Month: August 2005

Blogging and "academic branding"

I’ve read and read about the Chronicle of Higher Education article “Master (or Mistress) of Your Domain” by Michael J. Bugeja in a couple of different places, but I like the way John talks about the article here. I disagree with the presumption that Bugeja is making about what it takes to become an associate or full professor, to be “nationally recognized,” because the majority of colleges and universities are not tier 1 research facilities and thus have different standards for tenure.

But I do agree (obviously) that it’s a good idea for academics to have a web site and to even think about investing in your very own domain name. I’ve been darn happy with stevendkrause.com. Sure, I have to pay a little money out of pocket, but it’s much more reliable service than EMU’s servers and I can pretty much do whatever I want with it. Personally, I think it’s the best $40 or $50 a year I spend.

Slight update:

Oh yeah– Like Collin, I too think that Bugeja’s self-promotion is kinda creepy and slimy-sounding. I do think it’s important for academics to do self-promotion, something that I think many folks (including me) are kind of reluctant to do. On the other hand, Bugeja has probably gone a wee-bit too far here.

What academic blogging means to me (and what it is likely to mean in the coming year or so…)

As I mentioned the other day, Alex and Collin both had some very good and reflective posts about the reasons for academic blogging. Good posts. Go read them.

For me, keeping an academic blog has been useful and satisfying for all kinds of different reasons. I use this blog space to kind of keep notes and make links for myself (for teaching, for scholarship), my blog is a way making connections with other scholarly-types, I like the immediacy of blogging, I like the control I have, and I like the attention, modest though it may be. This is just a guess, but I’m pretty sure that more people read my blog every month than have ever read my more “real” scholarly publications.

In fact, I for one am likely to write even more on my scholarly blog and even less in more conventional outlets, at least for the next year or two. Why? Because I can.

See, in the next week or two, I should be will be as done as I am likely to get with a textbook project that I’ve been working on (and off and on) for years now. That’s the kind of project that will make you want to take a “break,” believe me.

Plus I’m in a comfortable and “settled” space life and career-wise. I’ve been tenured for a while now, and, because of the way things work at EMU, I will almost certainly be promoted again to “Professor” in a few years based on the work I’ve already done. My wife, Annette Wannamaker, is going to be starting a position in the department here at EMU as an assistant professor, specializing in Children’s Literature. This situation– both of us employed in good tenure-track positions that allow us to live in the same house like “normal” couples– has been something we’ve been working to achieve for almost 10 years now. We’re darn happy about it and because of this arrangement and the difficulty in getting this deal in the first place, I seriously doubt that we’ll be leaving EMU (which means we won’t be “going on the market” again, which we’re pretty darn happy about, too).

In other words, I’ve reached a point in my career where I don’t have to play the usual “publish or perish” games. And because of that, why not just blog?

Of course, my situation is a bit unique and perhaps different from a lot of other bloggers out there. It seems to me that grad students and tenure-seeking faculty need to make some careful decisions about blogging, about what to write or not write (I’m thinking here of the need to avoid posting things to a blog that might hurt future or on-going employment), and about how much and how often to write. Collin says that blogging is something that has helped him with his other academic writings, but I think I tend to agree with Alex when he writes:

You don’t give up other scholarly pursuits completely to go “all in� on blogging (or, at least, most don’t). But the truth is, rather than writing this entry, I could be working on a half-dozen other projects that would actually show up on a vita. The direct payout is not at all clear.

And again, by “direct payout,” I think what Alex means is stuff that will count in the academic game of getting a tenure-track job, getting tenured or getting a better academic job, getting promoted, etc.

For me, blogging is a benefit in and of itself. But I also see it as a dangerous procrastination activity. In the time I have spent this morning on this entry, I could have (probably should have) gotten some more work done on my textbook. Which is what I think I’ll go do right now…

How much is the war costing us, anyway?

