Category: Scholarship

Posted on

BAWS: What's the role of commercial/corporate blogging in all this?

This post falls into the category of “note to myself” as I think about the Blogs as Writerly Spaces project: As I searched around and discovered some new themes, I stumbled across something I hadn’t really thought a lot about (even though I did know it existed): blogging for profit. I of course have heard of Gawker Media, but what I found here was Splashpress Media and from that site, Mr. Bloggy and ProBlogging.com and lord only knows what else.

Anyway, this got me thinking: I hadn’t really thought before about including a discussion about or case studies of people who make money with blogging, but I wonder if that isn’t something I need to consider a bit more carefully. I can’t remember who said this little quip, but there’s some quote about how becoming a professional writer is a little like becoming a prostitute: first you do it for yourself, then it’s something you do for friends, and before you know it, you’re doing it for money.

All I’m getting at is it seems to me that if part of my goal is to study motivation in writing and blogging, then I probably ought to consider one of the most important, obvious, and crude motivations: money. Or at least the ways in which professional status when it comes to blogging is defined, how it figures into the writerly process, etc., etc.

Posted on

A word about the unpleasant EMU news of late…

Here I am, just beginning with Sabbatical Lite, and already I am feeling out of whack.

Most obviously, I and everyone else at EMU has been following the recent news of the president, the chief of campus police, and the VP of student affairs getting fired/”separated” from EMU. It’s a little discombobulating to hear the story I’ve been hearing/repeating on campus and at EMUtalk.org (the campus/community oriented blog I started running last September) for months now showing up on CNN, Fox News, in the New York Times, in the UK’s Guardian Unlimited, and 500-600 other outlets, according to news.google.com.

For folks coming here for more info on this– either regular readers or folks who found me on a web search– I would encourage you to take a look at EMUtalk.org in general, and perhaps at this post, “To first time EMUtalk.org readers/searchers about “Laura Dickinson Murder.” On this page, there’s a link to the category on EMUtalk.org “Dickinson Murder,” which has 64 different posts beginning on December 15, 2006 when the rumor of a dead girl in the dorms turned out to be true.

There’s only two things I’ll add here. First, the basic news story that has appeared in the national/international press recently basically summarizes the story well enough, though there are obviously a lot of other details. It’s been a topic of discussion on EMUtalk.org since December, and very heated discussion since late February when a suspect was arrested and when it suddenly became clear that Dickinson’s death was not “just one of those things” but a murder, and that murder had been covered up.

Second, I think the thing that is most frustrating to me personally and, simultaneously, most interesting about this to me professionally, is that all of this was easily avoided with some simple and clear communication skills. I won’t go into it all right now, but the various reports and investigations suggest that the players involved who came up with the “no foul play is suspected” line that was the seed of the administrative cover-up were working with almost zero actual information about what happened and that the line was more or less a toss-off line to round out a very short web statement/press release. “No foul play is suspected” was as much as anything a sloppy sentence written by a PR person (and apparently approved by Fallon) simply to close out a paragraph, not unlike other toss-off lines like “In society today” or “In conclusion” or something.

Then, after this toss-off and inaccurate line (and I say “inaccurate” because the investigation into the cover-up makes it clear that “foul play” was always suspected by the police investigating the crime) was allowed to go forward, no one in the upper-levels of EMU administration felt the need to correct this. And to be perfectly honest, it isn’t completely clear to me if this did not happen because the principles involved– President John Fallon, VP for Student Affairs Jim Vick, and/or Police Chief Cindy Hall (all now “former” in these roles)– did not want the message corrected for misguided PR and/or investigation reasons, of if these people were just not competent. Fallon, btw, is claiming as his defense that he just didn’t know what was going on, and there have been some cryptic suggestions in the latest reports that he’s got some kind of story to tell and that he was fired because he was about to do something that would have been very bad for EMU. I don’t know, strange.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to get at here is this: I think there is little doubt that Vick and Hall got fired because they tried to cover up a murder in the dorms, either because they didn’t want the bad PR or because they just didn’t know what they were doing, and that Fallon was fired because his defense of not knowing what was going on is about as problematic as actively participating in a cover-up. At the same time, it seems to me that a lot of this mess is also simple the result of sloppy writing and thinking, a terrible misreading of audience, and the lack of willingness to revise. Had someone– anyone– at some point gotten to the powers that be and successfully convinced them that EMU should have corrected the “no foul play suspected” line, none of this would have happened. Had someone published on the web site or elsewhere a statement like “We can’t say for sure there was no foul play involved. We’re investigating, and in the mean-time, everyone ought to review basic personal safety information,” etc., etc., this would have never become national news, and none of these people would have lost their jobs.

There’s always the what ifs though.

