Category: Blogging about blogging

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Class web site with WordPress/Scary Crash Problem Solved/Future Mac-served CMS Projects?

This is kind of a “three-fer” message, as you can tell from my title here:

First off, I must say I’ve been pretty pleased with my use of WordPress to support the class web site for English 444: Writing for the World Wide Web this term. I’m running it on the computer in my office– an eMac– because no one here at EMU seems capable and/or willing to support software that requires MySQL or PHP (more on that later). While it was kind of a pain in the butt to set up in the first place, that up-front work has been paying off lately because it has proven much MUCH easier to update the content on this site than it is to update a normal web site. I guess that’s something I should have known before, but now I really know it now. This is especially true when I compare my 444 web site to the one for my computers and writing class, in which the web site is still out of date and incomplete (note to self: update computers and writing web site).

The only problems I’ve had in running this stuff myself on my office computer are a couple of power outages and what appeared to be a catastrophic crash/screw-up on my part. It’s kind of amusing in hind-sight, but it wasn’t at the time. What happened was I updated my OS to 10.4.4, restarted, and then went to the computer lab to meet my 444 students. I went to the web site to show students something and it wasn’t there. Instead, there was a scary-looking screen that said that WordPress couldn’t find access the database. So my initial thinking was that my system upgrade had trashed it.

Needless to say, the rest of that class didn’t go great.

But fortunately, my colleague Steve Benninghoff found the answer to my problem here on the WordPress support forums (and not a moment too soon, I might add– in my panic/disgust with the whole system upgrade blunder, I was this close to just figuring out how to just throw all of it away and starting over). And a big thanks to the folks who posted to that WordPress discussion forum; I would have never figured this out with my extremely limited (albeit growing) knowledge of working with the command line on my Mac.

Which leads to my last point: like it or not, it would appear that if I want to do anything that requires MySQL/PHP (WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, etc., etc., etc.), I’ll have to do it myself because the folks who should do this, ICT, won’t. I actually can’t be too mad at them because, while the original answer to my MySQL/PHP request was basically a rude “no, security issues,” I ultimately received a more full and polite answer, which was basically “no, thank you.”

Fortunately, my department head seems to on board with the benefits of this sort of work, which means that I will hopefully have something up and running soon. Unfortunately, it looks like one of my new hobbies is going to have to be getting myself a bit more schooled in MySQL/PHP stuff. I’ve been able to get by on minimal knowledge so far, but I’d like to be able to say with a little more confidence that I know what I’m doing, especially if I am going to be forced to be the support person for this stuff in the department.

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Can't get there from China

I stumbled across this this morning, “Sites Google Agreed to Censor in China.” It’s part of Google Blogoscoped, which looks like an interesting site devoted to issues on Google and search engines, but the main site freezes when I look at it in Firefox. Anyway, the list of censored things in China is interesting, both in what it still allows and what it doesn’t. Certainly worth a look.

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Those dangerous teenagers, again….

The other day, there was an article in the Fredericksburg, VA newspaper The Free Lance Star about teenagers and blogs MySpace (we’ll get to that in a second) called “Teen blogs: Too much information?” On the one hand, it is another example of an article in the genre of “the Internet is a scary place for our kids.” Here’s a passage along these lines:

MySpace has been in the news in connection with two recent teen deaths in Virginia. Locally, Courtland High School athlete Baron Braswell II was fatally stabbed Friday at a Spotsylvania County CD release party publicized on MySpace. Afterward, his friends used MySpace to post memorial tributes.

And after 17-year-old Virginia Commonwealth University freshman Taylor Behl was abducted and killed last September, investigators found that she had posted photos and other personal information on MySpace. Her profile mentioned that she was moving to Richmond and hoped to meet “someone who is kind.” Police have charged a 38-year-old Richmond man in her death.

As teenage blogging booms, many parents are left in the dust and in the dark. Some parents of young bloggers don’t even use the Internet, said Staca Urie, outreach manager for NetSmartz, the online safety unit of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

And so forth.

