Speaking of more reading that might be useful in teaching English 516 and/or English 444: Via boing-boing, comes “NPR: Pentagon scans milblogs for security risks (audio report).” That title doesn’t do this justice because there are a whole bunch of different links and info here about the blogs and other Internet-based info kept by soldiers in the field in Iraq.
Facebook in; MySpace out?
From today’s Washington Post, “In Teens’ Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year.” Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:
Teen Web sensation MySpace became so big so fast, News Corp. spent $580 million last year to buy it. Then Google Inc. struck a $900 million deal, primarily to advertise with it. But now Jackie Birnbaum and her fellow English classmates at Falls Church High School say they’re over MySpace.
“I think it’s definitely going down — a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now,” said Birnbaum, a junior who spends more time on her Facebook profile, where she messages and shares photos with other students in her network.
From the other side of the classroom, E.J. Kim chimes in that in the past three months, she’s gone from slaving over her MySpace profile up to four hours a day — decorating it, posting notes and pictures to her friends’ pages — to deleting the whole thing.
“I’ve grown out of it,” Kim said. “I thought it was kind of pointless.”
Dang– and this after I’ve tricked out my MySpace page! (well, okay, maybe not…).
For what it’s worth though, I think this is one thing to point to as evidence about why “blogging” and “social networking sites” like MySpace are actually two different things.
NPR, Blogs, and Slang
I heard two good stories on NPR’s “All Things Considered” which might be good teaching resources some time this coming winter. First, there was “Blogs Capture, Amplify Galludet Protest,” which is about how a couple of bloggers covered the ongoing problems at Galludet in DC. Given the nature of the story, there’s a transcript at this site, too.
On a completely different topic, there was also this story, “American Slang, Adapted and Updated.” This is an interview with Paul Dickson on an updated version of a dictionary he has on slang. I thought that this might be an interesting thing to think about in a first year composition class, actually….
Is this the next "big" thing?
I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but boing-boing had a link pointing to Vox the other day. I had actually heard of this site earlier (and btw, if I have heard of something before it shows up on boing-boing, does that make me super-duper cool or what?), but I haven’t set up an account yet.
It does look promising though; basically, this it’s like a blogger-type space that allows you to easily incorporate lots of video, audio, pictures, etc., etc. That’d be pretty handy for a class where one of the goals is to get students to do stuff with a variety of different online medias but where there isn’t a lot of time or computer lab access to take students to work on iMovie and other software.
"Steps toward a successful classroom blog"
Also from jill/txt (yep, I’m behind with schoolwork and thus behind on my blog reading and my own blogging again) comes this article, “Steps toward a successful classroom blog.” This reminds me that I really REALLY need to start getting my act together in terms of both planning English 516 (“Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice”) online for the Winter 2007 term and getting a proposal together for an online version of English 444 (“Writing for the World Wide Web”…).
"Our Story" (or, can online scrapbooking catch on?)
A former student/current friend of mine sent me a link to this article a couple weeks ago, “True Story: Online expression evolves from blogging to multimedia storytelling–and it’s not just for bedtime.” The service this article is about is called OurStory.com, which, as far as I can tell by looking at it for about 3 minutes, is a kind of web-based and interactive scrapbook, one that you can also export to a DVD.
Kinda interesting, and worth talking about in either Writing for the World Wide Web or my grad class on computers and writing. But on my computer, the concept of electronic scrapbooking is called iLife.
Audioblogger soon to be no more….
Well, this is a bummer: according to the folks at Boing Boing, the audioblogger feature on blogger– which allows you to literally call in an audio file over the phone and post it to your blogger blog– is going to be closed down on November 1.
It figures. Computers and Composition Online recently published a special issue on sound that includes my article/website/podcast “Broadcast Composition,” and one of the things I talk about in that piece is the advantages of using audioblogger as a teaching tool.
I thought audioblogger was a pretty cool service– at least when it worked (it was always a little buggy). Make a phone call, talk for up to five minutes, and it automatically posts. That’s it. Super easy, and free is a really good price.
Well, the good news is there are other services, notably Odeo, which I think has more or less cornered the market on free podcasting. You can’t use the phone to record podcasts, but you can use their software– as long as you’ve got a microphone on your computer. And, as the Boing Boing piece points out, there are other services for recording audio for the web over the phone out there.
Still, I’ll miss the audioblogger stuff….
Wish I was there– or there (maybe)
I stumbled across the web site for “Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences,” which is sponsored by a group I had not heard of before this, the Association of Internet Researchers. It’s going on in Australia.
“Stumbled” is perhaps the wrong word. I came across this because Alex Halavais is blogging about it, along with his travel experiences.
Or, perhaps, I should be here, at BlogTalk Reloaded, which is happening in (I think) Vienna. Jill Walker has been blogging about this one lots and lots.
