efficient.

3. Cone does not offer a link the Lex Alexander’s May 7, 2003 entry about Roddick because there is no clear way to find its URL visible on Alexander’s page, a shortcoming of the software or the page template. If you can’t provide a permanent link to the entry itself, I suggest giving its date and title, but certainly its date. On many sites, you find the permanent link to each message there at the end of the message, ready to be captured.

You might add a fourth item for times when you refer to a site for the first time, since this would be a good place to refer not just to the particular post but also to the main page. I believe I’ve seen people do this two ways:

And then there’s Philip Warbler, who claims that blogs were invented by Martians disguised as American teens.

Or:

And in his blog (It’s Me!) Philip Warbler claims that blogs were invented by Martians disguised as American teens.

In both cases, I would offer “invented by Martians” as links to Warner’s particular posting, and either Warner’s name or the name of his blog as a link to the blog’s main page.

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How ideas work

It’s true, I’m charmed by the subheading of Philip Greenspun’s blog:

an interesting idea every three months; a posting every day

Worse case: 90 days of banality and one interesting post; repeat the process. But that’s not really very likely, is it? Aren’t people who are interesting on May 1 likely to be interesting, one way or another, the rest of the month?

A more hopeful view of the subtitle: thinking just works that way. One interesting idea, then a couple of weeks of working it out, trying it out, seeing how it relates to other interesting ideas and cases, then a couple of weeks of noticing its limits, and a couple of weeks of rebuttal at whatever level might be deserved, then starting to explore the areas the idea didn’t do justice to for a couple of weeks, then a couple of weeks of brainstorming about those unaccounted-for things, then a week or two responding to some new aspect of the problem that throws open some doors and provokes fresh thought, and then another interesting idea; repeat the process. Maybe throw in some exchanges from collaborators and readers along the way to leaven the process.

In other words, we work to and with and through ideas; we don’t just have them.

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An action disguised as an object

In his introduction to The Best American Essays 1997, Ian Frazier wrote that an essay is an action disguised as an object. (xv) Weblogs may help us recover the sense of writing as an action rather than an object; while reading and writing the small, daily pieces, we may more easily see the acts of mind as part of a process rather than as a product. If I could understand student blogs as powerful enough examples of this process, I might retract earlier arguments I’ve made here in favor of assigning certain kinds of products along the way, rather than having faith in the nature of the blog experience as a sufficiently educational process in itself. As I get further into this experience with students, I expect to figure out where I stand on that matter. For now, I’ll try to keep an open mind.

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Will blog for food

I can’t remember where I found the link to this blog, but this is the chef of Google’s daily menu. Three cheers for whimsy.

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NPR on audio blogs

This morning NPR offered a story on audio blogs, with some links to other blogging stories.

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A reinterpreting exercise or two

Following up on Saturday’s entry . . . if reinterpreting is a vital part of the textual tradition of blogging, we might ask students to try one of these exercises:

1. Use repositioning to help reinterpret: write about the same incident a few days in a row, each day writing about it in connection with a different concept, quotation, or fact drawn from another context. Reflect on the different aspects of the incident that come to mind when repositioned or juxtaposed with different materials like this.

2. Find a few contrasting interpretations of a contemporary or historical incident. Look at the differences between the interpretations and speculate about the agenda of each of the interpreters. Reflect on your own agenda, then write a fresh interpretation of the incident.

3. Rogerian argument: find a political argument that alarms you in some way, and look for the elements of the argument that you most agree with, most respect. Name the common ground you share with the other writer and speculate about how you could build on that common ground to solve a problem.

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A retelling exercise or two

Following up on yesterday’s entry . . . if retelling is a vital part of the textual tradition of blogging, we might ask students to try one of these exercises:

1. Find a half dozen or more accounts of an interesting historical event. Use them as the basis for their own retelling of the event. Have students post their versions on a particular day, then read each other’s versions and discuss the differences, the decisions each writer made, in the next few days.

2. Find a dozen or more political blogs that mention a recent event and assemble their accounts of the event. Based on this collection, have students make a guide to types of retelling. Ask them to discuss the strengths and weaknesses, the uses and misuses of retelling, based on the collection.

3. Have students write the “back story” or the sequel to a well-known incident, as a form of contextualizing, interpreting, or judging of consequences.

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Learning from poets

I spent three hours today in a coffee shop with two poets who were working on translations of poems by contemporary Israeli poets, with the help of a skillful linguist who is fluent in Hebrew and English. All of the poems were retelling, in one way or another, episodes from the book of Genesis. It was fascinating to see how the poets could reopen the familiar stories and retell them so as to bring out elements of the human drama that the Bible had not emphasized. A major character like Joseph appeared in several poems and was interpreted freshly and variously; minor characters like Potiphar’s wife (her name is not preserved) come forward in suggestive new detail. Needlesss to say, this process of reinterpreting by retelling is a central element of Jewish textual tradition, and it was quite moving to see the translators taking the rich originals and bringing them forward another time by creating English versions of the recent Hebrew poems.

Of course retelling and reinterpretation are well-established in the blogosphere. We can ask students to participate in the two acts when we ask them to compose blogs, but we might also ask ourselves whether there are kinds of retelling and reinterpretation that are most well-suited to academic purposes and whether there are approaches to retelling and reinterpretation that can deepen the value of those acts for students.

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How much can one person read?

Every time a teacher of a writing-intensive course assigns students to write, the teacher in effect assigns herself twenty or thirty pieces to read and think about and comment on. No matter how much a teacher believes in asking students to write, the teacher’s workload always threatens to become a problem, one that is intensified by modern message-rich software tools.

In the next few days I’ll finish grading for the semester and start planning next semester in more detail. Before the lessons of the semester slip away, I want to see if I can learn anything from the experience about managing the workload. Some thoughts:

1. Every semester I give the speech: One of the most important goals of the course is get the teacher out of your life — that is, to make the skills your own, to add them to your tool kit and walk away knowing how to do things for yourself. That means that the course has to give students a chance to practice critical skills. They should be responding to each other’s work often, practicing their critical skills, with guidance, as a step toward independence. I should not be the only reader of their work. The class web page helps make that easier, but so does small group work in class, email exchanges, and so forth. Share the responsibility for giving feedback, I tell myself. If you work hard on learning how to read and give useful feedback on your classmates’ work, I tell students, you will learn how to read your own work more critically. While you are helping others, I tell them, you will be practicing the good kind of selfishness, helping yourself.

2. I need to improve my ability to juggle the schedules of my different classes. Instead of planning one course at a time, I need to plan all three of my courses together, so the papers don’t pile up too much at any one time. Clearly staggered due dates among the different courses, for example, should help.

3. I need to decide how many pieces of writing I will read by each student most weeks. For example, can I give a good writing class by carefully responding to one piece of writing per student per week? Probably so, if the class sessions provide guidance and if classmates are also giving feedback.

4. I need to continue to teach students how to give feedback by reading and discussing their papers in class. This powerful technique makes their writing the central text of the writing course; it is no hyperbole to say that many times when my courses go flat or students struggle too much it is because we are not looking at enough of their work in class.

5. Students sometimes don’t really see the point until it is their own paper being discussed. Speed that along by looking at substantial paragraphs rather than whole papers — done this way, most students can have their work discussed in a writing class in the first few weeks of the semester, more efficiently and, by choosing the samples carefully, more strategically.

6. If the students are posting to their blogs, then I should be able to save time finding their new work by aggregating it in a central blog. Or instead of each student having a blog at a different address, they can each use a thread or category, as it is called in pMachine, allowing the teacher to work through all their new contributions at the same class site. Disadvantage: the students can’t have the full experience of shaping the design, graphics, and link collection of a blog.

7. I have written several times about asking students to edit, to anthologize their work, to annotate. If they do so, then their blog is like a portfolio, and as you would in a portfolio course you can ask them to guide your reading with a cover letter, table of contents, or other organizing document that speeds your reading and writing by giving it a focus.

8. As I have written before, don’t hide the moves — post criteria for each assignment and use those as a guide to focus your response. This should help students work on a particular skill with more care and should help a teacher respond more quickly.

9. If you do post criteria, then your course starts to have a more substantial paper trail, and you can use that next semester to save course preparation time.

10. If you post goals and criteria, you might as well ask students to use that information to give an evaluation of your own work. That should speed your reading too.

11. Hey, thunder and lightning. I have to get off this machine before something bad happens.

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Testimonial

My students in W250 used pMachine for posting work and giving feedback to each other all semester. This was not a blog in the usual sense, but it was a serious test of the software: the 16 students and I posted 455 messages and 460 comments during the semester, with hardly a glitch the whole time. During the final class several students spoke with enthusiasm about the software, its ease of use, the handiness of being able to consult the work of classmates at any time, to learn from their work and build on it. They also said it was easier to use than the alternatives provided here at IUSB, principally Oncourse. It doesn’t do all that Oncourse does, though. Next semester, full-scale student blogs in at least one course.

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Experiment on the last day of class: advice to next semester’s students

Today in W130 I asked students to give advice to next semester’s students, as a way of starting to experiment with the idea from Sunday’s post. #

I asked for their advice about how to get the most out of the course — learning, that is — and how to get a good grade. They suggested these things:

1. Pay attention to the feedback from classmates but also learn how to give feedback because it will help you give feedback to yourself on your own drafts.

2. Don’t be frightened by the length assigned; write your ideas about the topic, and you will probably do better than you might think.

