Category: BAWS

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My thoughts on pseudo-identities

I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing I should be posting on my blog now or not, especially with the project I’m working on, but I think it is awfully spot on: it’s an entry from Design Observer, “What’s in a name?” I mean, part of my research has to do with the ways in which bloggers and commentators portray identity online, and I guess I should appear to be neutral on that. But as this and other posts from the past suggest, I’m not neutral on this, and my experiences as the sitedad over at EMUTalk.org have made me even less neutral. Anyway, a long passage that sort of sums up the problems here:

A rose is a rose, and a real name at the end of a blog post is an indication that the person who authored the statement is taking responsibility, indeed ownership of the words — it is a simple act of honesty. For too long bloggers have been given license that is not tolerated in letters-to-the-editor columns of newspapers and magazines (except in extraordinary circumstances). If one is willing to expound, exclaim, or critique it should be done under a real name and with links to a valid email or website address. If transparency on the web is the new black, then there should be no secrets.

Pseudonyms like “miss representation” or “Xman” or “Pesky Illustrator” or “Inaudible Nonsense,” or even the passionate, erudite “DesignMaven,” are not cute, they are cowardly. This indictment holds true for those who only use their first names as well (the many known only as Nancy or Chris, Dan or Steve). If a blogger or responder does not have the courage to own up to his or her ideas then why should readers accept or respond to them? Having a pseudonym is not about, as some argue, building a brand story or mystique; it is about masking identity, which is inherently deceitful. Unless one has a good reason — like being on a black list or having a life in peril by a repressive government — the practice of anonymity should be considered unacceptable.

Maybe this will show up in a book chapter on identity eventually– maybe with some counter-arguments from the “pro-pseudonym” camp.

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How to write a lot– in theory

I’m in the process of updating/upgrading my RSS feeds on blogs and my own blog spaces– look for an alert to a new blog address soon– and through this process, I stumbled across an entry on Nels “A Delicate Boy” Highberg’s blog (and he cites a much longer and detailed entry at the pseudo-anonymous blogger’s “New Kid on the Hallway” site) about a book called How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J. Silvia. I think both of these other blogs do a much better job than I can in terms of a review/explanation, particularly NKH.

What I take from these reviews is that Silvia is trying to make two basic points. First, write every day/often/just do it/etc. Second, put writing time into your schedule, and he (apparently) argues that academics ought to schedule the time of their writing just like they would schedule the time of their teaching. No excuses.

Now, this is all fine and good advice, it’s one of the main lessons I learned as a writer over the years, it’s advice I give my grad students working on projects, and it’s advice I have been trying to follow myself in my own writing this last year. But I’ve struggled lately to follow this advice, and it makes me think about it a bit. In the opening pages Style, Lessons in Clarity and Grace, one of my favorite books on writing style (and writing advice of a sort, I suppose), Joseph Williams kind of mocks this sort of simplistic advice. He says something like “Telling me that I need to ‘be clear'” (and here Williams is making a not so veiled reference to Strunk and White’s famous advice book) “is like telling me to hit the ball squarely. I know that. What I need to know is how.”

It also seems to me that the advice on scheduling writing time and sticking to it no matter what is the sort of advice that either a) works in theory better than in practice, and/or b) is advice that comes from someone who doesn’t teach courses that involve a lot of time spent grading/responding to student writing. Interestingly enough, b) might very well be correct: Silvia is a Psychology professor, and he might not have to spend as much time reading and commenting on student writing. Time and the teaching of writing expands and contracts. The time I would have spent this morning writing I spent instead on commenting on short student projects– and thank God I’m just teaching one class (the other half of sabbatical lite is perhaps kicking in) and these were short essays. When I’m teaching a full load next year, this issue will be even more significant, though conversely, I hopefully won’t have to spend as much time with service/administrative stuff, which also has a way of expanding and contracting.

Anyway, then there is also the “bags of shit er, timesuck” that drop from the sky on academics everywhere: the request from some administrator for a detailed report that is due in two days, the brouhahas that get stirred up from nowhere and that demand immediate and exquisite attention, the emergency a student advisee has in terms of some kind of graduation audit or fee. Not to mention life in general.