But this article is different in at least three ways. First, the reporter, Laura Moyer, is a really good friend of my wife, and an overall great person. Second, she makes some good points here and tries as hard as she can to be objective about all this, and along the way, I think she makes it clear that she’s not trying to write a typical “teens gone bad” sort of article. Though the headline kinda does that in a way. And third, because she is a friend of my wife and because my wife pointed out to her that I’m a certified “expert” on the whole blogging thing, she called me and ended up quoting me a bit in the article. Here’s what Laura quoted from me in the piece:

But scary possibilities don’t justify yanking minors’ blogging privileges altogether, said Steven D. Krause, an English professor and blog expert at Eastern Michigan University.

Like anyone else, teenagers need to learn what they should and shouldn’t put online, he said. And as they learn, they’ll probably make mistakes.

“I don’t think there’s any question that young people use poor judgment in what they post,” Krause said. “But you know what? They make poor judgments in face-to-face situations, too. Part of the job of teenagers is to do stupid things.”

While teenagers and 20-somethings may use MySpace and similar sites as personals ads, Krause said, blogs are also a powerful, accessible communication tool. He encourages his college students to blog as a way to publish their writings to an audience beyond the classroom.

Like more serious topic-related or news blogs, teen blogs are here to stay, Krause said.

“I think kids must be onto something if it’s getting people this scared,” he said.

Had I been more clever and reflective and such when I talked to Laura, I would have said some other things that she might have tried to include in the article. So I’ll say them now:

  • Blaming MySpace or any other Internet service for the death of this kid is just plain silly.
  • In one sense, I will admit that things like MySpace and Facebook do potentially enable bad behaviors, especially among teenagers, who are not known as an age group to be that reflective. But in another sense, I think it’s just making visible the kinds of stuff that teenagers have been doing in more private (more dangerous?) settings since… well, since there were teenagers, I’m guessing.
  • And really, MySpace isn’t the same thing as a “blog,” in my opinion. Services like MySpace and Xanga seem to me to be geared much more to “meeting” (virtually or in real life) other people. The emphasis on MySpace and its ilk is in the visual and in having “friends,” while my impression of “real” blogs (like on blogger, like, hopefully, this one) is they are more interested in texts and fellow readers (who, yes, maybe are friends, maybe become friends). MySpace is designed to share, I dunno, the surface. Blogs are designed to share reflections and thoughts. Sorta. MySpace has a feel more like a singles bar or a frat party– at least the way I remember such things.

And that is what I mean by saying that these things aren’t blogs. They certainly are some kind of networking/communicating medium, but I don’t see them as one that supports the kind of writing/communicating/networking/reflecting I’d want students to do when I assign blog writing activities.

Or maybe I’m just getting old.

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Krause Podcasting (or, it's one thing to write about nothing, but is it okay to talk about nothing too?)

Andrew “Doc Mara” Mara mentioned in a comment the other day that I had a podcast listed on iTunes. That’s true, though as Andrew said, there really isn’t much there. Yet.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using audio to help me support my online teaching and I think it has been pretty effective. Basically, I’ve attached audio to notes about readings inside the eCollege “shell”– I’d link to it, but you have to have a password and be signed up for the class to get to it and all that. I’m trying to extend this to what I guess really is an “honest to goodness” podcast, one available via iTunes and the whole bit. It’s called “Steve Krause’s English 328 Blog,” and you can find it if you go to the iTunes store, look in the podcasts, then in “Education,” then in “Higher Education,” and then it’s and alphabetic list. Or you can go to Krause’s English 328 Blog and take a listen for yourself– though, as Andrew pointed out, there’s not much there yet.

Unlike the audio I include as part of the online class materials, I’m not quite sure what the point of this podcast is going to be yet. I think I’m going to use it as an opportunity to make some “class announcements,” maybe to give some overall thoughts on the progress of students in class, etc. Maybe my students will catch on and will want podcast for themselves. We’ll see. What I wanted to do for the time-being was simply demonstrate that making a podcast and getting it included in iTunes is surprisingly easy. After I get a better handle on planning my classes, I’ll probably write up a “how to” document and post it some place.