Besides this most public distraction, there are some departmental distractions too, things I will not go into right now, and some major budget cuts coming about soon. This puts me potentially into an odd place in terms of my sabbatical lite. On the one hand, my own work is inevitably being interrupted by these distractions (I suppose this post is evidence of that), in part because being the writing program coordinator (among other things) means I can’t just ignore these problems. On the other hand, I have already said I’m going to consciously not get “too involved” in some of these departmental distractions because of my writing and research plans. It’s probably too early to tell, but I think this has a chance of working.

In any event, I feel like this post might help me get some of this unpleasant news out of my head and maybe help me think about how to frame my sabbatical lite plans in the long-term. In the short term though, I think I had better get on to the scholarly/BAWS plan I had for the day: organizing my desk/office space a bit.

Posted on

Misc. Readings from "Up North"

While I was on vacation with family last week (the curious can read a few things about it here), I did do a little light blog reading, in part with the help of the off-line function for Google Reader. I don’t think I’ve quite figured out how to use it correctly, but I did manage to star a few items that I thought I’d mention here:

Posted on

"Happy Blogiversary," from WSJ.com

Just as I am ready to get back from vacation and ease into quasi-sabbatical mode, I stumbled across this article, “Happy Blogiversary,” from the WSJ.com. It is a pretty good and rather long article that spells out the “state of affairs” of blogging, at least from the point of view of a rather conservative newspaper about the world of business. This is certainly something that would be useful to teach a variety of different classes for sure.

Actually, it’s one of those articles that, in relationship to my “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project, I find simultaneously really helpful and really intimidating. It’s helpful because it features a number of famous and semi-famous folks– bloggers and not– talking about why they read/write blogs, and it includes some interesting history. But it’s intimidating because it is one of those articles that, in very basic terms, probably sums up the point I’m trying to make with this project. And if my project can be summed up in a WSJ article, well, is my sabbatical project really a project?

These are normal doubts and misgivings at the beginning of a big project like this, I suppose. It feels a little like working on my dissertation. I recall going through these oscillations where I felt like my diss was literally about everything and therefore impossible, and/or that my diss was common sense and therefore irrelevant. I suspect this project will take some similar turns.

Oh well. I’m just easing into this project. The first things I’m going to do is read and clean my desk, so it’ll be a while before I have to doubt myself too much.

Posted on

danah boyd myspace v. facebook article (and a BAWS example?)

Via jill/txt, I came across this entry from apophenia (Danah Boyd’s blog) called “viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” I think it’s interesting, though not necessarily because of the subject matter. Boyd (or, I guess I should say, boyd) more or less argues that there is a class difference between users of MySpace and Facebook– I’ve only skimmed the article, but most of her claims seem reasonable albeit sweeping. For example, she suggests that teens from poorer backgrounds are more likely to be on MySpace than Facebook. That might be true, though at EMU, I’m always surprised by the number of my juniors and seniors who have almost no experience with either of these services.

In any event, I’m not really that interested in boyd’s argument per se (though I think this link could be useful in a class like English 516 or English 444 in a discussion about social bookmarking software), mainly because I have a really hard time getting too excited about either one of these services. I realize this is a bad attitude because there are serious people out there– like boyd, for example– who do serious scholarly work on these Internet environments.

What I’m more interested in is how this figures into my Blogs as writerly spaces project– at least in my own head. boyd wrote this essay– I do not know if she was deadly serious about it or if it was just a toss-off piece– and posted it to her blog. Suddenly, she’s getting a ton of comments and even reflecting here on this unusual level of attention. Her reaction in some ways seems similar to my own reaction on my blog when I was getting an insane number of hits posting about the EMU faculty strike. But while I felt compelled to write even more as a result of this new-found audience, boyd seems to be not that thrilled with the attention. In fact, this post suggests a certain level of “stop bugging me about this already.”

Now, I’m just brainstorming here, and I don’t really know how much of this figures into what BAWS will look like ultimately. I mean, boyd is already something of an internet celebrity, so I presume she’s used to the attention. I am not sure this particular essay has much of an impact in terms of her motivations to write or not write on a blog, though I suppose it has created an unusual exigency from her point of view. It also occurs to me now that a lot of what we’re talking about here is what can only be described as a viral text– and I have no idea why I haven’t made that connection up to this point. In my C&W presentation, I talked about the role that search engines and such figure into the functioning of rhetorical situations, and I think it’s begining to gel more clearly in my head that it is something like this.

And that ain’t that clear, is it?

In any event, I’m going to be following danah’s blog for a while, and we’ll see where it goes with this idea….

Posted on

"Podcasts replace textbooks for GATE students"

This is an especially misleading headline, but it is what it is: Podcasts replace textbook for GATE students, from the Mohave Daily News. Happily, looking at the first couple of paragraphs proves that they aren’t throwing away the textbooks exactly:

Instead of pouring over textbooks and completing worksheets, students at Diamondback Elementary School are making podcasts, creating virtual tours of fictional museums and putting together their autobiographies with digital cameras.