3. Don’t be frustrated at first because you’ll get better and your experience in the course will get better.

4. Don’t be afraid to be extra tough on feedback on people’s papers at the start, for as the feedback became tougher it became more useful.

5. Aim to please the teacher because the teacher has all the power.

6. Try not to take it personally when your paper is discussed in class, but instead learn how to give feedback from the process. Make it a positive learning experience.

7. Volunteer to have your paper discussed in class as soon as possible, because it makes the class’s lessons much clearer.

8. Use the SI tutor or the Writing Center for immediate feedback. Take advantage of all resources that are offered. Stay for the SI session.

9. Take your time and look deeper into the subjects and topics — don’t just skim the surface of the reading or topic but look into it more.

10. Don’t write your papers as if people know the readings, but for people who haven’t read the readings, so you have to explain things more thoroughly.

11. Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to write a paper in two hours. Put it aside and then take a fresh look and revise. This allows more creativity because you keep thinking about the paper over the course of a few days.

12. Use feedback activities to get to know classmates.

13. Keep all of your papers for the final portfolio and get satisfaction from your progress.

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Portal design

A nice portal design that a person could adapt for a group project in a research-oriented college course: #.

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Early journalism about blogs

Jorn Barger lists, among other things, more than a dozen of the first high-profile newspaper and magazine articles about weblogs. #

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Preserving successful strategies

“Companies are going to want to capture people’s experiences so when they leave the company they don’t take everything with them,” says Biz Stone in an article by Jimmy Guterman. (#)

This makes me think about students who might pass on to later students successful strategies for mastering course content.

Quotation from Management by Blog?
By Jimmy Guterman, Apr 25, 2003, in Business 2.0

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Kuusisto on growing room

I thought of blogs when reading this passage about teaching from Stephen Kuusisto’s wonderful memoir, Planet of the Blind:

I’ve never understood those writers who deprecate their students. Roethke . . . Nabokov . . . the list goes on and on. The classroom, however, is my ray of light. The Bible says there is a fatness in heaven, a rich sweetness where the soul can feast. Sharing stories with my students becomes a kind of mutual tasting. I encourage them to read to me, and they do. Not just their own stories but the things they find at random in the library. Talking in this way, we find we can make something larger, you might call it growing room. Just when you think you’ve acquired some expertise at understanding the power of words, a student comes along who surprises you. (133)

This is about dialogue, chance encounter, building on the words left to us from the past, and making something like a space that has healthy properties. Perhaps best of all, it’s unpredicatable and not all the creative energy belongs to the one in authority. This dialogic space seems, which is the creative writing teacher’s classroom, reminds me of the communities that spring up around certain topics and their representative writers and blogs.

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Johnson writing on a deadline

I’m not sure these self-revealing comments by Samuel Johnson about writing on a deadline help me think further about blogs, but I’m fond of them:

Though to a writer whose design is so comprehensive and miscellaneous, that he may accommodate himself with a topick from every scene of life, or view of nature, it is no great aggravation of his task to be obliged to a sudden composition, yet I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty. There was however some pleasure in reflecting that I, who had only trifled till diligence was necessary, might still congratulate myself upon my superiority to multitudes, who have trifled till diligence is vain; who can by no degree of activity or resolution recover the opportunities which have slipped away; and who are condemned by their own carelesness to hopeless calamity and barren sorrow. (Rambler 134)

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A model editing site

It’s not a blog, but this collection of links about Samuel Johnson might serve as a good model for a product students could produce as part of the process of blogging about a focused topic.

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Samuel Johnson knew

In 1751 Samuel Johnson might as well have been writing about blogs:

As every scheme of life, so every form of writing, has its advantages and inconveniences, though not mingled in the same proportions. The writer of essays escapes many embarrassments to which a large work would have exposed him; he seldom harasses his reason with long trains of consequences, dims his eyes with the perusal of antiquated volumes, or burthens his memory with great accumulations of preparatory knowledge. A careless glance upon a favourite author, or transient survey of the varieties of life, is sufficient to supply the first hint or seminal idea, which, enlarged by the gradual accretion of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth of fancy easily expanded into flowers, and sometimes ripened into fruit. (Rambler 184)

At first Johnson seems to know only the weaknesses and limitations of the form, and even by the end there is only the chance of bearing fruit. Yet the chance for flowering and fruit is there, in spite of the limitations of what the author happens to encounter along the way. It requires the writer, with a well-stocked mind, to respond inventively or imaginatively to the seminal idea. In other words, to work with it, to bring it into relationship with other ideas and examples, to make or try to make something of it. As in a post of a few days ago, this is writing rather than editing the web. #

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The need to organize #1

I’ve written about 15,000 words since March 7, and one of the ways I’ve tried to challenge myself in this blog has been to go back and say more about ideas in earlier posts. Even in 6-7 weeks, though, there are too many entries to find old topics easily. In a class with 20 students posting to individual or class blogs, the problem is compounded. Unless the search feature, the chronological archive, and the broad categories (some software offers this feature) are sufficient — I don’t think they are — the day comes when the writer has to say so long to old content as it sinks into the waters, or start organizing. I’d like to try re-organizing this site, and I will keep track of my efforts as I go, in case that is of use to others.

One problem: I’m not actually a well-organized person. But here goes. Step one, accomplished a day or two ago — add a category about page design, since that is a subset of the software category that I’ve found myself taking an interest in lately. Surely page design deserves its own collection of entries. What next, I wonder?

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A guide to writing for the web

Author Gerry McGovern shares two chapters from The Web Content Style Guide that clearly introduce a variety of writing and design principles that a class might consider.

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More page design

I like the middle column design of the World Press Review site: subdividing its subject matter into groups, with each group offering links to three stories. I could see a shared class project taking advantage of a format like this, breaking up into teams to carry out a portion of the larger task, and being responsible for a section of the middle column.

And as I look around the site a bit more, I see that they have a page devoted to educational uses, and sure enough, they’ve already dreamed up what I was describing above.

I can imagine asking students to collaborate on a glossary that can support new students in a particular field, as they have done for the Iraq crisis.

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Images and tables: for puzzle-lovers only

If you like intricate puzzles and want to think more about ways to put images on a blog, and you think a complex of tables might be the way to do it, check out the page source for Greggman. Or just enjoy his pictures of all manner of Japanese food, each item more lively than what you may be accustomed to in packages like these:

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

PS. It’s true, I need to figure out the code for centering images on this software the next time I have a few minutes.

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Writing vs. editing the web

Part of the problem I see in adapting blogs to college courses comes from the decision writers make to focus most on editing and commenting on what they find on the web or on writing new material that connects to and builds on what they find on the web. If you edit the web, your blog might consist largely of links with or without brief orienting comments; if you write, you still depend on the links you make to the work others have done, but you press yourself to contribute something of your own. If you edit, you contribute many judgments, even if you don’t explain those judgments very much to readers; if you write, you bring those judgments out front, for all to see. Whether you write or edit, your judgments may be excellent or poor, but they are available in very different ways to readers, or to teachers who need to give feedback, prepare grades, or write letters of recommendation on behalf of students.

I suspect that grading a writing-style blog is easier than grading an edit-style blog, since in the first one the student shows her work. This may be fairer to students and easier on teachers.

In aligning myself for the moment with writing instead of editing, I am probably remaining faithful to respected traditions of research-paper writing. For example, in The Craft of Research (1995), Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams say:

Good research should change our thinking . . . . Such changes we rightly resist without good reasons. So when you ask your readers to change their minds, you owe them your best reasons for doing so. But you can’t just pile up more and more data, no matter how reliable . . . . considerate researchers always ask themselves whether they need to explain why their data are not just reliable but relevant. (111)

Booth et al recognize that some writers simply try to “overwhelm” readers with data, but a better approach, they say, is to “anticipate their views, their positions, their interests, to put forward your claims in a way that helps them recognize their own best interests” (87). They hint at the lively sense of audience that we recognize in good weblogs in the next sentence:

By helping you explore the limits of your evidence and test the soundness of your reasoning, the elements of a good argument help you work not against your readers but with them to find and understand a truth you can share. (87)

Again, I find myself wanting course-related student blogs to have a strong engagement with a real audience, which will probably mainly be classmates and teacher, and a clearly-defined project that calls for substantial writing, rather than only editing, the web.

See an earlier post on editing: #

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A page format for class collaboration

The two-column format of CounterPunch would work well for a class collaboration in which students contributed small or medium-sized pieces on a regular schedule, building a body of work on a shared topic. The left column lists recent entries by date, title, and author, and the main column contains the newest entry or the one a reader has selected. They place “Today’s Features” at the bottom of the main column, but they could also be in a third, right-hand column or elsewhere.

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The DC metro blog map

A clever designer has turned the lovely Washington Metro map into a map of District of Columbia blogs:

You could imagine a campus map similarly set up, as well as a map of the college town or the region, with links to blogs by students and faculty on topics of interest or study across the area: a local wetlands project, the literacy center, the internship projects at the daily paper, and so forth. Let the images play across our screens.

Pointed out by Bureaucrat by Day on 4/15/03. #

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A lively graphical feature

The blog called randomWalks has small, lively, and often thematic images that serve as spacers at the start of a day’s entries.

They give more visual character to the site, a nice touch. I’ve sampled a few here.

If you reload the randomWalks site, the images are replaced by others in the collection. I believe there are 255 different ones to see.

