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Before I get down to some biz-ness, I decided to take a look at Daring Fireball, one of my (new though it’s not a new blog) regular reads.  In the “colophon” section, we learn a little more about the site’s author and such, and this little bit about web standards:

Web standards are important, and Daring Fireball adheres to them. Specifically, Daring Fireball’s HTML markup should validate as either HTML 5 or XHTML 4.01 Transitional, its layout is constructed using valid CSS, and its syndicated feed is valid Atom.

If Daring Fireball looks goofy in your browser, you’re likely using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Internet Explorer, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care. If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and have trouble viewing or reading Daring Fireball, please do let me know.

Heh.  Perhaps I’ll come back to this in 444.

This is something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now and that has come up in a couple of different places recently:  is blogging, well, “over?”

No, but I do think it’s different than it was.

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I’m giving a couple of talks today about blogging as part of a “Technovations” Forum sponsored by the Faculty Development Center:

• Blogging:  An Introduction (PDF), which is a bit of a general primer to define blogging (sorta) and to introduce some blogging tools.
• Teaching with Blogs (PDF), which is more specifically about four basic ways to use blogging in teaching.

I’m not entirely sure how many people are going to be at these talks or if what I’m intending to talk about is going to be useful or not, but I thought I’d put these up here to share with the world, so to speak.  And to help me remember what I did with these files later on….

There’s actually a longer post embedded in some of these items, but for now, I thought I’d just get some of these down here.  After all, I had intended on doing so last night but went to bed instead….

• Cheryl Ball posted on Tech-Rhet asking about a Mac organizing software from a company (or maybe that’s the software) called Circus Ponies. It’s an organizational tool, which might be useful, though I find that my problems with organization and/or “getting things done” are not software-related.
• Talking/working with Derek on a panel, and two ideas I want to get down before I forget: 1) it sure seems like a lot of people (including me) aren’t blogging at the same rate they used to blog (that’s a post one of these days, btw), and 2) while Facebook and Twitter are kinda cool, they aren’t a very good replacement for blogs.
• Where have blogs gone?  Well, one theory I have is as newspapers and other print journalism go online, they are pressing into the space that was once occupied more by individuals.  This is not to say that individual blogs are going to go away, but why read (or even write) on your own individual blog if there is going to be a big newspaper out there willing and able to host your posts and comments?
• Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff notes some of the writing on the backs of desk chairs of classrooms where she is doing evaluations.
• Alex Reid has a nice post about learning to write and how it impacts how we should and shouldn’t teach classes like first year writing.  I’ll need to come back to this.  I never actually took first year writing– I tested out of it.  I even was videotaped giving the speech I gave to get out of it, and I believe they took me and the other people who tested out to a lunch.  Thinking back on it briefly now, I believe we were an informal focus group.
• Fine writing advice, he gist of which I give all the time and which I have to work very hard at myself to follow (and I frequently fail at that).
• I kind of feel like I been a teleworker/web worker/distance worker/whatever for a long time, but that’s because I teach a fair amount online, and also because tenure-track faculty tend to have the luxury of working wherever they want.  Of course, the problem with “decentralized” work in general and defining “the work” of a college professor in particular is that I’m always working, in an office or not.
• What’s the big trend now?  Nowism.  Actually, it’s more interesting than it sounds.  I like the list of “now applications” that are down the page a ways, and I like the term “Liquid Modernity” which comes from Zygmunt Bauman.
• “The lost chicken hatcheries of Iowa City, IA.” Of course I have to note that, even though I am not all that crazy about chickens in Ypsilanti (I have yet to spot a coop in my neighborhood).

Lawrence Lessig announced today that he’s more or less giving up blogging, and it’s striking to me how many of his reasons seem to correspond to my own very limited research on why it is people hang up the ol’ blog.  To simplfy:

• Life and other work has intervened– Lessig is expecting another child and is taking on more time-consuming responsibilities at Harvard.
• Technologies of blogging has become somewhat problematic, especially in terms of spam.  Though I have to say I think this is a kind of lame explanation/excuse since it’s easy to set up a blog to dissuade spam.
• Moving to other spaces– or, in Lessig’s case, putting his energies on other spaces he’s already mainitaining:

This isn’t an announcement of my disappearance. I’m still trying to understand twitter. My channel at blip.tv will remain. As will the podcast, updated as I speak. I will continue to guest blog at Huffington Post. And as Change-Congress.org enters a new stage, I hope to be doing more there. But this community, this space, this board will now rest.