And then, then there is also the distraction of other writing that takes away from “THE WRITING,” things like, well, this blog post.

Anyway, none of this is to discount Silvia’s advice. I am sure it is sound.

And be sure to eat write er right, don’t drink too much, get plenty of exercise, get plenty of sleep, spend quality time with your family and friends, read good books, watch good movies, recycle. And just write.

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Let the surveys begin!

Finally, finally FINALLY, I’m starting to send out my “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” survey. I feel like I’m literally about a year behind on this project for reasons that are both bad (my own laziness, my lack of focus, distractions that are too easily found, etc.) and good or at least inevitable (unexpected and expected school things, other scholarly side projects, “real life,” etc.). The process of writing the survey took longer than I thought it should have, getting it approved through the Human Subject Review process (what everyone else calls IRB) took a while, I decided to wait for a while longer to get some funding from EMU to pay for this survey, and then, just as I was getting ready to send this out, someone in my department decided to stir up the politics I vaguely elude to in my last post, and that of course sucked up far too much time.

But finally, I’ve started surveying folks and the results are trickling back in.

I don’t want to say anything too specific about this right now because it’s way early and I expect to be collecting a lot more data over the next year or so. My methodology is to invite bloggers via email to participate, and I’m trying to invite as many different kinds of bloggers as I can (I’m trying to minimize the number of academic bloggers I survey since I don’t want this project to be a long and hard stare in the mirror). I started by visiting some friends’ blogs and a few other blogs I read on a fairly regular basis, and then visiting their links and then their links and so forth. I will probably try to contact bloggers listed in things like technorati (hey, why not try to survey popular blogs?), and I might have to try some other tactics (including this entry– see below) to recruit some participants. I don’t know if this surveying process is truly random or scientific per se, but short of the kind of resources and expertise of groups/organizations like Nielsen and the Pew Research Center (and people question those studies all the time, of course), I think this is about as close as I’m going to get. So call it pseudo-random.

Like I said, I’ve only been doing this for a couple days, but two things I’ll mention that I’ve noticed so far: first, I am inevitably and unintentionally screening participants based on valid email addresses available via their blogs (or their profiles on various blogging services). I suppose I could invite people to participate in my survey by posting a comment on their blog, and I have been surprised by is the number of blogs/bloggers that do not provide any contact information. So I hadn’t thought about this.

Second, and I had thought about this when I started this project, I think am going to have a really REALLY difficult time getting ex-bloggers (e.g., people who used to keep a blog and then abandoned it for some reason) to participate in this project. I’ve been trying to invite these folks when I come across their dead blogs, but they often lack contact information and the ones I have tried emailing bounced back to me. So this part could be tricky.

By the way, if anyone reading this wants to participate in my survey, shoot me an email at stevendkrause at gmail dot com with your blog address (and your email address, obviously), and I’ll send you the survey link. I’m especially interested in hearing from you if you are an “ex-blogger” who wrote not exclusively all about academic stuff. And hey, I’d even be willing to include a few academic blogs in all this….

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Does anyone know anything about Scrivener?

I was talking on the phone the other day with an old friend of mine and in the course of our meandering conversation, her mentioned/recommended Scrivener, an Apple only software that is a word processor that is designed for “writers” with all kinds of compelling-looking features. You can try it 30 days for free and it’s only $40 after that, so I will probably monkey around with it anyway. But I’m sort of curious if anyone reading this message now has played around with it themselves.

The main question I have in my own mind is this: is this software that will help me be more efficient/”write better,” or is this software that will help me procrastinate/goof off?

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A week of school done/some links from the week

This has been one of those weeks where stuff has piled up and then cascaded by me. One thing after another, and yet, not really that much of significance at the same time. If that makes sense. The one thing that I did learn/remind myself about is that “time management” with any kind of release time, sabbatical lite or otherwise, because I felt like I spent way WAY too much time getting my class in line, way WAY too little time working on my sabbatical lite project, and basically no time blogging.

So, in an effort to at least get caught up on the blogging, I offer a variety of links to stuff I’ve been reading lately:

And then today, I came across a couple of handy videos. First, there’s this one on Facebook:

Kind of interesting, though some of the connections they’re making here between the Facebook crowd and the CIA seem like they might be a bit of a stretch to me.