Please do take a look at the images in their original setting, though — they work better there: #

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Remaking Harvard

I guess I’m just getting the point. The Harvard blog project is an experiment to see whether the software can provoke a new sense of social organization at the university, based on more fluid and dynamic kinds of communication via blogs . . . using blogs to let parts of a university know more about other parts, assuming that a university can act more as an organism whose parts are aware of each other and think together:

It’s the bright promise of creating intellectual community among Harvard’s discreet “tubs” that launched Weblogs at Harvard Law. The initiative arose, says Palfrey, from a conference the Berkman Center sponsored in November 2002 called “What Is Harvard’s Digital Identity?” At that conference, Provost Steven Hyman challenged the assembled deans, faculty members, and technology-forward administrators to harness the Internet to build intellectual bridges that would facilitate the flow of information and ideas between the University’s disparate schools and centers. #

Imagine trying to provoke an entirely new social organization at one’s workplace — a bold move. From the same issue of the Harvard Gazette, Dave Winer looks happy at his job:

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What is creativity?

Nicholas Negroponte on creativity:

Innovation is inefficient. More often than not, it is undisciplined, contrarian, and iconoclastic; and it nourishes itself with confusion and contradiction. In short, being innovative flies in the face of what almost all parents want for their children, most CEOs want for their companies, and heads of states want for their countries. And innovative people are a pain in the ass.*

He may be right, but I wonder if instead creativity for groups, though perhaps not for individuals, is at least as often based on conversation, exchange of perspectives, shared inquiry, play, working with decent resources toward shared goals, and so forth. I think of times committees of faculty members have worked well together and created new programs. I was able to make sense of those events as acts of problem-solving that became simultaneously acts of professional self-definition. As we named our circumstance we named our sense of self and our vision for our shared future. We built a shared language that could serve us as we built a new program.

Blogs that remind me of Negroponte’s quotation don’t seem any better to me than those that remind me of those successful committees I’m recalling. Instead, those committees seems suggestive at least of ways blogs might be shaped or guided for classroom purposes. I’m not sure the classroom resembles Negroponte’s vision either, most of the time.

*From “Creating a Culture of Ideas” by Nicholas Negroponte, in Technology Review Feb. 2003 (106.1).

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Toward a rating guide

How about a scale for evaluating entries, just to provoke some conversation? Then you could give a blog a rating based on the average of its last 10 entries, or 10 chosen at random, or its best 10, etc.

1 point for each of these things:

mentioned something in the world or on the web

linked to it or otherwise showed you how to find it or bring it to mind
praised or criticized it generally
summarized it overall
named its parts
named a connection between it and something else
evaluated it overall
evaluated its parts
evaluated its connection to something else
discussed the significance

10 points possible

It is possible that a 10 is not always a desirable score, that posts that earn a 10 are not always the best choice for a writer.

(This is a streamlined version of an earlier post — #)

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Generosity

Dave Winer uses the Weblogs at Harvard Law site to build a community of bloggers there. # Like many other good sites, this one is marked by a spirit of generosity that will, no doubt, help bring new people to the Harvard project by using clear language to offer links and other resources. At the same time, the resources are there for non-Harvard readers to use. See, for example, Winer’s posting of the bookmark list for his April 10, 2003 presentation. #

I get the impression from his list of bookmarks that the presentation doesn’t much address pedagogy. I think that’s interesting. It could mean that weblogs have such a strong character that they will draw students in almost without the teacher providing a pedagogical wrapper of some kind. Or it could mean that they’ve not taken a conversation about pedagogy as far as they’ve taken other conversations there at the Harvard group. But maybe writers from other places will generously share their ideas about pedagogy and weblogs. Several have already done so — back to the search engine.

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Writing good links #1

I’ll be wanting a brief guide to help students make good links. I’ll start writing it now and add to it from time to time. Your suggestions are welcome.

First, an example from the Tuesday, April 01, 1997, post to Scripting News. # The archive contains a dozen brief items for the day, including this one, which I offer in its entirety:

Check this out. Amazing!

The word this was a link to the home page of emulation.net, but if you click on it you get their most recent entry, so you have no clue about what the prominent blogger was pointing to that first day in April of 1997. I suspect that the entry was illegible within a day or two, even in 1997, for the same reason.

The rule teachers in the age of the typewriter tried to teach their students probably still applies: give a full enough bibliographic reference, in some standard format, to help an interested reader find what you’ve been reading and read along with you. The web complicates the problem, since many pages evaporate. A link to a frequently-updated site doesn’t serve, but a date, an URL for the entry, and a brief description of what to look for on the page might.

Important bloggers with a well-established relation to their audiences may not need to say much about a link in order for it to be of use — their readers may know what to make of their briefest hints. Students, however, haven’t established the reputation and persona that will allow readers to know what to make of an entry like the one above, so they need to say more. Why is this worth pointing to? Who should go there, and why?

PS. See post #2: #

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An audience for self-involving writing

In the introduction to her 1987 book, Context and Response, Lou Kelly, the long-time director of the University of Iowa’s Writing Lab, described the ways she hoped her students would participate more deeply in their own literacy skills and practices as a result of the writing course they were taking. Her statement of founding values translates well to the realm of the weblog:

The opportunities for self-involving writing which this book offers will take you from talking on paper to thinking on paper: from using your own expressive, everyday language to composing the more complex linguistic and rhetorical forms needed to express more complex ideas. While writing your way through one or several parts of this book, you will also find opportunities for self-involving reading which is directly related to the personal knowledge and ideas you are exploring in your writing. But the development of your writing and reading abilities is possible only when the messages you’re sending out, and the messages you’re taking in, are being shaped, and challenged, by your own perceptive questioning mind.

Lou’s course began exactly where the students were as readers and writers when they walked into the Lab that first day, but self-involving writing and reading grew as the writers enlarged their sense of audience in response to the engagement generously given by Lou and then by other students. Writing Lab teachers read carefully and generously. They often responded by asking a few serious and challenging questions that indicated what they had understood and what more they wanted to understand about the writer’s ideas and experiences.

On a good day in a good semester, a teacher has a chance to see a healthy sense of audience build among students. They sit in pairs or small groups and give each other lively, detailed feedback, and they even manage to strike to the heart of a draft’s problems and make very challenging suggestions for rethinking and revising. They have become a serious community of engaged readers and writers. Their conversations are energized and energizing.

When you look around the web at some class blogs, you notice that the some writers don’t have that energy. I attribute this, in part, to a difficulty they may be having developing that sense of audience. Students are not likely to build a strong outside readership in the first month or two of a semester, and unless classmates are guided to participate as readers and respondents, a student blog can have an attenuated sense of audience. Strong students can produce self-involving writing without an audience, but others will struggle.

If teachers don’t help students assemble an audience, then weblogs will become mere assignment-posting spaces, and their special value will be lost. Supported and challenged by the best sort of audience, however, students have often written well. Since weblogs add new dimensions to the classroom, the potential audience, and the raw materials of writing, we can expect great things if we can name our goals clearly and structure our assignments and classroom practices soundly.

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From electronic office hours to FAQ pages

I remember a colleague who used to hold electronic office hours a couple of times a week. These were times when his students could count on him to catch up on email or answer any new messages. He wanted students to keep in touch and to learn the new technology, email. Now email is common and almost all students use it, but there may be some interesting variations for electronic office hours involving weblogs.

Electronic office hours: answer questions from students on a weblog rather than through email, on the principle that if one student asks, three others probably should have asked the same thing, and on the principle that you will have to answer the question again next semester.

Have a different student each day keep track of questions asked in class, and then answer one or two of the most important of those questions again on the teacher’s class weblog later that day, to form a record of the best questions.

End each class with index cards for one minute – ask each student to name one or two things that were most clear and useful in the day’s class and one or two questions that remain. Answer some of these on the class weblog later that day.

Or, post some of these questions on the class weblog and ask rotating groups of students to prepare answers for them and post these on the weblog in a day or two. Read the answers at the start of the next class, to spark the discussion.

Ask students to preview their contributions for a day’s discussion ahead of time, posting their notes and questions on the class weblog. Other class members can be responsible for preparing ideas about three of the posts before class.

Edit the questions that accumulate on the class weblog into a Frequently Asked Questions page for the course, and make that available for the students the next time the course is offered. Or ask the students to edit the questions, as a class assignment that will serve as a guide to the subject matter of the course for later students.

In several of these ideas, the premise is that addressing questions asked in a course is best seen as a responsibility shared by students and teacher. Announce that premise in the syllabus and practice it all through the semester.

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CSS layout resources

The glish.com site provides a generous set of resources for learning about cascading style sheets (CSS), which make possible very elegant page designs. See especially the collection of two-, three-, and four-column layouts, with code provided at the bottom of each example.

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Launching and anthologizing

Some bloggers clearly announce their project in a first entry, and students might be asked to give it a try, as a way of focusing their efforts as early as possible. Nevertheless, the projects will evolve, and occasionally a student might try again later to name the focus of the project. Teachers of research writing assignments know how challenging and useful it can be to ask students to guide their work with a question they want to answer and to revise the question several times during the process.