I thought about the idea of including a podcast as part of my official blog space, and I guess I’m still thinking about it. On the one hand, it might be kind of an interesting experiment, and, as far as I can gather, no one else in the comp/rhet blogging world is doing this yet. Actually, I’m not sure there are any academic bloggers who have started to do any podcasting. In any event, what I’m getting at is it might be a worthy experiment because no one else is doing this yet.

On the other hand, I’m not sure if my podcast would be that interesting to anyone. As I suggest in the headline for this post, it seems to me that it’s one thing to “write” in a blog about (basically) nothing/what’s on my mind/etc., but it’s something else to just “talk” about nothing. Blog readers can pick and choose via an RSS feed and/or simply scan the text (my guess is that most of my readers are doing one or both of these things right now). You can’t really do that with audio; listening to a podcast is largely an “all or nothing” kind of commitment.

I dunno. I think I’d better plan my classes for the term that starts tomorrow before I start figuring out how to make people listen to me babble.

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Friday Lunch (or Linda, when are you going to start a blog?)

I had lunch on Friday with Jeff “Yellow Dog” Rice and my EMU colleague, Linda Adler-Kassner. Really, it was just one of those opportunities to get together and eat and drink and talk– gossip about the comp/rhet world, talk about different institutional politics, a bit about C&W 2007 (which is going to be at Wayne State U), quite a bit about technology things, etc.

Jeff and I also tried a bit to convince Linda that she ought to blog. She kept saying that she didn’t think she really had a reason to blog/anything to say, and we kept trying to tell her that wasn’t true. I don’t think it worked that well, but it was fun trying.

But one thing that we did talk about as a reason for blogging was what I guess I would describe as the unexpected benefits. Jeff and I both talked about various versions of this, but just speaking for me: my silly little blog here, which really doesn’t get that much traffic and that isn’t that significant in the big scheme (or even small scheme) of things, has indirectly lead to a number of publications (some of which have even paid), speaking engagements, and other kudos. I suppose it is kind of a “build it and they will come” sort of thing.

Anyway, like I said, good food and fun was had by one and all. We didn’t talk about football, which, given the way that the Outback bowl turned out, was probably a good thing.

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I am the Master of MySQL! (sorta, and not drupal… yet…)

I’ve spent far too much time since last Monday trying to figure out how to install drupal on my Macintosh computer in my office. I’m interested in working with some kind of CMS for departmental things– to make some documents easily available, maybe even to be the “front end” fo the writing program web site. Drupal seemed like it might be a good idea.

I of course realize that I could use Drupal for tons of other things, but I’m not interested in changing my ways too much. WordPress works just fine for me in terms of a blog (and, as I’ll get to in a moment, it might end up being my choice for a CMS too), and I plan on continuing to use some combination of ol’ fashion web sites and eCollege for my teaching. As I’ve said before, eCollege isn’t perfect, it isn’t nearly as customizable as any open source/do-it-yourself product, and I think the interface is kind of ugly. On the other hand, eCollege is the system supported by Continuing Ed at EMU (and it is quite well supported, too), which means that the technical stuff is someone else’s problem. And this last issue is way important.

Anyway, I found some instructions at a sight called Mac Zealots for installing drupal on a Mac. BTW, a great site, and, as far as I can tell, it’s written and run by a couple of undergrads at Purdue. Now, no fault to the Mac Zealot guys, I had two basic problems following these directions for drupal. First, I am a “Mac guy” specifically to avoid opening “Terminal” and typing a lot of crap like this:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql test

Second, in order to install drupal (or any of these other open source content management systems), you really have to install and vaguely understand MySQL and PHP. This is a level of computer geekdom I have not yet reached.

Now, when I’ve raised some of these issues with people who know better than me, and their general response is “you should talk with your local system adminstrator.” Well, here’s the problem: when I mention things like “Content Management Systems” (and to be perfectly honest, even stuff like “Open Source”) to the local system adminstrator types, they clearly have no clue as to what I’m talking about. There is a way to work with MySQL on the university’s main web server, but I think they are very stingy about access to this and when you ask for access (which I have– haven’t heard back yet), they make it clear that you’re basically on your own.

