“Why I Blog” by Andrew Sullivan is an Atlantic Monthly article that might be useful for my long-languishing Blogs as Writerly Spaces project, not to mention for English 516 or English 444. Or not– I haven’t had a chance to read it yet…..
Christmas cards I want to send
Via boing-boing, “The Wondermark Goodsery Holiday Cards.” They are a little on the pricey side, but this one is kind of hard for me to resist (click on the image to see a readable version):
Good bye old media, helllo new media
Via Will Richardson, I came across this NYTimes article/blog/whatever, “Mourning Old Media’s Decline.” It’s an interesting article about the ongoing implosion of old media/traditional newspapers. My wife and I were just talking the other day about canceling our paper subscription to the Ann Arbor News; what’s the point if I’m either going to not read it at all and/or read it online?
Anyway, this is an article that might work well for 444, where I usually have some discussion/unit/readings about “citizen journalism.” But I also post about this because I think that Will has it slightly wrong, when he writes:
The problem for us is that we’re still teaching like our kids are going to be reading those edited, linear, well-written newspapers when the reality is they’re not. And the bigger problem is that, by and large, we still don’t know enough about the “new” media world in our personal practice to push those conversations about change in any meaningful way.
We better figure it out pretty quickly, or we’ll be mourning much more than old media…
These are important warnings, but I have to say that I think that my colleagues in journalism (and I teach in a somewhat unusual English department in that journalism is housed here) are well-aware of this, and I think that there teaching has been moving in that direction. I’m not completely privy to the discussions that happen among that group, and I do know there is a tension between, um, “old school” and “new school” folks. That being said, there’s lots of technological awareness, abilities, and pedagogy in these kinds of classes.
And the thing is that while the medium itself is changing– as is the definition of what constitutes an “expert” or a “journalist”– the basic literacy and research skills of what we train in students in journalism is not. We still have lots and lots of students in our journalism program (not to mention PR and our writing majors), and, as far as I can tell, these students still end up getting jobs. It’s just that the paper pulp and the ink is gone.
This probably doesn’t count as book research, but it’s probably the only research I’m going to do this week…
Via Alex Halavais’ blog feed, I came across this article on the Financial Times web site, “Net prophets,” which is a review article of three different books out/coming out about search engines, including Halavais’ forthcoming book.
It is the sort of thing that would be good to include for English 516, but it’s on my mind this morning in my waning “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project and the chapter/part on rhetorical situation. Which is itself on my mind since that was the topic (more or less) from last night’s section of English 505. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I it seems to me that search engines throw a wrench into the role of audience in rhetorical situation, no matter how firmly (Bitzer) of fuzzily (Bisecker ala Derrida) you define “audience” or any other constituent in situations.
I think that Jenny Edbauer is on to something with “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” that isn’t quite talking about the phenomenon of search-fueled audiences and spikes in audiences as a result of searches– as I experienced quite personally with the EMU faculty strike a few years ago.
Anyway, this is all the BAWS thinking I get today. Too much voting, too much grading, and (hopefully) too much celebrating, more or less in that order.
Technorati doing some of my homework (sort of)
Via Collin’s blog, I came across the latest in blog stats: Technorati’s annual “State of the Blogosphere” for 2008. I will have to spend some more time over the next week trying to figure out what these people are saying, but I guess I have two thoughts for now. First, is this bit from my skimming of the report:
The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month. Note: median investment and revenue (which is listed below) is significantly lower. They are also earning CPMs.
Seriously? $75K a year?
The median revenue numbers are indeed significantly lower– if I understand the chart/stats correctly, the “revenue” is more like $200 annually. But even that seems to me to be kind of high, especially relative to the blogs/bloggers I’m surveying for my study.
In any event, this is still potentially useful data for my project since my much smaller survey takes a slightly different tact and also because of the case studies coming out of my study. Of course, I still have to write this all up one of these days….
Viral blogging, Palin, dinosaurs, and who knows what else
Here’s a guy I want to interview/get a hold of for my Blogs as Writerly Spaces project: a blogger named Bob who maintains a blog called TUBOB. Perhaps you’ve heard some kind of rumor about Sarah Palin thinking that dinosaurs were “Satan’s Lizards?” That, as this post at Community College English nicely summarizes, was flat-out made up here by Bob Salsbury in a post called “Fake Governor Sarah Palin Quotes.”