Lisa Thompson keeps a lively site called “field notes” about living on California’s Tomales Bay, an area rich in shore and water life. Writing in the tradition of Thoreau and Dillard, she launched the weblog with her 8/18/02 post on the some of the things she wanted to learn about the land and waterscapes around her. She extended her thoughts about the project a few days later, on 8/21. Here is an image from her site:

—————- —————-

Lisa Thompson also provides a good solution to the problem of losing one’s best work deep in the archive of an active weblog. In her upper-right-hand column she offers a brief anthology of titles and links to what she calls “suggested reading” from her archive. This kind of anthology would be a good assignment for students, after they accumulate a substantial number of entries or as part of a final class project in which they evaluate their work. While the process of blogging may be reward enough for some writer and readers, I suspect that for classroom use we must also think of the products. Anthologizing one’s best work can be a way of reflecting on values and achievements, a worthy task.

The software itself can provide different opportunities for carrying out this task. I’ve mentioned before, for example, the way pMachine easily supports indexing through the “View by Category” link in the left column. # It can also support an elaborated version of Lisa Thompson’s anthology list, either on its own page or there in a section of the site’s main page. I haven’t turned the feature on for my site yet, but this software offers several fields for entering text associated with a message. A writer interested in producing an elaborated anthology index could activate one of those fields and enter a brief description or highlight when composing each post. Then when you set up the anthology index, either in a section of the main page or on its own page, you could ask for the titles (as a link) and the description or highlight to be displayed. Wherever you place it, the index entries could look like this:

The Truth about Weblogs — ancient tablets reveal two lessons about blogging that can change your life.

Three Perfect Weblog Assignments — mistake-proof assignments that adapt to any college course.

And so forth.

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Defined, illustrated

“I propose,” wrote Tim Bray, “that we define a weblog as a conversation between a person and the world.” Along with that lovely and expansive definition, he said to include pictures as often as we can. # Here is one I had in the files:

[That’s from a mock-up for a proposed literary magazine. A colleague and I believe that weblog software may be a very efficient way to post a poetry journal, edited by students. We hope to invite English majors to build a wider range of editing and editing-related technical skills. The software plays to the strengths of English majors, I think, dividing content from form and giving writers and editors room to think and act without requiring a second technical major.]

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Course-linked blog ideas #2

In my technical writing course I usually break students into groups and give each group a task to perform as consultants to some other organization, and I play the role of the client as they work through the task. At the end the groups present their completed consulting reports to the other groups for comparision, feedback, and evaluation. A class might have four groups and four interestingly different solutions at the end.

With weblogs, some new opportunities arise. Each group could have a non-public weblog on which they record all their work, using it like a company email record, file drop for working drafts, and log of activities. These pages would be open only to group members and the teacher until the end, when the students would make their presentations and throw open not just their product but also their process for viewing by the other groups.

A final task might be to evaluate the group’s collaborative process in light of the strengths and weaknesses they see in the ways one of the other groups worked through the consulting task in their weblog. This would make it easier for students to reflect not just on the technical writing they had produced but also the process of collaboration that is so important in writing for business and civic life.

If the consulting project involved research on a topic of wider interest, the groups might also be asked to produce for their clients a body of web resources, with annotations. These would be part of each group’s presentation, and then they could be collated as a final full-class project and offered as a web site of value to people in the field outside the class. Students might take away a CD of their group project and the class’s collated resource site as part of a portfolio to show potential employers.

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Course-linked blog ideas #1

I ran into Wild Skye, a lovely collaborative site from the island off the west coast of Scotland. The writers keep track of the local flora and fauna of the island, with siting reports, photographs, and enjoyable speculation and commentary. The project is clearly a labor of love. Here is a Golden Eagle from an entry on Wednesday, November 27, 2002.

The site may be a good model for courses where students collaborate on a weblog in order to make something for a wider audience. I think, for example, of a course I took in Plant Taxonomy, long ago at the University of Missouri. We all memorized the key characteristics of 50 or 100 plant families, and each student collected, dried, mounted, identified and tagged 25 flowering plants. After these were graded they vanished into closets and trash cans, I suspect.

But if the class would make the identifications using digital cameras and record them on a weblog with dates and place of “collection,” then as the semesters go by the site would become a growing public record of the natural history of the region, while still serving the needs of the course. Students would be able to look back at the site years later and see their work and the work of others who have followed them. Another Skye web site, Skye Flora, is building something of that kind.

Over time, other courses, such as ecology and urban planning, could draw on the growing collection for data about the health of ecosystems and the impact of new housing developments, say. Geography classes could map the data. Climatologists could trace shifting weather patterns. Photo-journalists could look up the best dates for seeking a rare flower in the local woods.

Younger students could manage similar but simpler projects. In South Bend, for example, we have a lovely, small zoo. Grade school students could produce a guide to the zoo, with short features on the different types of animals, observations of their behavior, and updates on births and other developments. A grade school could deepen its links to the community by inviting local experts to contribute 100-200 word entries on some topic of interest for the site — a botanist could talk about how grasses are grown for herbivores in the zoo, while a veterinarian could talk about the how to take care of very large and very small animals, such as elephants and poison dart frogs. The result would be a site of use to children and science teachers from other schools in the area, which would be a point of pride for the sponsoring school.

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An introductory article

Laurel A. Clyde offers a two-part overview of “Weblogs and Blogging” from the online publication Free Pint (numbers 111 and 112). In part one Clyde defines basic terms and types of weblogs and introduces some of the software choices. Part two discusses weakness of weblogs and some areas, such as library and information science, where they seem promising.

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Blogged out

It’s useful to listen, when we can, to experienced weblog writers. Here is Peter Merholz:

I was also growing increasingly frustrated with the echo chamber effect of weblogs. A meme drifts out there, and then 38 different people post their take on that meme, and they all link to each other, and, as a reader, you bounce from post to post, the semantic feedback growing until it’s deafening. I needed to remove myself from that for a while. To prune a tree. To look on as my g/f and another friend weeded my garden. To get licked in the face by a dog. To prepare my taxes. To watch work out while watching TeeVee. 3/29/03

I suspect that we need to stop talking and make something once in awhile. Words into other forms of creation, words into action, words into community, words into other forms of life. To avoid being left only with words and words that are words about words.

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An extensive site

Will Richardson, “Supervisor of Instructional Technology at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in beautiful Flemington, New Jersey,” maintains an extensive site called Weblogg-ed, addressing theory, practice, and reports from the field. In a better world New Jersey’s beauty would go without saying.

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Bibliography and metablogs

José Luis Orihuela provides a good general bibliography about blogging, a list of metablogs (blogs about blogging), and other resources.

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Professors who blog

The Professors Who Blog site provides some examples of academic uses of weblogs or weblogs with an academic aroma. The page’s host, Andrew R. Cline, himself provides many resources for readers interested in interpreting political rhetoric — visit his Rhetorica site to see an example of a site devoted to providing resources for an academic and civic endeavor.

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Trying the free software

Everyone knows the free software provided by Blogger, with its bright blocky default page templates and its advertising banner on top. Blogger pages can be a bit clunky to look at, but the price is right. Not, I think, as well known, is we::blog, a free provider I’ve tried out this week for another topic. To my eye, the default pages are clean, clear, almost graceful in their simplicity, and there’s no banner advertising, which I think is a valuable difference for a course-associated weblog. Take a look.

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Stretching to meet the world #2

In a previous post I praised Rebecca Blood for her sense of the elements of a strong weblog and suggested that for some writers these things don’t come naturally, but might be encouraged and supported by a well-shaped assignment. I said that I thought students needed to make a stab at connecting to another person’s ideas and experience by investigating the ways she makes those things known in the specificity of her language. With that in mind, I want to resist something Blood says on the next page:

Link choice is voice, and those who say otherwise have not quite grasped the essence of hypertext. (The Weblog Handbook 73)

I agree that pointing to another site can be a gesture of real eloquence, taking its authority from the cleverness of the link and from the writerly persona you have already created for a reader. I agree that juxtaposing, without comment, can be as devastating as any direct comment (see many of the works of Joan Didion, for example). But at the risk of not quite grasping the essence of hypertext, I want to say that there is a virtue for students, for citizens, for professionals in many fields, in being able to point to the particulars of someone else’s language, summarize them, contextualize them, evaluate them one by one, and come to an explicit conclusion. Brief entries pointing and linking to another site, perhaps with a few words of evaluation or a lively bit of attitude implying a judgment, are more in keeping with the emerging customs of the blogosphere, and students may come to classroom weblog assignments expecting to write that way, but I don’t think they will be well-served if we don’t ask them to modify the genre for the classroom.

Perhaps I am putting too little faith in the process, in the growing sense of audience, in the integrity of the individual’s own project as a writer, or in the sense of play that might thrive under less restrictive classroom regime. I don’t know.

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Stretching to meet the world #1

In The Weblog Handbook Rebecca Blood pins down some traits of a good weblog:

My prescription [for a superior weblog] is founded on three elements: challenging yourself, having fun, and most importantly, writing from the perspective that your opinion matters…. As you honestly stretch yourself to meet the world, describing it as best you can, your voice will begin to emerge. As you continue to investigate your own way of seeing things, that voice will strengthen. (72)

I like the spirit of those comments. I get the sense that there is a way of looking outward that strengthens the one who looks — a kind of inquiry or investigation through which we challenge and slowly remake ourselves. She insists that the process be playful, and she locates the authority that makes it all possible in the individual, not in a profession or academic field or party platform. She wants bloggers to think and write in a place of liberty.