In short, when it comes to this sort of thing (e.g., anything that ICT doesn’t already understand, even if it is something that they should understand), I am the local system administrator.

Anyway, I figured out the other day that I had installed the wrong version of MySQL before Thanksgiving break and didn’t really figure that out until yesterday. An easy mistake, IMO, because there are about 100 different versions of MySQL and the “right” version for things like drupal and WordPress is kind of old. So I had to go through the process of un-installing MySQL, a somewhat scary step since it again involved the dreaded Terminal function and the script I found for uninstalling MySQL comes with warnings like “make sure you know what you’re doing or you’ll have to reinstall everything on your computer.” And basically, I think that I did get this version of MySQL to work.

So, everything’s great? Not quite.

I tried to get drupal to run with no success. Then I tried to install WordPress, and, after a few minor glitches, I got it to run, as you can see here (though there really isn’t anything there yet). I would still like to get drupal to work, and maybe I’ll try to monkey around with it when I get a bit more free time in the office. But for the time-being, here’s what I’ve learned so far:

  • While WordPress might not be nearly as powerful as drupal, it’s a hell of a lot easier to configure and use. At least to me. And a CMS in the hand is worth more than two in the bush.
  • I feel like I am approaching the place where I’m going to have to buy one of those books I see in the computer section that suggests it can teach me MySQL and PHP basics in a week.
  • Finally, Apple– or somebody else developing software for the Mac– needs to come up with a CMS/blogging software that is all icon/menu-driven. I want this to be an icon I click on, and, as long as I have Personal Web Sharing set up on my Mac desktop (which can be set up with a few clicks, btw), then, I want this to work too. I want ti to have a lot of features along the lines of what I would expect in a word processor or a good HTML editor. And I want it bundled with the operating system– maybe OS 10.5? If I were in charge, I’d call it iBlog.

Interestingly enough, there is a software that does a lot of this stuff called iBlog. I haven’t used it, but the reviews are pretty mixed.

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How to Make Academic Blogging Count? Publish It!

This is just half an idea, one that I will toss out before I forget it, and then I will comment on student essays, I promise:

I’m not sure how I stumbled across this, but there is apparently a book available in the UK called 2005 Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere. To quote from the blurb on the amazon.uk web site:

Famous bloggers like Belle du Jour and the Baghdad Blogger have already secured lucrative book deals thanks to the quality and vibrancy of their writing. But there are literally tens of thousands of bloggers who have not yet made the move to print. “2005: Blogged” provides a complete round up of the way the blogging community covered the major events of the year.

Anyway, this got me thinking: what if there was a way to put together a journal– maybe print, maybe electronic– that was kind of a selection of different blogger’s entries, perhaps arranged around a topic? This publication could reproduce those blog entries and even encourage the original writers an opportunity to go into more detail in the form of an “article” or “chapter” of some kind.

Too crazy?

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Turkey Post #2: More On The Value of "Academic" Blogs

There was a good discussion on Tech-Rhet and some thoughtful commentary on an article that appeared in/on Slate (in a week of articles about academia), Robert S. Boynton’s “Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs– When academics post online, do they risk their jobs?” In the nutshell, Boynton, focusing on the story of Daniel W. Drezner, who keeps a well-regarded blog (which I don’t read on a regular basis because it’s about stuff like political science and economics and stuff), was denied tenure at the University of Chicago (and Drezner writes about this experience quite a bit in his blog), and eventually offered a tenured position at Tufts.

I am sure there are many places in the blogosphere where folks are talking about this, but there’s a useful post at the if: book blog, a post that raises the issue of making blogs “count” in academic sense with peer review, so-called blog “carnivals,” and the like. This entry conveniently links to a bunch of other useful sites, and ends more or less like this:

It will be to the benefit of society if blogging can be claimed, sharpened and leveraged as a recognized scholarly practice, a way to merge the academy with the traffic of the real world. The university shouldn’t keep its talents locked up within a faltering publishing system that narrows rather than expands their scope. That’s not to say professors shouldn’t keep writing papers, books and monographs, shouldn’t continue to deepen the well of knowledge. On the contrary, blogging should be viewed only as a complement to research and teaching, not a replacement. But as such, it has the potential to breathe new life into the scholarly enterprise as a whole, just as Boynton describes.