And, on a more cheerful note, this CommonCraft video about Online Photo Sharing:

Definitely a teachable moment here….

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The beginning is near…

Of the winter term, that is, what every other university I know of refers to as “spring.” Though I have to say that calling this time of the year the “winter” term makes perfect sense, especially in Michigan, where winter is certainly in full effect through late March, when spring really starts, and quite often long after that, too.

In any event, on tap for me as of tomorrow for this term:

  • “Sabbatical Lite” continues since I am teaching but one class, doing administrative stuff, and still doing research. Once again, we’ll see how this works out. Since I have been granted some modest funding, I’m hoping/planning on getting my surveymonkey blog survey up and running for the “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project. With a little luck, I’ll start collecting some cool data.
  • I’m teaching “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice” again, which is a required course in our MA in the Teaching of Writing program. The course is pretty much what it’s about, although there is a focus on pedagogy that isn’t really in the title. It’s online again, and I’ve decided to experiment/try doing the whole class on emuonline this time around, meaning there isn’t going to be a class web site. Students will still have to make web sites, I will have my own little blog for the class (as will the students), and we’re going to do some cool stuff with wikis and video at different points of the term that I am hosting outside of emuonline. So maybe I’ll post some links to things here as the term goes on.

    I really like teaching this course, but it is always a challenge to get it together. I think I know what we’re going to be doing in general every week, but around half of the readings right now are still in the “TBA” stage. I was talking about this today with a colleague of mine: the great thing about being in computers and writing is it’s always new and interesting and changing and stuff. The bad thing though is that it’s always new and changing. If I taught rhetorical theory or the history of rhetoric class, I don’t think I’d have to scrap 2/3rds of the syllabus every year.
  • Speaking of computers and writing and collecting some good blog writing practices data, I need to get a proposal together for Computers and Writing in Georgia. I doubt I’ll end up proposing anything that has to do with the conference theme on open source software though; we’ll see what happens, I guess.
  • And this semester will mark the end of my term as the writing program coordinator, or at least that’s the plan. This is a job that involves running our undergraduate and graduate programs in writing, it’s a job that rotates around a bit, and it’ll be time for someone else to do it soon. There will be some transition during the spring and summer of course, but this is the last term where I expect a lot of meetings and such associated with this.

I know there are many MANY more things on my “to do” list for the term already, but for the time-being, I think the best thing I can do is get to bed so I can get that bright-eyed/bushy-tailed feeling.

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NCTE prelude post

I was in the office doing various quasi-administrator kinds of things all day on Monday, and when I left, I had the satisfying feeling of leaving a note that said I will not be returning until November 26. This warning/promise was somewhat short-lived since I’ve been to my office twice since putting up that sign, but that was/is the plan. I’d like to say I am doing this so I can hole-up and work on the BAWS project, but the main reason is travel of both the conference and family variety.

Tomorrow, I’m off to New York City (I hope the salsa is as good as they suggest in those Pace commercials…) for NCTE, where I am part of a double session/featured session called “Writing, Reading, Composing: The Movie(s).” Here’s a link to my web site for the project, though there isn’t much there other than links to the movies I’ll be chatting about.

It’s been an unusual deal for me. I made the “Celebration of Student Writing” last fall basically because I was the interim writing program administrator and because I could– that is, we had this cool equipment and a desire to use it. I posted a link on the WPA-L mailing list, my EMU friend and colleague Linda Adler-Kassner pulled together a presentation, and I was in. I was debating about going because NCTE isn’t usually my conference and because New York City is way too freakin’ expensive and I knew my wife wasn’t going to be able to go with me. But somewhere along in the process, we became a “featured session” that is going to run all afternoon on Friday.

We’ll see how it turns out. Given the topic and the time, I think we’ll have a big crowd. We have had some interesting discussions about some of the technicalities and, as a “plan b,” one person presenting is bringing a sound system and I’m bringing a mini projector from school. I’m also planning on making a sort of “movie of the movie session” with my Flip video camera, along with a little “traveling with Steve” video log. Stay tuned….

Oh, and next week I’m not going to school because it’s Thanksgiving. Duh.