I think her ideas are not so different from a few sentences I contributed to Literacies, a reading anthology for college writing courses I edited with colleagues Terence Brunk, Suzanne Diamond, and Priscilla Perkins:

You take a chance when you read. You risk an encounter with another person’s ideas and experiences, and you may not be the same when you are finished. Paying close attention to someone’s words is an act of respect and a form of inquiry, a way of taking the world seriously. When you think about the ways a writer’s words relate to what you know of the world, you take your own ideas and experiences seriously too. There is no telling where that inquiry might lead and whose ideas might be challenged in the process. Everything is up for grabs, then, when you think about what you read, and that is the power, and the risk, of the encounter. Reading like that can change a person. (xv)

When it comes to the elements of culture that reside in language, especially written language, we are under a practical and moral obligation to try hard to understand. We owe other people a substantial attempt to understand what they try to tell us about themselves and the world as they see it, and they have left the clues more importantly in the specificity of their language. To be honorable, our reading and writing practices have to include a careful inquiry into the specificity of the language of others. Without that, we are just covering their experience with whatever general categories of thought are handy.

Unless we think that weblogs create this kind of reading and writing naturally (I don’t think they necessarily do), or that live blog audiences lead a writer to rise to the occasion (I don’t think they necessarily do), then we have to return to the question of how to make assignments that invite students to into the ethical realm of reading and writing. How to invite them to risk, to stretch, to inquire, to look at the specificity of another’s life and language…. Those are everyday problems for a writing teacher, with or without weblogs. But it is good to see Rebecca Blood point out that blogging is primarily a rhetorical and ethical realm rather than primarily a technical realm. I agree.

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Never having spoken in public

I’ve been looking at the first entries of various new and long-standing weblogs, some attached to college courses and some enjoying the natural liberty of the form. There are interesting things to notice about the rhetoric of first entries, the relative sophistication of some writers, the narrow range of argumentative strategies some writers rely on as they begin.

But with students whose weblogs are set up for an audience wider than the class I notice that some of the writers sound as though they have never had a public voice before. We may be raising a generation of individuals who, never having spoken in public, have little sense of what it means to sound like a citizen.

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Essays and weblogs

Some of the things writers say about essays remind me of the traits of weblogs; some of the things writers say about weblogs remind me of the traits of essays. I’ll gather some quotations here to start to explore that. Maybe others will come to your mind, too?

Edward Hoagland, from his introduction to the 1999 edition of The Best American Essays:

Like you, an essayist struggles with the here and now, the world we have, with sore and smelly feet and humiliation, a freethinker but not especially rich or pretty, and quite earthbound, though at his post. (xix)

And the form of composition Montaigne gave a name to would not have lasted so long if it were not succinct, diverse, and supple, able to welcome ideas that are ahead of or behind the blurring spokes of their own time….[The essaysist] is an advocate for civilization…. Working in the present tense, with common sense as his currency, “This is what I think,” he tells the rest of us. (xiv-xv)

[Essayists] are not nihilists as a rule. They look for context. They feel out traction. They have a stake in society’s survival, breaking into the plot line of an anecdote to register a reservation about somebody’s behavior, for instance, in a manner most fiction writers would eschew, because an essayist’s opinions are central, part of the very protein that he gives us…. He has the job of finding coherence in the world. (xvii)

Theodor Adorno, from “The Essay as Form,” in Volume 1 of Notes to Literature:

[The] essay’s innermost formal law is heresy. Through violations of the orthodoxy of thought, something in the object becomes visible which it is orthodoxy’s secret and objective aim to keep invisible. (23)

Here is another translation of that:

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy’s secret purpose to keep invisible. (171)

On the other hand, there are the feeble imitations of the real thing. Austrian writer Karl Kraus said that certain would-be essayists were merely “baking bread from bread crumbs.” I like Kraus’s provocation there. No doubt there’s more to think and say about the weaknesses of both genres.

And we’ll have to talk about gender someday, too.

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Note-taking and revision

I’ve learned in the last week that I may have made a mistake as I chose among the optional features for this site. In particular, the site owner can choose between letting registered users compose in a small, stripped-down submission box, as I’ve done at the bottom of this site’s main page, or letting them compose at the larger, full-featured control panel located on its own web page. The stripped-down submission box works very well — my students have posted over 650 messages and comments on a class site since late January, with hardly a glitch. And when I am ready to comment on their small or large assignments, there they are, neatly arranged in the category listing by assignment. Very nice.

But students are using the software more as a bulletin board and forum, rather than as a full-blown weblog. In my own work on the site you are reading, though, I have in the last few days starting using some of the control panel features as an aid to note-taking, composing, and revising. I’ll want students to have the more powerful tools available to them when I assign full weblogs next semester.

I see from the ways I’ve been able to take advantage of the control panel’s features that I have been depriving users of the option of delaying the posting of a message. On pm achine, at the control panel, a writer can designate a post as Open, which makes it available for readers, or Closed, which holds it safely in the data base until the writer chooses to make it available. This option invites the writer to start a new message, take notes, assemble links to other web sites, sketch a draft, revise, and proofread, over the course of hours or days or even weeks, before opening the post to the audience. After I noticed this liberating feature of the software, I can modestly report that it only took me a few days to realize that I could and should have several closed messages stewing and developing, not just one, and so I do. I started this message two days ago with a couple of sentences; there are three others in developm ent right now, and the longer messages this week were written this way, too.

I know that a strength of weblogs is that they are often written on the run, but that is a weakness, too. I’m glad the software invites me, helps me, to write quickly as well as to write deliberately. I’ll probably reformat this site to allow other participants to use the control panel as soon as I can.

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Dipping into the debate

Since it’s 2003 rather than, say 1999, by now we can read the archived statements and the debates between some of the ground-breaking bloggers and web creators about the several possible natures of weblogging. It’s easy to find statements of optimism or high ideal. See founder Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of “Interactive Creativity…which means building things together on the Web,” for example. See also, though, his realism about the barriers to the ideals. #

Or more recently, in a series of comments about whether lawyers can afford to make public statements in blogs, writer Fred of Bureaucrat By Day says:

In the end, each of us must make an individual judgment about the how much of a public face we’re willing to make. For a private attorney, without certain speech restrictions, I would advocate going to the mat: blogs are the essence of participatory democracy; the new broadsheets. If you can’t speak your mind here, you’ll never do it. #

The tensions between real and ideal were part of the blogging conversation quite early. In her September 7, 2000 essay, “weblogs: a history and perspective,” Rebecca Blood drew on the work of Greg Ruggerio to link the challenges bloggers face to a fundamental trait of big corporate media:

But this type of [web-editing, web-filtering] weblog is important for another reason, I think. In Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus, Greg Ruggerio of the Immediast Underground is quoted as saying, “Media is a corporate possession…You cannot participate in the media. Bringing that into the foreground is the first step. The second step is to define the difference between public and audience. An audience is passive; a public is participatory. We need a definition of media that is public in its orientation.” #

Educators who have looked into the work of Paulo Freire recognize the problem well. In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in a chapter called “The Banking Concept of Education,” he argues that many teachers simply narrate to their listening students, attempting to “fill” them with alienated and alienating knowledge. Freire’s alternative to filling up students as if they were a savings bank is “problem-posing education.”

For apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, with each other.

Similar in spirit to Ruggerio, Freire says that education should be a “practice of freedom” rather than a series of “transfers of information.”

Several tensions come to mind immediately, though, for teachers and students using weblogs. We bring to weblog assignments the traditional forms of authority in the classroom and in the academic field. We are charged with passing on a tradition to our students, and with evaluating their work. Many of our students may be very comfortable in the often relatively passive roles of American student and American consumer. We may be more comfortable with students in passive roles than we know or like to admit. Is there really room for the feisty rhetoric of the political blog in most American classrooms? Will the distinctly un-academic models provided by some prominent bloggers help academics think about changing our ways?

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On the evening news

Today, when I came home from work, I found in this week’s New Yorker a Talk of the Town piece on what may be the only blog being written by a native and resident of war-disrupted Iraq. And Dan Rather closed the evening news with a segment on warblogs and offered millions of Americans links to many of them on the network’s web site. Earlier today I ran across a March 19 notice that the Heritage Foundation was soliciting prominent bloggers to open their email to H. F. press releases. # How about that?

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I edit the Net

The title comes from the footer on a July, 4, 1999 message from Jorn Barger about creating the comprehensive one-layer web reference pages that he calls portals. # On his own web site a few months later he made this prediction:

I expect that in a few years, many schools will have discovered that building such synoptic sites is an ideal class activity, so every topic will be covered by dozens or hundreds of different, well-maintained sites. #

I agree that the task of gathering, sorting, evaluating, and presenting the web resources on a topic is a promising assignment. He calls for a serious commitment to the needs of readers, saying that the links should go to the content pages themselves, rather than to the entry points of their web sites. He says a portal should be “ONE page that links directly to every relevant webpage, bypassing all the navigation trees inbetween” — an ambitious project calling for thoroughness, judgment, and organization. His portals are wonders of compression, aided by a clear, thoughtful vocabulary of categories that quickly show a reader the kinds of broad editorial judgments that have been made.

He offers two versions of his James Joyce site to clarify the concept of portal:

[1] Old unabridged Joyce-links page:
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/jajweb.html
[2] New-style one-layer Joyce ‘portal’:

http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/portal.html

While I imagine that a teacher might lead a group of students to create something less severe than the Joyce portal, something less reserved about revealing the editor’s particular judgments of the contents, the portal still shows much more shaping of the content than the older version and implies a knowledge of the history of the topic that would be a substantial accomplishment in many classes. While teachers may come to assign students to create portals based on Barger’s model, a cross between the portal and a more traditional annotated bibliography might be as useful for the students who create the site and readers who later use it.

