Something I just stumbled across in the blogosphere that might come in handy for a variety of classes, certainly 516 and the multimedia part of 328: “The Future of Writing,” which was a two day conference at UC Irvine back in early November. There are a bunch of podcasts of speakers and stuff that might be good “assignments.”
“Why I blog”
“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…..
“Working through screens” site
Also on the possible 505 reading list for Fall 2009: via Johndan’s blog, I came across Working Through Screens, which is a site/book/set of flashcards put together by some kind of online design firm out west called Flashbulb Interaction. It might be cool, it might not be; it’s something that I’ll have to take a look at later. But right now, I need to read some of the readings for tonight on interaction and usability, a unit where this stuff would probably fit next year.
“The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education”
Via the NCTE Inbox comes “The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education,” which is a resource published on the Center for Social Media at American University. This includes a long article and this six or so minute movie:
The timing of this is good for me because these are topics that are coming up right now in English 328 as my students work on short collaborative movies and as I think about English 516 for the winter term. And there seems to be some good stuff at this AU center. For example, another resource to look at when I get a free minute: Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video. This one seems to be particularly about mashups and remixes and how they “could” be legal under certain circumstances.
Of course, the timing on this is also bad since I have no time right now. All I can do yet this morning with these things is post some links. I have a mid-semester “to-do” list that could choke a horse….
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.
Christmas comes early
I found this via Henry Jenkins’ blog:
Actually, this is the winner of a contest, the Total Recut “Video Remix Challenge.” Some very cool stuff there, and some interesting ideas for video in both English 328 and (potentially) in English 516.
Another example of the fine line defining plagiarism
This is being talked about on WPA-L right now, but the thing that makes it most interesting to me is that it might fit into a discussion of plagiarism in English 516 next winter: “In the Words of My Speechwriter…” by David McGrath in the Washington Post. I think that McGrath’s purpose here is to criticize politicians– especially the most recent batch, and most especially the speech that Sarah Palin gave at the Republican convention. Here’s a passage:
All those years ago, Harvard’s lawyer referred to the implicit understanding between teachers and students. Isn’t it even more important that there be a contract of honesty between candidates for high office and voters?
(and skipping ahead a paragraph)
Can voters this year be sure they learned something about the real Sarah Palin from her GOP vice presidential nomination acceptance speech last night, considering news that it was originally written by speechwriter Matthew Scully over a week ago for an unknown male nominee? The commissioned draft was subsequently customized by Palin and a team of McCain staffers in the 48 hours leading up to its presentation.
Now, I think McGrath is interested in a kind of authenticity that I don’t think is necessarily possible, at least not through writing alone. But what is a better question to me is the flip-side of this: do politicians (or much of anyone else) absolutely have to claim each and every word in a text in order to claim some form of “authorship?” I’m reminded of this post I had about a Friday afternoon about plagiarism at U of M and Chris Anson’s example of an often repeated phrase on braking. Is that plagiarism?
I don’t know. But my point/hope is to get people to contemplate that a bit and to recognize that plagiarism is anything but clear. And that would be the point of having something like this in 516.