I have a number of thoughts about all this:

  • For most of us academic bloggers, happy and otherwise, I think it is either misguided or downright delusional to compare our situation with that of Drezner’s. At least it is for me. I mean, I have around 25-50 readers day– far fewer, I suspect, than Prof. Drezner– and while there are people in my department who know I keep a blog, most seem unaware and I don’t think any of my colleagues care one way or the other about my blog. Blogging always has to be a personal decision because most blogger’s top readers are going to be me, myself, and I.
  • Drezner himself points out that he doesn’t think it was his blog that cost him tenure at U of Chicago, and he doesn’t think it was that big of a factor in terms of snagging his new job at Tufts.
  • The vast majority of academics by definition don’t dwell in the rarified air of Drezner and his colleagues. I wrote an essay about valuing self-published web sites as part of the tenure and review process a couple years ago, an essay that was published in the online version of College Composition and Communication and that was part of a special multi-journal issue of various electronic journals. My essay was “disappeared” by that site, so I set it up on my own web server space here. I make a lot of points in this essay, but to me, one of the more significant points is this one:

    I recall the horror stories of “publish or perish,” of assistant professors who had books published by good presses and were still denied tenure. The picture that was painted by my advisors made me think that tenure at most schools was a fifty-fifty proposition, at best.

    The fact of the matter is this happens almost exclusively at Carnegie Classification Research I or Research II institutions, or it happens in situations that probably have more to do with complicated politics and personalities than it does with publications. The vast majority of community colleges, colleges, and universities in this country are not research institutions and do not have the same notions about what does or doesn’t count as scholarship for the purposes of tenure, review, and promotion. Yet this reality is routinely ignored in documents that offer advice and guidelines for tenure, promotion, and review.

    Or let me put it this way: the rules for tenure vary. A lot. Since I finished my undergraduate degree, I have been a graduate student or a faculty member at four different institutions, all of which might be best described as “regional state universities” (though I think Bowling Green State is a “Research I;” they certainly have a lot of Ph.D. programs). At each of these institutions, I know that faculty have been awarded tenure and/or promotion with less than a book.

  • So should blogs “count” toward tenure? Maybe, maybe not. But as I argued in my piece about self-published web sites, I think this is a situation in which tenure/promotion seekers have to make arguments that appeal to the individuals within their own institutions. At some places, they might count; at other places, they might not.
  • Personally, I don’t really care if my blogging “counts” in that sense or not. For one thing, one of the things I like about blogging is that for the likes of small-time bloggers like me, the motivation to keep a blog is pretty much internal. In other words, I do this because I want to, not because I have to. And let’s face it: the road to hell is paved with academic presentations, articles, and books that were written solely as a chip to add to the tenure basket.

    Besides, I get a lot of indirect benefits from blogging. I’ve been able to give presentations and write articles based on my blogging and teaching with blogs, and I’ve even made a little money from the whole blog thing. So that’s worth something.

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A few more miscellaneous links

I need to get myself caught up on grading today, so for now, just a few miscellaeous links to things from the blogosphere for the last couple of days:

  • Assigned plagiarism, from Mike at Vitia. Basically, Mike set up a project where he got his students to plagiarize to simultaneously make a point about research and plagiarism. Good assignment, I think.
  • Via Johndan comes this link of a “Typography Crash Course Roundup,” which could be interesting to look at… someday….
  • Via the CC Dean comes this post, “Teaching in Context, or, All Hail Dr. Crazy.” The “Dr. Crazy” in question is another blogger, who has a number of posts about the challenges of teaching (to quote Dr. Crazy) “at a Non-Elite, Teaching-Driven Institution.” They are good posts I suppose, but as a comp/rhet person who has always worked at these kinds of schools, they aren’t exactly surprising to me.
  • Via John at Machina Memorialis comes this article “Intelligence in the Internet age,” which is on CNET News. In a way, it’s kind of a “pop” version of a lot of the reading I tend to assign at the beginning of a couple of different classes I teach; might be interesting to come back to later.
  • Finally, and I’m not sure where I got this one (CultureCat?), comes CiteULike, which is “a free online service to organise your academic papers.”
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TWITs / Amateur Podcasts (Who Listens to These?) / And Who is Watching These Things??