He might agree, judging by his later plan for another generation of reference pages:

Gradually, though, I’ve grown dissatisfied with the extreme degree of compression here, because it locks out some newcomers, so I’m planning another generation that moves back a step or two towards the original ‘overview’ model. #

Writing the annotations and then grouping the sources into a coherent set of categories would take students far into their field, I think. In fact, the task reminds me of the kinds of questions one has to answer in a comprehensive exam for a M. A. degree, say — where you have to be able to tell the story of your subject over its history and also orient yourself to the particulars at key moments of that history. The broad pattern and its particulars, each known in light of the other.

Seen this way, editing the Net is a high level task. Seen this way, writing a weblog becomes a serious form of inquiry, with substantial obligations to readers and to the scholars who have gone before. Those obligations imply a respect for others — for tomorrow’s reader, for yesterday’s writer — that requires commitment.

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What I marked in the text

I thought I would try a different sort of entry today. I read much of Biz Stone’s book, Blogging, recently, and now I’ve gone back to take a second look at some of the passages I marked on the first reading. I’ll enter a few here, perhaps with a comment or two.

Blogs are wellsprings of experience, personality, and tacit knowledge. (165)

That reminds me of the personal essay, a genre I admire. Good essays get their authority from the inquiring mind of the writer rather than from a professional certification or academic perspective. There’s a better chance for knowledge to remain open and widely dispersed if some of the knowledge-workers are working the ways essayists work.

[Blogs are an] automated method of independent publishing. (3)

The independence suits the essayistic writer well.

The blog is very much a writer’s medium…usually made up of brief, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically….a blog usually takes on the character of the person or persons that contribute to it because it is so simple to update. This ease of use leads to frequent posting, which creates a fluid, ongoing “conversation” with an audience that helps to bring out the nature of the person “behind the screen.” (9)

But the essayistic writer thrives on a rich relationship with an audience, with the wider world, one way or another.

Blogs feed off the web, digest it, recycle it, and infuse it with new life. Created by feisty, intelligent, opinionated, subversive people — sometimes small groups — blogs are the future of personal publishing. (10)

Again, I like the active relationship to the web and other texts, to knowledge, and to community here.

It’s not so much the content that makes a blog a blog — it’s the structure. (160)

It’s a way of regularly getting to work in language — what could be better?

Blogs contain links…the classic blog format is very simple: links with attached commentary. the original bloggers were like self-appointed editors of the web. (195)

For this reason, good weblogs are dynamic and critical.

Template management allows web designers to separate web content from site design and then give non-technical users access to the site so that they can edit the content themselves. (225)

Templates allow the dog to wag the tail and not the other way around. Does that mean that essayists and writers of weblogs are dogs? I’ll leave that for others to decide.

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Adding value to links

In The Weblog Handbook, Rebecca Blood praises Jorn Barger’s 1999 list of ways to “add value to your links.” Barger suggests that we do more than point to another site — that we precisely describe, evaluate, and even interpret the site for readers before urging them to spend their time visiting. He asks that we link to the best page on a site, not the first page; that we sample interesting graphics; that we save readers time by linking to printer-friendly versions of a site; that we offer a lively and representative quotation from a site. Barger also offers links to other reflections on how to prepare stronger web pages.

His list of ways to add value to links is, implicitly, also an aid to invention and interpretation. The list should be useful to teachers as they give structure to weblog assignments and to students as they find ways to create more complex work on their weblogs.

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Praising Athens

In an earlier comment Kate Egerton said that on the web, even if you are a well-meaning person, you will often still “end up conversing with copies of yourself” rather than encountering diverse perspectives and broadening your view of an issue. The fact that some commonplace phrases describe this problem indicates how common the problem is. We know that writers sometimes end up “preaching to the choir,” and long ago one great scholar of rhetoric talked about the intellectually lazy act of praising Athens to an audience of Athenians.

I had a famous teacher once, a master rhetorician, who often began class by giving a definition of an important concept and leading a discussion of its implications. I noticed after a few weeks, though, that very often he would turn the conversation about 1/3 of the way through the class by quietly providing a contrasting definition. As we worked through the implications of the second definition, we often were able to use the final 1/3 of the class to think about the significance of these conflicting definitions. We were practicing a form of discourse that valued 1) the act of guided inquiry, rather than 2) the assertion of authority or the act of persuasion.

He never pointed out this strategy, but I noticed it one day and confirmed it in later classes. This remains for me a clue to the powerful ethical differences between different modes of writing and speaking. I suspect students often come to our classes knowing the second of those forms of discourse implicitly and perhaps even having some skills in it, but with a less well-developed sense of the first form. Yet the first form is more interesting to me as a teacher.

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Don’t hide the moves

When I get a chance to spend a few minutes looking at newish weblogs written by students, I see that some of them, of course, start off at a very basic level, and I wonder if some of the writers have noticed the room to move that a good weblog assignment has given them or the techniques that they will need to explore their topic skillfully. Seeing these hints about where some of the writers are in their developm ent, I am reminded of a very nice lecture Christine Farris of Indiana University (Bloomington) gave here in South Bend a few years ago. One point she made was that we shouldn’t hide the moves — we should name the goals of an assignment very clearly and tell as much as we can about the steps one should take to achieve those goals and the elements of the finished produce we will be using for evaluation.

She said that many teachers she had worked with were able, when asked or even pressed, to say much more about the goals and elements of their assignments than they had offered students in assignment sheets or oral descriptions. We sometimes take too much for granted about what students know and end up unintentionally hiding the moves from the students who most need to learn them.

Working with weblogs will bring this problem back for most of us, since we will probably not be quite sure what we think weblogs can accomplish in a semester and what steps are necessary along the way. When it comes to writing on the web, what are the moves?

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Strengths that are weaknesses / Creating a sense of audience

I notice from the last two weeks of work that one of the strengths of writing nearly every day and having the new material posted at the top of the main page is a growing sense of fluency or ease as a writer. Most days it is not very hard to explore a new aspect of the topic, especially if there is time to do a bit of reading and thinking. If I have a bit of an idea that I can keep in mind and think about as I walk to work, say, there’s a good chance I’ll be able to develop the idea in a writing session sometime that day.

But that easy can be too easy; that word fluency reminds me of the word flow that students often struggle with, since it offers only a vague sense of how ideas build through composing and revising. “I’ll know it when I see it,” some of them tend to say, but I’m not sure that is always correct. Fluency is an early goal, not the final goal, for writers in college courses. And that message that appears and then slides down the column and slips into the archive may testify to little more than fluency, if other goals aren’t achieved as well. It helps me to get some clues from other readers and writers on the site; I find it easier to press myself to go beyond fluency as my sense of audience increases. Students will probably need the same assistance.

When students are writing their early entries in a course-related weblog, they probably won’t have enough material to attract a wide audience. While they’re working on fluency and stretching to address other course goals, they’ll need classmates to help provide a sense of audience. A “comments” feature of some kind seems essential, then, for building a useful and writerly sense of weblog audience. We’ll need to build into the early weeks of the course, and perhaps the entire course, opportunities and obligations for students to read and comment on each other’s work.

We’ll want to figure out how to teach good commenting. In class last week I asked students to talk about which comments they had been given on a recent paper draft were most helpful, and why. We created an informal guide to useful commenting for everyone to use on the next writing project, and I’ll be posting this guide on that class’s web site. We can also update it, or at least check to see that it is still on target, in a couple of weeks. This way, students help name their own needs as writers and their obligations as writers of feedback for others. So far so good….

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Wish list #1

I would like to invite folks to use the “comments” link, below, to make brief suggestions about the things the perfect weblog software for higher education should be able to do. As the list grows, it may be of use to colleagues making a decision about software or even to a passing software developer thinking about the next version of a product.

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The distinctive traits of weblogs

Chris Ashley of the Interactive University Project wrote an excellent two-part article describing many of the elements of weblog software and practice that are of most interest to educators. Both sections of the article include links to two to three dozen other discussions of weblogs or illustrative sites.

The first section of the article describes the most common traits of this “writing space.” Ashley includes thoughtful introductions to the dynamic or unfolding nature of weblog content and the role a community of interested readers and fellow weblog writers play in creating a cultural or rhetorical context for the writing. Berkeley Computing & Communications, Volume 11, Number 4 (Fall 2001).

The second section considers the degree to which weblogs can be used to organize information, create communities, create new forms of journalism, support active and collaborative approaches to teaching, and replace more intricate course management systems. Berkeley Computing & Communications, Volume 12, Number 1 (Winter 2002).

Chris Ashley has provided an excellent introduction.

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Syndicating weblogs

I considered a moment of silence today, given the grave danger of war, but we might also learn what we can from the times we live in. Back to work, then. Blogs are a flexible tool for following the daily and hourly developm ents around the threat of war or other very dynamic subject. I can imagine classes putting blogs to very good use in an election year, for example, studying the political process, assembling information for voters, or researching and testing the claims of candidates, say.

You can sample the work of writers who stay close to the frightening news in many blogs devoted to international politics; if you find one or two, you can use their collections of links to find another dozen. I’ll somewhat arbitrarily mention the last one I found, as a example: Back to Iraq 2.0 — the work of reporter Christopher Allbritton. You notice the attractive layout and graphics, the detailed reports, the strongly held political perspective, the search engine, the links to related sites, and other standard features. Not quite so common is that he offers a discussion forum attached to each post, and he categorizes each post at the end, in order to make the site more useful. You sense the energy involved, and created, in trying to keep up with the complexity of his unfolding subject matter.