From there, it morphed into a series of comments and posts on all kinds of “real” news sites (see the CCE link for some examples). It ended up in a CNN story on false Internet rumors about Palin:
And, as Bob notes on his blog, Matt Damon mentions the rumors about dinosaurs that circulated about Palin in this otherwise spot-on critique of her VP-ness (wait for 1:22 into the video):
So, I’m interested in this on at least two levels. First, as someone researching blogs and the way(s) in which “situation” works with driving traffic to blogs, motivating bloggers to write, shaping content and audiences, etc., etc., this seems to me to be another great example, something along the lines (bigger, really) than what I experienced with my blogging on the EMU strike. I can read some of what Bob has to say on his blog about the experience, and perhaps that will be enough for my book purposes, but it still might be interesting to interview him as a case study.
Second, the way this thing spread is kind of interesting because it isn’t quite the same thing as the “Obama is a Muslim” thing. Obama has said over and over and over and OVER that he is a Christian and more or less has been his whole life. He has answered those questions repeatedly. And, besides that, so what if he did have Muslim heritage or he was a practicing Muslim? I know this isn’t the political reality, but being something other than a Christian shouldn’t mean anything.
On the other hand, Palin has identified herself and has been identified with Evangelical Christianity of the type that reads the Bible literally, doesn’t believe in evolution, and that uses creationism to explain the dinosaurs. Further, as far as I know, she hasn’t answered Matt Damon’s or Maureen Dowd’s question about dinosaurs. I mean really; what does she think? Does she believe the creationism museum version of dinosaurs? Does she believe in evolution at all? Obama has been asked and answered questions about all kinds of rumors about him; but to ask Palin these questions is disrespect.
In any event, it’s an interesting viral blogging example and one I’ll keep an eye on, probably. Thanks for posting that, CCE.
Computers and Writing 2008: Krause’s Big Wrap-Up
First off, let me back-track a bit and fill in a few more details on what I’ve already mentioned about C&W and this trip:
- The “very good session” I went to on Friday morning before Jay David Bolter’s talk featured Rik Hunter, Dan Anderson, and Alex Reid. Follow the links for more info on the presentations. Actually, in Rik’s and Dan’s case, you can literally see what they did: both of them had everything pre-recorded and just “delivered” it by cranking up the computer and pushing play. Alex did his the old fashioned way– just talking. All were very good, but it was kind of strange to see the presenter standing there while his movie plays his presentation.
- Speaking of Alex Reid, congratulations on the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award for Digital Digs!
- I wish Jay David Bolter’s talk was online someplace, and maybe it will be at some point– they videotaped it. I thought it would be a really interesting teaching tool because he made a bridge/connection between the hypertext experiments of the early 90’s (remember StorySpace?) with gaming experiments (newsgaming.com, for example), poetry that plays on your iPod or your cell phone when you are in certain points of the Atlanta subway, a podcast tour of a cemetery, etc. It reminds me that I need to work gaming back into English 516 the next time I teach it.
Now on to the “part 3” or concluding episode of Computers and Writing 2008 from my pov:
- My session was at 10 AM on Saturday, and the “prime time” seemed to help us draw a pretty decent-sized crowd. Before me was Gian Pugnucci with a talk called “The WikiBib Project: Exploring the nature of Teaching Collaborative Scholarships in a Wiki.” Basically, he was talking about using a wiki as a means of facilitating collaboration on an annotated bibliography assignment in a graduate class. I’ve talked with Gian about this before and I think we’re going to try and work something out together on this for his and my grad courses next year.
I was second, and I’ll pretty much let my presentation speak (or not) for itself:
A slight tangent here: I actually managed to forget the do-hickey for hooking up my laptop, so I spent a few moments thinking I was screwed. But it turns out I was doubly covered. Since this was the computers and writing conference after all, someone in the audience (Carl Whithaus, actually) immediately volunteered his adapter. But besides that, the fine folks in Georgia were completely prepared for this, too. The guy doing tech support for UGa told me he had a whole bag full of the adapters I needed and was very confident that he could get the projector set-up to work. Quite a contrast to the way the projectors often work (or not) in Pray-Harrold.Anyway, I got some great feedback from folks on what to do with the whole “finished blogger” issue, and as we discussed during the session, my use of the word “failure” in my talk is probably not right. “Not finished,” “abandoned, or and as often as not, “ended at the appropriate time” are probably better terms. In any event, helpful ideas from attendees.
The third presenter was Natalie Szymanski from Florida State with a talk titled “Wikis and Composition Pedagogy: Avoiding the Bandwagon.” Basically, she was suggesting that maybe we ought to slow down a bit on all of this stuff like wikis. While I didn’t agree with many of the things she had to say, I had to give her credit because it’s nice to see someone at this conference have the guts to point out that we’re in the “writing business” and not the “isn’t this software I just learned about cool business.”