Of course, the fact that these conferences are on different continents than mine does present a bit of a challenge on my modest travel budget. Besides, both of these conferences, given their topics, have lots of stuff available about them via their web sites, which is why these might be good sites to return to when I start planning my winter 2007 version of English 516. And it’s also why maybe I don’t actually need to be there.
The Strike of 2006: Blogging about blogging (or, metapost)
That was pretty weird.
Now that EMUtalk.org is up and running and the strike itself is in a holding pattern that could last years, the traffic on this site has returned to some version of normal. So this seems as good as a time as any to reflect a bit on just what the hell happened here.
I had been writing about the possibility of the faculty going on strike at EMU off and on for a while just as part of my regular writings here about things that happen at EMU– for example, this post about the health insurance issues was from the beginning of August. And about the same time I started getting more specific in my posts about the possibilities of the strike (or what I had hoped wouldn’t be a strike), I noticed that if you did a google search for “EMU strike” or “EMU faculty strike,” this blog came up pretty close to the top. I suppose there are a lot of reasons for that– a fair number of people link to this blog, I was one of the few places where there was anything out there on the strike, etc.
Well, after we actually went on strike, page hits and views started to climb. As the strike went on, I wrote more. As I wrote more, I got more hits and views and comments, which, in a classic feedback loop, drove me to write even more. By a few days into the strike, I was getting about three times as many hits and views as I normally get. And by about ten days into the strike, well, here’s a graphic of that:
So, the purple represents page views, which is when someone comes to the site and then doesn’t do anything, and the green represents visits, which means someone did something to the site– scrolled, clicked on a link, commented, etc. On September 11, the point of the highest peak on the chart and the day before we essentially gave up the strike, this site had about 1,800 views and about 600 hits. In “normal times,” as the far left of the chart suggests, traffic here is dramatically less than that.
Like I said, it’s been weird. During the course of the strike, faculty who were relative strangers to me were coming up to me and thanking me for my blog. A bunch of people told me that I was the only decent source of information about what was going on with the strike, which to me says something about a) what a piss-poor job most of the local media did on covering the strike (other than the student paper and WEMU, that is), and b) what a piss-poor job that that union did in telling its story.
But one way or the other, people came here and they came here in relatively big numbers. I realize that sites like boing-boing probably get 1,000 hits every few minutes, but that’s record-setting traffic for the likes of me.
Anyway, in no particular order, here’s what I see potentially coming out of all this:
- I’m trying to channel the energy on campus and to nurture EMUtalk.org, and so far, so good. There’s about four or five other people who seem pretty active and involved in making it work, and it’s already getting more traffic than this site. Which is good. It will be interesting to see how long this site can sustain itself, especially after the anger of the strike wears off.
- This little experience represents for me a little microcosm of how blogging can work as a space where readers come to get information that is unfiltered and then to comment on that information. It’s why blogs are kind of like other news media, but also why blogs are not like these other things.
- I think this also proves that if you write about something that others want to know about– in this case, the faculty strike at EMU– these others will find your blog through search engines and recommendations, and they will read it and comment on it. But it also proves that there’s a delicate balance here. Had I been posting stuff about the War in Iraq or anything else that already gets lots of coverage in other media and other blogs, nothing would have happened. Had the event of the strike not happened– what Lloyd Bitzer would call an “exigence”– there would be no reason for me to write so much about the strike. On the other hand, as Vatz might have argued, the situation of the strike became filtered for many readers in part through this web site.
- Through this blip in time, I saw my blog go from a rather personal and idiosyncratic space for me and a handful of other computers and writing readers/bloggers to this “community space.” And yet, at the same time, it wasn’t really a “community space” in that it really functioned because of me. I mean, I was (and I remain) the main writer here, the person who starts the conversations that people can comment on. I suppose this is why a lot of blogs striving for the “community thing” have multiple authors.
- The feedback loop I found myself in here was really fascinating. Like I said, while my motivations for my initial posts about the strike were more or less personal– that is, I wasn’t thinking of myself as providing news to a large audience– I felt myself posting more and more in response to the presence of more readers and commenters. And then, as I posted more and as more people out there heard about my site via a Google search or just by other people on campus, more people read and commented on my blog. Which just made me want to write more. And so forth. I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I do think it says something worth exploring about why people blog (or not) in the first place, and I think it also says something about why students in classes across the board write well (or not) too.
- Finally, all if this makes me rethink some scholarly activities. As one of my colleagues said to me during all of this, “you have to at least write an article about all this.” I’m beginning to think that’s true, or maybe there is a reason to actually try to start writing a book about blogging this year.
In any event, I’m not happy to return to normal around here. At least once I finally get caught up on my life….
Johndan Hangs Up datacloud
Well, this is a bummer. But if I know Johndan (and actually, I only sort of vaguely know him), I’m guessing he’ll come up with something else one of these days soon.