And a dazzling further step — syndication. Properly set up, the data base that supports a weblog can be syndicated to other weblogs. Allbritton has made his content available for another weblog, Warblogs:cc, a site that is composed mainly of syndicated clippings from six blogs and a handful of major news services. This kind of team effort, made possible by syndication, could produce a more varied and substantial web publication. It seems to me that students could unite in a group project of real use to one community or another using syndication to combine individual or small group efforts into something quite substantial. Take that idea, above, about researching and testing the claims of candidates. Teams of students could handle different topics of interest in a particular election, or different races, or different planks in party platforms. Working at their own pace, the groups would publish pieces as they were ready, and the syndication page that assembled the different strands would be dynamic, often changing and growing. The students might gain a real audience with a page like that. Building a site that syndicates, organizes, and then evaluates the work of other organizations could also make a powerful assignment.

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A grand experiment / by Craig W.

Late last year, a colleague introduced me to weblogs. I surfed the Net a bit, read a wonderful book by Rebecca Blood (The Weblog Handbook, Perseus Publishing, 2002), and discovered a layer of the Web that I hadn’t even known existed. After giving it some thought, I decided to incorporate a weblog assignment into the latest incarnation of my Internet Politics course. The assignment would replace one from previous semesters, which required students to create a website in lieu of a standard term paper (with mixed results).

As such, rather than a “model major course assignment,” I tend to think of this as a sort of “grand experiment.” The results aren’t in yet, of course, but it’s been an interesting experience so far. On the whole, students have responded positively to the assignment; and some seem to be putting a good deal of thought into their entries.

One of the major pedagogical hurdles for me, unfamiliar as I was with blogging, was figuring out how to connect the weblog assignment to my course. In previous semesters, I had required students to create a website on an issue that was explicitly political. For this assignment, I decided to regard blogging itself as a political act, since the “online communities” that develop around interlinked weblogs are informed by particular ideologies or political perspectives. To reinforce this notion, throughout the semester, I’ve tried to highlight these connections and political perspectives in class.

Again, I’ll have to see how this all turns out; but I think the assignment will work well enough that, perhaps with some minor adjustments, I can use it in future semesters and/or for other courses.

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Indexing as interpretation

I’m oddly fond of the feature of this software that appears in the left column of the main page, under the ARCHIVE SUMMARY heading. It’s the second one, the “View by Category” link. Now that there are a number of entries in this site, the page you see when you click on “View by Category” is starting to fill up. The categories are threads built into the structure of this weblog (others can be added in a moment, if we think of new threads we’d like to explore) and represent a sort of self-indexing, on the run, during the everyday work on the weblog.

That “Category” page seems handy to me because it starts to give some intellectual structure to the work. I think it would be good, no matter what software one is using, to ask students to prepare a web page category index or else a print version, as a step in reflecting on his or her accomplishment in writing a weblog for a course. Another step might be to write a guide to the index, an overview of the contents of the categories. A further step might be to write an intellectual chronology of the categories, interpreting the movement of ideas for a visitor. As you can guess, I’m looking for ways to help students toward the complexity that the most powerful weblogs achieve, and as a teacher I’m looking for assignment structures to help that happen. Other paths, though?

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Aiming for academic discourse

Robert M. Holland, Jr.’s article (see the end of this post) also provides some language that can help us think about the shape of weblog assignments, if we believe in assignments (I do). Here is one of his overviews:

A scholar teachers what he knows; inquires, through dialectic, into what he does not know; and not only submits to but seeks the best interrogation, refutation, or criticism that may be developed by other scholars. Academic discourse, at its best, is both dialectic and didactic. (72-73)

Earlier in the article Holland says that academic discourse is

a search for truth through questions and answers designed to rectify, using logic, the evidence of observed data with the assertions of theory. Academic discourse is, then, both Aristotelian and Platonic: Aristotelian in its empiricism and its appeal to logical relationships claimed between particular instances and general truths; Platonic in its commitment to an intersubjective search for truth through dialectic. (72)

While this might seem to give an emphasis to collective weblogs or weblogs with discussion or comment areas, a conscientious writer can use questioning strategies to carry out these goals in a one-person site.

This reminds me of a story I heard about the scholar Hans-Georg Gadamer giving a lecture when he was deep in his nineties, an age at which he needed to be helped to the stage. At the end, still holding himself upright with the help of the podium, he asked the audience for refutations to his talk. When no one rose to speak, he said, “Very well, I shall refute myself,” and he proceeded to interrogate the points he had just made in his speech. That’s a wonderful image of commitment to academic discourse.

Robert M. Holland, Jr.’s article, “Discovering the Forms of Academic Discourse,” appeared in Audits of Meaning: A Festschrift in Honor of Ann E. Berthoff, edited by Louise Z. Smith, pages 71-79. Boynton/Cook (Portsmouth, NH) published the book in 1988.

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Teaching students about invention

Classical rhetoricians studied invention, the skill of creating material for one’s speeches and writing. Students today usually don’t know this sense of the word, but they benefit from learning invention strategies that can serve them as writers in college and in their working lives. The central invention strategies for bloggers seem to be:

1. linking to web sites and quoting from them, and
2. talking about the sites and the quotations.

I can imagine studying links, quotations, and the accompanying talk, and creating a taxonomy of these strategies, perhaps informed by Bloom’s taxonomy. Some of the options are:

1. naming a site or author
2. linking to a site or author
3. quoting from a site or author

And further:

4. offering no evaluation of a site or author
5. offering a global evaluation of a general character of a site or author
6. offering a more particular evaluation of a site or author
7. offering a summary of a site or author

And further still:

8. quoting a particular section of a site or author
9. quoting and summarizing the quotation

10. quoting and supporting the quotation
11. quoting and evaluating the quotation
12. illustrating and testing a quotation against other evidence or examples
13. discussing a quotation from one site or author in light of a quotation from another site or author

And further:

14. discussing a quotation in light of a body of ideas and examples from a profession or academic field
15. illustrating and discussing the significance of the comments made while carrying out any of the above items

And so forth. As we go down the very rough list, we head toward something most people would probably call critical thinking. If we shape weblog assignments sufficiently (if we believe that they need to be shaped as assigments, rather than left to take on their own character without our guidance), then we can help students proceed down the list toward writing and thinking of greater complexity and skill. I would be curious to know if this rough list seems at least suggestive to others.

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Make me care

Over two years ago Michael Stillwell described the growing impatience with a kind of weblog writing:

I lost interest in weblogs. They were never a great passion; over the last year or so they’ve become much less interesting, and much more, well, precious. Make me care about you and your weblog; don’t assume that I do. Junk the “mystery” links, the cutesy lines, the breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. #

I like the urgency of that middle sentence: “Make me care about you and your weblog; don’t assume that I do.” Assuming that a reader will care about the little adventures of the letter I is arrogant; a writer has an ethical obligation to engage with others, to risk an encounter with their concerns, their perspectives, their arguments. Even though I am a big fan of the genre of the personal essay, I think Stillwell is right that good writing is more than a transcript of one’s day, a catalog of the commonplace notions that pass through one’s mind, a chart of one’s emotions. If you work to understand the specificity of someone else’s ideas and experiences, you may be more ready to think and write interestingly about your own. From the point of view of a teacher, this is an argument for structured assignments, for asking students to do something they might not have imagined asking themselves.

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A substantial guide

The Web Tools Newsletter has a special issue devoted to weblogs in education, surveying web sites and articles and discussing several major strands in the developlent of “edublogs.” Though they offer to “survey briefly,” they’ve accomplished much more than that. See also their issues on blogs and weblogs — subtle distinction….

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Product and process

It may be useful to think about both the process and the product of a student’s work on a weblog. Writing teachers have used these two terms to help think about the ways we have set up courses and assignments — as a way of understanding, in part, what it is we are trying to teach when we give a particular sort of assignment. To make two very quick examples, if you require and, by asking content-related questions, respond to rough drafts before students hand in a final draft, your greater emphasis on an extended process of writing may help students build more reflection and critical thinking into their writing practices. If you only mark papers for sentence correctness, you might be telling students to think of writing in terms of a very particular and narrow sort of product.

Why, then, are weblogs worth giving as class assignments?

1. Is the process itself valuable enough to justify using the finite resources of a course? If so, what are the virtues we see in the process? How can they be drawn out or amplified?

2. Is the process valuable if it is done a certain way, using certain concepts or techniques? If so, what are those concepts or techniques? What are the virtues we see in them? How can they be drawn out or amplified?

3. Is there a product other than the process that has some value? Is that product the completed weblog entries or the whole website? It that produce something that can be abstracted from the weblog?

For the sake of conversation, let me propose tentative answers to the three questions.

1. Just as a conversation or lecture held in a classroom is not necessarily a pedagogical event (a successful one, anyway), a weblog completed for a course assignment isn’t necessarily a pedagogical event either. It might be true that in ten years everyone will be composing weblogs, but the basics of making one are so simple that we cannot give college credit, I would say, just because a student has let us impose a weblog on him or her.

2. A weblog can be a pedagogical tool if it involves inquiry and reflection, the risk of encountering some complexity, the experience of doing so using the tools of some academic field or profession, the responsibility for thinking through something over time. A person who does these things is making new knowledge for herself, for himself, and if a college course has helped that happen more strategically then there is a skilled teacher at work. We need more discussion of the structures of an assignment, as it influences the structures and practices of a weblog, in order to know more about how this can work.