Check out the Cost of War web site, which includes a rolling counter for the cost of the war in Iraq and points of comparison. As an example: according to the web site, for the amount of money we have spent so far in Iraq, the U.S. could have hired an additional 3,217,823 teachers.

It’s part of the National Priorities Project. And you’ll note the handy counter I’ve added to my sidebar, too.

Grade school podcasting (and other technologies, too…)

From Canada’s Globe and Mail web site comes this article, “Web logs, podcasts and virtual classrooms.” Really interesting piece. Two quick highlights:

The “Room 208” podcast may just have the youngest production staff in the history of broadcasting. Written, produced and performed entirely by the third- and fourth-graders in Bob Sprankle’s class at the Wells Elementary School in Wells, Maine, the podcast — an on-line radio show that can be downloaded to an MP3 player — began in April, has 171 subscribers for its weekly 20- to 30-minute shows and includes regular features like Student News, The Week in Sports and Word of the Week.

and…

When Joel Arquillos, a social studies teacher at the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology in San Francisco, started his 11th-grade American history students blogging, he didn’t know what to expect. Mr. Arquillos set up a group blog as a joint project with David Boardman’s English class juniors and seniors from rural Winthrop High School in Maine for students to post assignments on-line, comment on each other’s work and expand their cultural awareness.

At first, the students needed to be prodded to post. But the blog took off when Mr. Arquillos had them write about their neighbourhoods. A student who lives in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco described her feelings about the drug dealing and gang violence in the neighbourhood. The Maine students posted that they had thought neighbourhoods like the Tenderloin were urban legends.

Soon, the students started posting on their own to find out what their peers cross-country thought about various subjects (the structure of the new SATs, good reasons to skip the prom, among many), discussions that almost came to match the assigned writings in volume.

“I want to give these kids the tools to say, ‘Hey, my voice is important in this world,”‘ Mr. Arquillos said after the year-long experiment. “This blog helps me do that.”

Hey, how cool is that, huh?

Blog ads as ironic comment? or just out of the blogger's control?

While procrastinating this afternoon, I stopped by Bitch Ph.D., a blog I look at once in a while just to see what sort of thing she and her colleagues are writing about. I often agree, I often don’t, and I often think that she’s sharing, ah, a bit too much information of the sort that fuels the fires of the Ivan Tribbles of the world.

Anyway, I noticed that she’s sporting a new look on her blog and that includes blog ads on the far right column. Now, I like money as much as the next person (even though a lot of academic-types would prefer to not admit this), and I’ve wondered about the idea of putting up ads on this site. I honestly have no idea how much money I could make off of it, but if I were to clear say $50 a year for leasing the space, that would pay my annual icdsoft bill.

The problem though, as I think is evident with Bitch Ph. D.’s site, is it appears that you have little control of the ads themselves. At least I think that’s the case. For example, on Bitch Ph. D.’s site (at least when I checked it now), there were two ads, one urging people to sign an electronic petition to approve John Robert’s nomination to the Supreme Court and the other for a pro-life group, that seem to me to be at odds with the sort of ideas that are being promoted in the content of the site.

I have no idea how these ads came to be on this site; maybe it is based on sites that bubble up in Google’s rankings for searches on “John Roberts” or “Pro-Life.” And I have no idea how the Bitch Ph. D. crowd feels about these ads (ironic? money is money? who knows?). But if blog ads means that you give up a space on your site to advertise damn near anything, then I think I’ll keep paying the bills myself.

Now I need a chocolate bar…

I went to the dentist today to get a crown. I have kind of bad teeth, but fortunately, I have a good relationship with my dentist. He does good work.

Counting this new one that is in temporary form, I have six crowns. For me, getting a crown is not really that much worse than getting a filling. Getting a root canal (I’ve had that done twice), well, that’s an entirely different thing.

Things went as well as can be expected, but there was one torturous moment when the dentist and the dental assistant made small-talk– with me, in theory, but since my mouth was numbed and filled with some kind of epoxy that takes an impression of the tooth being repaired, I was more of an observer than a participant– about Twinkies, Ho-Hos, and the Atkins diet. Awful.