Interestingly enough, I think the Lessig blog also exhibits the classic signs of ending blogs:  a flurry of posts in recent days here in late August 2009, but none in July 2009, and one in early June.

But I have no doubt that Lessig will remain an important and prolific voice online and beyond the blogosphere.

From the blog Livin’ it Up Big Time comes this entry, “Looks Like If The Words Are Bleeding (Collected Collegiate Student Essays, 2002-2009).” This popped up on the WPA-L mailing list.  Basically, the blogger/artist Theodore Diran Lyons III took some particularly poor examples of writing assignments he had collected from seven years of teaching at different institutions, tacked them up on the wall, circled some of the errors in red and highlighted other errors with large font pull-quotes, and said it was an art piece about illiteracy in America.  Comments on his blog ensued, and I am apart of the thread as the long-winded “Steve,” if you’re curious.

I don’t know, perhaps I was giving the guy far too much grief/far too much attention here, but I got sucked in.  The whole conversation bothers/bothered me.  This is certainly an example of the sort of feedback loop I’ve experienced/written about in terms of blog writing and viral media.  I guess I also think it’s interesting the extent to which we reached an impasse regarding the definition of illiteracy (which is obviously more complicated than mistakes circled in red), and the extent to which Lyons is so defensive about all this.  Oh well; I guess we all have a way of being defensive, eh?

I think one of the key differences of opinion is the idea about what counts as a “fair game” object of art or public discussion.  Lyons wants to claim that artists can claim pretty much anything.  In his way of thinking about it, the students abandoned these essays (they didn’t pick up them up at the end of the term), so they were his to do with as he pleased.  I think that when we ask students to write things, it is uncool to turn around and then use those things in our own work.  For example, it would be problematic for me to lift chunks of text from one or more of my students’ essays and then claim it as my own (though we’ve all heard stories of this happening before).  And it is clearly and completely wrong for teachers to use a public forum– a blog, an art gallery, both, etc.– to make fun of students’ failings.

I suppose it’s different here since Lyons isn’t exactly presenting this work as his own and he did work to conceal the identities of his “illiterate” students; but he is using his students’ work, unbeknownst to them, in an attempt to make a point.  And in my way of looking at it, he is using his students’ work to more or less demonstrate that they are not very smart and to make fun of them.

That’s just mean.

It also seems to me that the more successful of this mode of found/quasi-performance art uses as the subject/victim the artist himself.  I’m thinking of people like Chris Burden, who nailed himself (well, someone else obviously must have done the nailing) to the back of Volkswagen and who was shot by an assistant as art.  Think what you will of Burden’s art, but in these pieces, at least he is the object/victim.  In contrast, Lyons’ piece victimizes his students.  Granted, we’re talking about abandoned writing assignments here and not truly life-threatening acts/art, but these students are victims of a sort nonetheless.

For me, a more interesting piece might have involved Lyons tacking up some of the student evaluations he has collected over the years on a big wall in some sort of pattern.  Maybe there are reoccurring comments from students he could circle?  Maybe he could note the ways he himself has progressed as a teacher?  Maybe he could note the mistakes he continues to make?  Lord knows that’s a piece I could put together.

… it is certainly connected to and yet different from networks like Facebook and Twitter.  Case in point:

I’m writing this post because I saw Rebecca Howard’s Twitter post about Jeff Rice’s blog, which then pointed me to this ReadWriteWeb post, “Is Blogging Dead?” And this is a question, btw, that the RWW folks answer (basically) “no,” and comments ensue.  And, because I think this is interesting and it will tie in with a class I’m teaching right now, hosted here using the blogging software wordpress. And I will probably alert people that I have made this post by posting a link on Twitter with a #fb tag, which then will in turn also post it to my Facebook account.

So what I mean is this:  Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and all kinds of other Web 2.o/social networking/whatever you want to call it software is obviously connected, related, and increasingly redundant.  I’m preparing for a course called “Technology for Teaching and Learning,” which is mostly a hands-on workshop where we’ll learn about all kinds of different tools (Google stuff, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, podcasting, videocasting, wikis, etc., etc.) and talk about how this stuff can (and sometimes can’t) be part of good teaching practices.  As I am going through these various tools, it strikes me how they all do very similar things in interestingly subtle ways.  You update your status on Facebook, you update it on Twitter; why both?  And yet, that’s exactly what lots of people are doing now, including me.