3. One way to accomplish the things I’ve said in my answer to #2 might be to ask students to use the process of blogging in order to prepare the content they need in order to make a useful product, such as a web site addressing a question in the field. This web site might be dynamic, might be a weblog, but the thinking and gathering that allows an individual or a team of students to be ready to address the question could also be carried out and recorded in a weblog. So one or more student weblogs, sites of a process of inquiry, could lead to one weblog that offers a body of resources addressing the question they’ve chosen.

For example, the web site called Good News India. This is not a student weblog, but it addresses a problem — the need for a resource bank of creative solutions to a range of social problems in India. In doing so, it tries to be a resource for others. Robert M.Holland, Jr., proposed some years ago that students stop writing the usual (often problematic) research papers, which can sometimes be little more than loose cut-and-paste jobs, and start creating guides to the literature on a particular question. He worked with librarians to help students create these guides, and later they were contributed to the college library’s collection. In both cases, the product is meant to be of service to others, and that probably stimulates the writers to produce something that addresses serious questions, is informed by the best thinking in the field, and so forth. If there is a product that comes out of a weblog assignment, we might be able to help students achieve the goals in question 2 more readily. Perhaps we can give assignments, however, in which the process is structured so well that the process is product enough.

More on Holland in this post. Robert M. Holland, Jr.’s article, “Discovering the Forms of Academic Discourse,” appeared in Audits of Meaning: A Festschrift in Honor of Ann E. Berthoff, edited by Louise Z. Smith, pages 71-79. Boynton/Cook (Portsmouth, NH) published the book in 1988.

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The rewards of a writerly discipline

Almost immediately I noticed a few things about the experience of writing this weblog. As I tried to make at least one contribution a day, I noticed that I was thinking informally about the topic fairly often during the day, while walking to the coffee machine or heading over to the cafeteria for lunch, and making small steps forward in my thinking even when I wasn’t sitting at the keyboard. I remember Ernest Hemingway talking about how writers recharge themselves for the next day’s writing, and I think students, who so often write only just before a deadline, may never discover how thinking about something every day can tap a part of the brain’s power that otherwise may remain dormant. With a properly structured weblog assignment, I think we can help them have a new experience of the rewards of a writerly discipline.

I also have noticed that it is liberating to know that I only need to write a small piece each day. That builds confidence and keeps me involved, keeps me from the writer’s block that can arise under more high pressure circumstances. I recall a summer school course I took in graduate school where a short paper was due every day. By the middle of the term I had a new feeling that I could think and write any time. I believe that weblog assignments can give a similar experience to students.

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Toward a dynamic page

I decided to buy some software instead of using the free weblog software available at places like Blogger because I wanted to learn more of the options that are available with these data-base-and-template-driven tools. One thing my guide from the IT department at Saint Louis University, Andrew Wimmer, pointed out immediately was the goal of having a dynamic rather than static web page / web site. How many times can a person usefully visit a static site? How can the web be a place for creativity, collaboration, democratic exchange, if most of the sites are dead? I think these are fair questions. Similarly, having students post their homework on the web is not always more interesting or dynamic than having them hand in a paper copy or pass a copy or two around in class.

Luckily, weblogs are dynamic by virtue of the frequent entries by one or more writers, each new one traditionally placed at the top of the main page for easy access. But other kinds of shape-shifting and content-shifting can be accomplished with some weblog software. For example, this software, pm achine, offers something called pBlocks, and I have placed a small example of that in the bottom left column of the site’s main page.

I set up a pBlock by giving it a name and creating two entries that belong to it, though I could have created many more. These entries can be images or text or other page elements. Then I write a simple line of code into the page calling for the particular pBlock to function. Then when your browser creates this page, it inserts one of the entries in the right spot. If you hit refresh or if you return to the site tomorrow, you will probably see a different entry, as the pBlock cycles through them or selects them randomly, whichever I choose. In this way I can offer students quotations from important figures in our field, for example, each time they load the page, or I could even ask them to populate the pBlock themselves and add this layer of dynamism to our class site.

I am curious to know how people imagine using a feature like this. In a class on prose style I have used the feature to offer a variety of models in different styles and tones, for example, each time students come to the site. A teacher of art history might put slides of important works into a pBlock to give some visual energy to the site while also reminding students of the course content. Your thoughts?

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A model major course assignment

A friend passed along a link to Craig Warkentin’s course called Internet Politics. Taught at SUNY-Oswego, POL 330 includes a major weblog assignment worth 20% of the course grade. Dr. Warkentin publishes a detailed description of this thoughtfully-prepared assignment on his web site, and he includes links to his own blog and those written by his students. I will invite him to talk about his course here in the days ahead.

PS. He joined the conversation with this post.

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Learning from bad examples?

It may be useful to think about diary weblogs. Without discussing the role that sort of public disclosure plays in society or in the life of the writer, it seems easy to conclude that many of these are probably a poor model for pedagogical blogging. The diaries wander in the wilderness of the individual life, they have no allegiance to the critical tools of a field or profession, they glance off the events, emotions, and ideas of their days. From the point of view of a teacher, I would say that while they offer some of the pleasures of writing and reading, they aren’t serious.

Yet weblogs are clearly useful for tracing and developing the thoughts that follow unfolding events, and some diaries are wonderful for that work. Political blogs can be both of the moment, personal, yet informed by theory and historical context. All fields unfold, some as often, as quickly, as a wire service posts a news story and some as slowly as the editing, printing, and mailing of a quarterly journal. A student could compose a weblog by following the unfolding of some portion of a field, noting what the student-writer sees as the vital issues and the representative events and facts, and using those to illustrate and test the (traditional and unfolding) guiding ideas of the field.

I will say more tomorrow about how my teacher, Gene Krupa, asked students to surround an issue with their research, seeking all the main perspectives available, and then to position themselves in relation to those different voices. I will talk about Robert M. Holland, Jr.’s article about replacing traditional research assignments (that lead very often to weak cut-and-paste plagiarism) with projects that ask students to compose a guide to the literature on a particular subject.

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Some starting points

While the main article addresses the gender dynamics of the blogging community, author Lisa Guernsey provides a sidebar introducing two books and five software providers for beginning bloggers: “Telling All Online: It’s a Man’s World [Isn’t It?],” in the Circuits section of the Thursday, November 28, 2002 New York Times, pages E1, E7.

Conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan described the weblog phenomenon in the February 24, 2002 London Times and continues to offer this article as A Blogger Manifesto in his own blog’s Culture section. Without raising the price of his article a cent, he includes a dose of free-style media-bashing near the end just because it was building up in his system, I guess.

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Let me know if you run into trouble

Most of the features of this software are very easy to use, but if you have a problem, please click on the “comment” link, below, and leave a message there, or use the contact link located in the lower left part of the main page. Thanks.

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The heart of the matter

The pedagogy discussion should be the heart of the matter for this weblog, so why not start now? Are there questions or principles or problems you would like to bring up?

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Loss of instructional time

With weblogs and with all the earlier software we’ve used in college writing classes, I’ve had two concerns:

1. As appealing as holding class in a computer lab can be, we sometimes use computers for types of assignments students used to do as homework, and as a result, we can lose instructional time when we use computers.

2. And when faculty members spend time learning new software and then handling the dozens or hundreds of messages and files students produce, we often spend much more time teaching each course than we used to do.

At first glance, is seems very easy for computers to reduce the quality of a course and of a teacher’s working life. Nevertheless, here I am, learning a new kind of software.

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Sharing ideas about particular software tools

I hope that visitors to the site will occasionally share interesting traits of the software packages they are using. For example, this site is “powered by pm achine,” as their logo says, and that means that I can easily offer several categories for our posts (“Topics” in the left column of the main page). It takes no more than a minute for me to set up a new category, if we find that we need one to make our work go more smoothly, and then contributors can sort their new posts into the appropriate category, for the convenience of their readers.

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Setting up work groups

If users of this site find that they would like to create new threads to address particular topics or bring colleagues together in other ways, I will be glad to set up work groups. Leave a suggestion by clicking on “comment” below, or email me through the contact information in the left column of the main page.

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Harvard University certifies* the future of education weblogs

By giving a fellowship to blogging innovator Dave Winer, Harvard University points* higher education in the direction of the on-the-run web collaboration and publishing known as blogging. A blog or weblog is a web page containing frequently-updated entries on a topic, usually posted in a column with the newest entry on top. The software supporting weblogs allows single writers or teams of collaborators to prepare and post new entries to the web very quickly, without writing html or other code required by older forms of web page. Other materials, such as a space for readers to comment or a list of web links to related web sites, are common elements of a weblog.

A news story and interview with Winer announces the university’s commitment to “the Internet’s hottest new trend,” which, says Winer, is “going to be a basic skill like e-mail or using a word processor.” # Educators are just starting to explore the pedagogical value of this new technology.

Elsewhere, on his History of Weblogs site, Winer offers this definition:

Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there’s also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc. #

“Blogging comes to Harvard” by Paul Festa, CNET News, February 25, 2003.

Note:

*I look back on the rhetoric of my message with a bit of a shudder, knowing more clearly now how much work has already been done in this field by interesting people who have shared many ideas and examples in sites of their own. I would probably set up this message differently now, since some readers might be pleased to let me know that they didn’t need any *certifying or *pointing to get to work. Addendum by KS, 3/20/03.

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