- And then it was time for golf. I was part of a foursome with Steve Benninghoff, Gian, and Nick Carbone out at the University of Georgia Golf Course. In hind-sight, I think we should have picked a more “accessible” course since Benninghoff and I could have used a bit of a “palate cleanser” after the challenges of that course in Kentucky, and Gian and Nick, neither of whom had swung a club in over a year, could have just used something easier. This was one bad-assed hard hard course, certainly in the top 2 or 3 in difficulty that I’ve played, and a course that made me wish for an easy one like Pierce Lake or Eagle Crest.
But hey, it was a friendly game, and a good time was had by one and all even if the play wasn’t great. Actually, it got a lot more fun when we started the back nine and we played a cart versus cart scramble, but Nick had to leave a little early, so it just kind of degenerated into some sloppy play at the end of a long death march of a round.
- Steve B. and Gian and I had some BBQ that I thought was pretty so-so, and then we went off to Kingpins Bowl and Brew for the ritual of the bowling night. I managed to catch up with a few folks who I didn’t get a chance to talk to much during the conference itself (including Courtney, who is doing great), had a few more Terapins, and even managed a little bowling (I scored 100– I had forgotten that real bowling isn’t as easy as Wii bowling).
- And then Sunday was the long drive home. I managed to prod my more leisurely traveling companion onto the road by 6:30 and we were back in Ypsilanti in less than 12 hours, which, when I think about the expense and general pain in the butt of flying, makes me think that driving was a good idea, with or without the golf.
So an excellent conference/roadtrip. Well done, UGa, folks! Here are some pictures of the whole things– eventually, I’ll add some info about all these pictures.
Next year, C&W is going to be at UC-Davis and it is going to be toward the end of June. I don’t know if I’ll be going yet or not, to tell the truth. On the down-side, the CCCCs is in San Francisco this year, and I don’t think I can afford 2 trips to California just to conference. On the other hand, Annette and Will and I might want to make this part of a west coast “pilgrimage” back to Ashland. We shall see….
On the road from C&W; in the mean-time, enjoy this movie
Steve B. and I are (hopefully) going to be leaving soon for the long and exciting one day haul back to Michigan from the Computers and Writing Conference here in Athens, GA. But before I go, I wanted to post a link to a movie I made of my presentation, as I promised I would during my presentation. So here is:
Interestingly enough, I tried to upload this to Google Video and I was “rejected” for what they said were copyright reasons. I’ll have to figure out what the deal is with that later. I recorded this with KeyNote as I was talking at the conference, so this really is a kind of “Live, from Athens!” sort of deal.
Okay, onto the highway….
Why yes, I would like to read a blog just about bookshelves
Here it is then: Books At Home. It would appear that the blogger in question has also started a blog recently on Books in New York. Via Johndan.
Link/reading pile-up
It’s that time of the semester, and I’m trying to slap together a presentation for the conference I’m going to next week. So here’s a bunch of links that I had meant to write more about earlier but I’m just going to mention now. Some of this might be handy for teaching at some point:
- “A guide to writing better emails.” Nothing earth-shattering here, but good advice nonetheless.
- The curious and odd ProfEssays site. I’m not sure how I came across this, but I think it is interesting and odd and strange that this paper mill’s web site has as much information as it has about plagiarism.
- A review of a book called Proust and the Squid. Sounds like a cool book. Here’s the first paragraph from the review:
For most people, reading is a taken for granted skill. The purpose of Proust and the Squid is to reveal the magic and mystery of reading and its pathologies. This everyday activity is not natural, and is a recent development from an evolutionary perspective. There is no ‘reading center’ in the brain, but something a lot more enigmatic, an acquired way of using existing structures and connections. New imaging technology shows startling differences between dyslexics and others, differences that illuminate the journey to literacy as never before. It is only 6000 years since humans trained their brains to read, and during that time they have improved on the process to such a staggering degree that the modern child takes 2000 days to achieve a degree of literacy that took 2000 years to develop. The dark cloud on the horizon is another human invention of staggering genius: digitalization. This most economic of information systems was made possible by the very thing it now threatens: the ability to read.
- “How to start writing quality articles for blogs and article marketing.” This is a little too much in the “get rich quick with your blog writing” category of things for me, but still some interesting advice in this little piece. Might be good for Writing for the WWW.
- This link and this link go to popular press stories about a study some folks did about why people read blogs. I haven’t had a chance to look at all the details yet, but it looks interesting for all kinds of different reasons, and it looks like what they are arguing is that blog reading is practiced as “a habit,” and that there is a fuzzy line between blog writing and reading. All of which falls in line with my BAWS project. This might also make for good WWWW reading.
- Finally, WEbook, which I just stumbled across. It looks like a collaborative book writing site. I dunno, maybe that’s one way to get the ol’ scholarly work done, throw it out there on this site and see if other people will do the writing for me.