This is kind a “three-fer” blog posting about podcasting and the next wave, videocasting:

  • You might want to take a listen to the “This Week in Technology” podcast show; last week’s episode included Larry Lessig on the panel. It was a pretty interesting conversation, making accessible a lot of the rather complicated issues of copyright in the digital age. As Lessig pointed out, almost everybody– especially young people– violates the letter and/or the spirit of copyright law nowadays with the way that they download music from bit torrent technologies and the like, and that’s a bad thing.

    It was interesting to me because I listened to this show the day after I had had a conversation with students in my Thursday night class about copyright issues and Internet downloads. They seemed to be either apathetic or unaware that downloading music for free and without permission is explicitly against the law. This “criminialization” of a pretty common behavior is in and of itself a problem, and Lessig made a compelling argument in this podcast.

    Having said all that, much of this show and other TWITs episodes (I’ve listened to parts of a couple) really amount to listening to some smart guys sitting around in a bar talking about computer geek stuff. It works here because all of these guys are experienced in the media– the leader of the pack is Leo Laport, and while he and the rest of them might say they’re computer geeks and they kind of are, really, these guys are all old pros from radio and TV– and because they have some pretty high production values. Which brings me to my next point…

  • Who listens to these things? I’m not talking about TWITs or all the NPR and other network news sorts of things that are available as podcasts nowadays through iTunes; I’m talking about the complete amateur stuff. As I look through the iTunes “top 100,” I can see that most people are agreeing with me since most of what’s there is coming out from “the pros;” but take, for example, The Dawn and Drew Show, which is a couple in Wisconsin talking about stuff. I have been told it is “hillarious.” I dunno about that. Maybe I just don’t have the right gene for appreciating things like this kind of podcasting, the same way I just don’t “get” public access television.

    As I have written about here numerous times, I’ve been including audio for my online class this term and I am going to be doing so podcasting for my online (and not online) classes next semester. Based on what students have told me, these audio files (more or less “mini lectures” about some of the readings) have been a success for these classes. In the winter term, I’m going to do some podcasting of “shows” that sort of provide a wrap-up of my classes for the week. I think; I’m still trying to decide. And, like I said in a post about a week ago, I figured out how to do a podcast that can be listed with iTunes (and presumably other syndication services) with nothing more than an blogger account, an RSS 2.0 feed (via feedburner), and a cell phone.

    However, I am under no illusion that anyone other than my students would be at all interested in listening to these podcasts– and it is kind of up in the air that my students are even that interested. So who the heck is listening to all of these random podcasts listed on iTunes? Anyone?

    And I know what you’re thinking– “Oh yeah? What makes you think that anyone is actually reading this thing, anyway?” Good point. But I keep a blog in part as a selfish note-taking device, it’s a lot easier (and less time-consuming) to skim through some blogs (especially with an RSS feed reader of some sort) than it is to “skim” through some podcasts, and I guess I’m just more willing to read “random thoughts” than I am to listen to them. Maybe that’s just me.

  • Just to make matters worse, it looks like we might soon move beyond not so interesting audio blogs to not so interesting video blogs. Via boing-boing this morning (so I guess somebody is watching), I came across Drive Time, which is a weekly (or so) video blog about a guy’s commute into work in the Boston area. The camera is somehow mounted on his dashboard and what we see is him driving and chatting with passengers– in the episode I sorta watched, his wife and then, later on, some other person he picked up. (Deep sigh…)

    Look, I’m not saying there is no potential to this stuff– far from it. But right now, I think we’re at a phase of the technology in which “success” is being marked by only the ability to pull it off, and, as anyone who has sat through a painful video/slide show with some family member can telly you, the ownership of a video/still camera does not necessarily translate into “art.”

    • Enough of that for now. I need to go record some more audio for my class, maybe experiment with an “unofficial” podcast for my unofficial blog, and then maybe price some cheap digital video cameras….