Well, I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, I used that and the pain to justify an extra-special post-dentist treat. It always includes some kind of chocolate, but today, it was a Lake Champlain bar, Dark Chocolate with Almonds. It didn’t quite make up for it, but close.

Now I had better do some sit-ups or something.

Serious and not so serious statements about "the blogosphere"

Thanks to Nick Carbone who posted this to a mailing list, I read this morning’s New York Times editorial “Measuring the Blogosphere.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

Earlier this week, Technorati, a Web site that indexes blogs, released its semiannual “State of the Blogosphere” report. It records a steady, and astonishing, growth. Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 percent of which remain active. Some 900,000 new blog postings are added every day – a steady increase marked by extraordinary spikes in new postings after incidents like the London bombing. The blogosphere – that is, the virtual realm of blogdom as a whole – doubles in size every five and a half months.

Now, as you might imagine since this is from the nation’s premiere dinosaur blog newspaper in the U.S., this New York Times editorial praises the growth of blogs while it simultaneously dismisses the content of most blogs, calling the growth of the blogosphere…

…a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.

It’s passages like this one that make me think/wish I was working on something a bit more theoretical about blogs and the way that they problematize our conventional concepts of rhetorical situation. Maybe I will get on that one of these days, maybe not….

In the “not so serious” department of statements about the blogosphere: my colleague Steve B. pointed me to a sound file actually available via iTunes titled “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Blogging.” Similar to the book and recent movie The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and I think this sound file was part of a promotion to the movie that came out earlier this summer), it’s a voice-over encylopedia-like entry that is both pretty darn funny and reasonably accurate. I came across this web site that has the words from the recording. An example:

It [that is, blogging] is the 21st century equivalent of hanging around railway stations writing pithy but erudite descriptions of the passing trains. To take part in blogging or, to use the appropriate terminology; to join the blogosphere, there are a couple of things you need to do. Firstly, you need to increase the size of your ego, without a swollen ego, you simply cannot achieve the levels of solecism required by a modern blog.

Many a blogger (including me on many days) would hear this and say “yes, yes; what’s your point?”

Confessions of a College Dean and the Happy Academic

In an effort to broaden my perspectives, I’ve been adding a lot of links to the ol’ blog lately. Generally speaking, I am not a fan of the anonymous blog, especially those anonymous blogs written by folks who want to be taken seriously as an academic but who are hiding behind a pseudo-identity. But I decided to make (another?) exception this morning and I added Confessions of a Community College Dean to the blogroll this morning and I’d encourage you to check him out.

CCCD is sort of a “happy academic” among the administrative ranks. He writes things I don’t agree with (this post about what seems to be an adminsitrative “dream scenario” for getting rid of those pesky tenured professors is offensive and wrong in a bunch of different ways), but I thought this post about housing was good (and it hits home in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti market, “fly-over state” though I suppose we are), and this post
and this post about the cons and pros (in that order) of being an academic administrator.

One should never say never, and it’s difficult for me to predict my (or anyone else’s) future. But as a Happy Academic and a member of that (occassionally problematic, according to what I’ve read on CCCD) class of the tenured, I can only say that I would rather chew off one of my own fingers than to become a department head, assistant/associate dean, or dean of a college. I am greatful for good administrators and scornful for bad ones (we’ve got our share of both around here) and I am happy that someone else is willing to do this work, and I also understand the fact that administrative-types generally make more money than us faculty-types. But dang, if I wanted a 9-5 job that required me to show up in an office, dress in appropriate office clothing, attend a whole bunch of meetings, and deal with people complaining about stuff I can’t do much about all day long, I would have never gotten into academia in the first place. Thank you, but no thank you.

Instead, I believe I will spend the rest of my Happy Academic summer day by working on a book project, going to the gym, taking my son to swimming lessons, working in the garden, and going shopping. I’ll be doing these things not necessarily in this order and certainly while wearing shorts and a t-shirt.