But they are also different, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes not.  And this is one of the main reasons why I don’t think blogging is going to be dead anytime soon, much in the same way that I don’t think video or audio is going to replace the written word anytime soon (notice I didn’t say print on paper– that might be a different story).  Alex Reid kposted something about this (well, the way I’m thinking of it right now at least), about digital video and scholarship, where he wondered what the role of video is as a means of delivering scholarship in comp/rhet.  Why are there so many books and journal articles out there about web 2.0 stuff, not to mention video and film?  Well, besides the academic capital issue, I think it’s because it turns out that these rather traditional forms actually are the best ones to sometimes articulate and reflect on ideas both big and small.  Not in an either/or sense, but in a “use the right tool for the job” sense.

I guess where I see this in my own blogging/facebooking/twittering is this:  Facebook and Twitter is for posting links and for posting about “being” on a day to day basis; my blog is a place to write out something more– not necessarily “thoughtful” per se, but more reflective.  In that sense, I think that one shift that is going on in blogging in relation to these other medias (and perhaps why some think that blogging is “dead”) is that the diary aspect of blogging– I’m about to go mow the lawn (a true statement, btw!)– is much more effectively presented via Facebook/Twitter.  So maybe the diary blog is a dying off, but that’s okay, I think.

I’m having a relatively quiet evening here watching some TV and surfing the ‘net, so I thought I’d post a few links of stuff I’ve come across:

• “The Furlough Blues: Or, How I spent my 12 days of university-ordered, unpaid leave”by Keith Miller from CHE about this situation at Arizona State University. I completely understand where Miller is coming from: I have no idea how I would handle this either, and I sure as heck hope it doesn’t come to EMU.
• Over at Writing for Ants, “Give the machines what they deserve” is about this recent Inside Higher Ed article about this dubious services by StraighterLine to teach first year comp for dirt-cheap. There was a lot of outrage about all this on WPA-L (including by me), and I think this is a good commentary as well. But interestingly enough, the same night I came across this…
• …“Accreditor Eyes Course Outsourcing,” which is another Inside Higher Ed article about StraighterLine. Here’s a quote:
  

  “It turns out that students and faculty members aren’t the only ones seeking more information about an arrangement between Fort Hays State University and a company that sells online general education courses for $99 each. The arrangement was a surprise to Fort Hays’ accreditor, the North Central Association of College and Schools, which is now asking questions.

  North Central is also examining the company’s relationship with two for-profit institutions it accredits: Ellis University and Grand Canyon University.

• “Ward Churchill Redux” is Stanley Fish’s response/summary/commentary on the resolution of the Churchill affair. We’ll see if this is the end of this deal or not.
• A couple of good posts about the decline of the newspaper business: “That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers” from TechCrunch, “As Newspapers Implode, Diverse Voices Move Online” from MediaShift, and “The Speech the NAA Should Hear” from BuzzMachine by Jeff Jarvis. I have to say I kind of agree with these critiques.
• Best Online Collaboration Tools of 2009. This is kind of a weird one– you’ve got to scroll around the page to see stuff– but there are oodles of social networking/collaboration tools here, maybe some things to think about when I try to get students to make collaborative movies online again.
• Will Richardson interviewed Kathy Yancey– one of those things to come back to later.

One of my students turned me on to Ping.fm, which supposedly can update your status (or whatever?) in all of your social networks at once. I haven’t really had time to check it out yet and it probably is a good thing/good idea. But I do have two reservations. First, like Debbie (see #7), I sometimes grow weary of the book o’ face. Second, I’m not sure I want to update all of my social networks the same. Maybe I do, maybe not. Actually, I’ve thought recently of setting up a Facebook account that is actually for my “real friends” and not as a “public persona.”

My student learned about Ping.fm at a workshop about publishing and the need for writers to set up their own “platform” for promoting their books/writings/etc. This reminds me that in that conversation I had last week with my journalism friend, he talked about how he used his twitter account to post links to articles he had written. So in the sense of “driving traffic,” perhaps all of these other things do make a little sense.

But before I have time to figure any of this out, I need to get caught up on grading and such….

This is kind of irritating: the Google blogroll feature stopped working, for why I don’t know. I suppose it’s reasonable to assume that it will start working again sooner than later, but I kind of wish it was working last night during my English 516 class.

Perhaps I’m relying a bit too heavily on a completely free service here. I mean, if Google just turned this service off, I’d have a bit of a problem, now wouldn’t I?