The Gifted And Talented Enrichment (GATE) program – offered year-round for kindergarten through eighth grade in the Bullhead City School District – launched a four-week summer program this year that has students working on MacBooks.

The MacBook runs both Apple and Windows systems, compared to the Windows-only computers the district currently uses, and has a built-in system that can take still photos and record audio and video.

Oh yeah– it’s kind of an ad for Apple, too.

This is an article that I hope is around in terms of a link next year when I teach English 516 again because it’s another one of those examples to me of the difference between just dumping laptops in the schools (and then being shocked– SHOCKED, I tell you!– when that doesn’t work) and actually integrating technology into pedagogy in a way that makes sense.

Posted on

12 important U.S. Laws every blogger needs to know

One of my students in Writing for the World Wide Web sent me this: “12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know,” which is from something called the Aviva Directory. It seems like an authoritative article, though the source makes me a little suspicious. In any event, it would be a good reading for the next time I teach Writing for the Web, which will probably be next spring, It might be useful for my research project, too.

Posted on

Sabbatical lite coming soon…

I can see the finish line of the spring term– just a pile of end of term grading, one short class meeting on Tuesday, final revisions on Wednesday, and grade posting to go. And at the end of this term, I begin my year of sabbatical lite (and thus a new category at the official blog). I mean “lite” since I don’t mean light as in “bright” or even light as in “not heavy,” but I mean it as it is with beer, “watered down.” Though I still think it will be tasty.

Here’s the deal:

I was fortunate enough to be awarded a sabbatical for next year to work on my book/research project on blogs as writerly spaces. Now, at EMU (and at most universities nowadays), sabbaticals come in two different varieties: a full year (for 50% of the usual salary) and a semester (for no cut in salary). I flat-out cannot afford the pay-cut at this point in my life, so the one semester option was really the only one available to me.

Now, I also currently get a course release per term so that I can do the work of being the writing program coordinator– not to be confused with the first year writing program. As writing program coordinator, I advise/recruit grad students, advise undergrads, and do a bunch of other administrative work of the program, etc. I have a year and a half left in my term doing that and I don’t want to just quit and dump that work on someone else. As I see it, that means I really couldn’t take a semester completely off even if I wanted to. If, for example, I decided to take a break as the program coordinator for Fall term, I would inevitably have my short-term replacement calling me up/emailing/whatever with various questions anyway. And besides, a semester isn’t really enough.

So, here’s my plan:

For fall term, I’m going to use 2/3rds of my sabbatical time. That means all I’ll do for the fall is be the writing program coordinator. For winter term (2008), I’ll use the remaining third of my sabbatical time, continue to be the writing program coordinator, and teach one course. Thus “sabbatical lite.”

We will see how this works out.

The conventional wisdom I have received has been that a sabbatical is a “all or nothing” kind of thing, and the danger of administrative work based on course release is that it has a way of expanding to occupy the amount of space you allow it to occupy. In other words, I run the risk of spending my sabbatical– which, after all, is supposed to help me with my scholarship– on service.

But I am cautiously optimistic for two reasons. First, I am planning on setting up what I hope will be fairly rigid rules for when I will and won’t do this kind of work: right now, I am thinking that Mondays and Wednesday will be designated “school days,” and that will be it. Second, I’m a little worried about what might happen if I really did take a complete and entire sabbatical. As the saying goes, if you want a task to get done, assign it to someone who is always busy. If I had a semester where all I had to do was work on my scholarship, I am afraid I would spend far too much time watching TV, organizing my sock drawer, etc.

Anyway, we’ll see. Three more days. And a little summer vacation after that. And then it begins….

Posted on

Foundations in the virtual world

Via my department head, I learned about this, “MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton and Second Life CEO Philip Rosedale Are Inviting Us,” and by “Us,” they mean HASTAC. There’s some more information on all this at the MacArthur Foundation web site too. Basically, there’s going to be a Second Life gathering next week (June 22, 9 am PST) in the virtual Second Life world about (virtual?) philanthropy.

I dunno. I might have a bad attitude, but I think that Second Life is… well, um, kind of goofy. And I say this as someone who went through a phase of playing the equally (even more) goofy game of The Sims. Maybe these virtual envirionments will be the “next big thing;” or maybe the money being made here is just the latest tulip.

Posted on

Rudolf Arnheim, 1904-2007, RIP

I am not typically an obituaries reader, but I stumbled across them in the Ann Arbor News this evening. Talk about coincidence (or, given Arnheim’s interests in Jung, “synchronicity“) I learned that Rudolf Arnheim died over this weekend. He was 102 years old, and (of all places!) he died in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I only know Arnheim’s work indirectly, through writers like Molly Bang and Ann Wysocki. They make a good point that he’s someone worth reading. But I have to say, I’m fascinated by the fact that this guy lived to 102 years old and he was a local! Go figure!