Even Richtel’s piece points out the false . . . → Read More: Blogs in class]]> In yesterday’s NYTimes, Matt Richtel has an article entitled “Blogs vs Term Papers,” in which he sketches a debate about college writing. Cathy Davidson responds brilliantly, talking at length about her own experience with teaching methods that stray from the traditional academic writing still taught in many places.

Even Richtel’s piece points out the false binary in blogs vs term papers (why not both?), but another false binary, introduced in a quote, goes largely unexamined:

“She’s right,” [William H.] Fitzhugh says of Professor Davidson. “Writing is being murdered. But the solution isn’t blogs, the solution is more reading. We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.”

So, it’s blogs vs term papers, or blogs vs. reading, as if requiring blogs precludes assigning reading. And reading what, by the way? Articles? Blog entries? Novels? Academic essays? Comic books?  And the prejudice remains that blogs are always short, sloppy, personal, ill-researched, and term papers aren’t.

I am having my students keep blogs this semester for the first time in many years. The blog entries I will require them to write take the place of short response papers they used to hand in to me. My rationale is that, if they feel they are writing for a public audience they will write differently, and be responsive to that audience in a different way. Their classmates will certainly read their work, and the general public also has access to these blogs. And guess what? They’re also writing more traditional papers.

I don’t believe that anyone thinks assigning blogs is avant-garde at this point, and I think the only way anyone could strongly oppose them is to come up with headlines like “Blogs vs Term Papers” and fall into stereotypes about what blogs do, as if the only function of a blog is to act as a 14-year old’s diary.

What I have found so far is that most of my students have never heard of, let alone kept, blogs. With a few exceptions, the few that have them use them for their English classes.

My hope is that they will treat them as a space for their own writing, for experimenting with prose and trying out opinions, and for seeing their own writing as  potentially valuable to others. I also hope it will teach them to be accountable in their writing and consider an audience beyond their stodgy professor. Finally, I hope they will take ownership of their new blogs and keep them after the class is over.

In assigning them blogs, I recommended WordPress but told them they can use whatever they like, including Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous or whatever. I also gave them the following advice about anonymity:

Everything you post on your blog is public. You may use your real name on your blog, but you do not have to. You might prefer to use your first name and last initial, or a complete pseudonym. So long as I and your classmates know it’s you, you can use whatever name you like. Think hard about this, but know that with most blogs, you can change your display name whenever you want, so your decision is reversible.

(The anonymity bit is prompted in part by the strange experience my class had last time we did blogs.)

I know I have created for myself a total mess in allowing different platforms and levels of anonymity, but I have learned from experience that students have different levels of awareness about online identity, and I want them to make informed decisions since these are, after all, their blogs, not mine.

I am going to put together a list of all the blogs from the class, but I am not sure I will publish it publicly, because, frankly, I don’t know what the FERPA implications are. If you have any insight on this, let me know.

I realize that this blog post has become quite rambling and fragmented, but isn’t that part of the point? I wouldn’t submit this to a journal, nor would I consider this scholarship in any traditional sense. But neither is it a pointless diary entry about what I ate this morning (if you’re interested, I will tell you). And writing this blog entry doesn’t mean that I cannot or will not write more sustained and organized argumentation around this topic. I simply haven’t chosen to at this point, in this venue, and I think that’s ok. If that’s all my students learn in their blog entry assignments,  I will be satisfied. After all, they still have to write a longer essay for me.

This brings to mind . . . → Read More: Writing and Blogging]]> I’ve been worrying that blogging has hurt my academic writing, and twitter has hurt my blogging. All my thoughts come, I’ve been afraid, in tiny 140 character chunks, instead of complex, well-articulated arguments.  But that’s not true. It is more or less a matter of habit and attention, among other things.

This brings to mind some posts I’ve read and bookmarked over the last several months, as I struggle to maintain equilibrium. One consideration is that blogging is, in some respects, bundled together with other internet activities: facebook, twitter, RSS feeds, etc. I have found a useful way of looking at these is through Fred Stutzman’s idea of Information Budgeting.  We basically have only a certain amount of attention to give, and it is important to budget our exposure to information, which for me means tweaking whose tweets get sent to my phone, how often I check twitter and facebook, and how I organize my RSS feeds. I have a lot of work to do there. Cory Doctorow has some interesting advice on writing, the most useful of which is to turn off realtime communications such as instant messaging and RSS alerts when you work. His suggestions of short, regular work schedule seems right on, but I wonder how it works for academics. The key, I think, is regular — the short is negotiable. He also recommends “killing your word processor,” which sounds ok, but I don’t know if simpler word processors handle footnoting well. Lastly but not leastly, the always wittily contrarian R. Scott Nokes muses about how NOT blogging is hurting his career.

The trick for me with this blog is to stay closer to my research interests, instead of treating it like twitter, basically musing and pointing (although that is also okay, so long as it’s not all I am doing). If I commit to updating more regularly, and on topics I am currently working on, I suspect both my dissertation and blog writing will improve.

Check out some of the blogs listed here. Start here, clicking on some the blogs in my . . . → Read More: Hello class]]> This post is for my American Studies class. I was getting frustrated trying to put links into blackboard, so I thought I’d just put this here. It also lets the general public participate, if you want.

Check out some of the blogs listed here. Start here, clicking on some the blogs in my blogroll on the bottom right of the main page, and move through the others. There is no specific way to do this. You may jump around from blog to blog, read thoroughly within one or more, or both. The idea is to get a broad sense of how blogs work, the range of material they cover, etc. Make sure to look at all of those listed below, though, so we will have a shared set of readings to discuss.

William Gibson’s Blog

Cory Doctorow’s blog

An interview with a blogger

How to blog (from Antonella Pavese)

Boingboing

Then go to technorati and search for a topic of your choice. If you find anything interesting, post it in the comments here.

For the general public: what other general blogs should people who are relatively unfamiliar with blogs read?

This . . . → Read More: Blogging and work]]> This article (reg required) in today’s NYTimes poses some interesting questions about employment and expression. Summary: An employee of technorati posted a blog entry intended “to provide a harsh comment on the growing fears among corporations over the blogging activities of their employees” and technorati asked him to take it down. He complied.

This story keeps coming up. Someone gets fired or warned or censored for something on a usually non-work-related blog. The article brings up interesting issues, including privacy and freedom of expression, as well as the following:

But does that means that Mr. Kennedy, a short-timer, a product manager and by no means an executive at Technorati, carries the burden of representing the company into his personal blog?

Technorati’s vice president for engineering, Adam Hertz, responded: “It would be antithetical to our corporate values to force Niall to do anything in his blog. It’s his blog.”

Yet with the spread of the Internet and of blogging, Mr. Hertz said, it would be foolish for companies to not spend some time discussing the art of public communications with their employees, and even train and prepare lower-level staff for these kinds of public relations situations.

This raises some interesting questions for me, and academic workers in general. To what extent am I expected to “represent” the university for which I work? I make no claims to speak for the university, and I am, at times, openly critical of it. This blog is not hosted on university servers, which may add a layer of complexity to the analysis, and is intended as a personal blog about various issues, including not only film, media and communication but also teaching and academia generally. But if someone objects to my politics, criticism or writing in general, would the university, as my employer, have the right to “ask” me to rescind something? I honestly doubt that this would happen, but it does make me wonder.

On another note, I like technorati, so I would neither initiate nor advocate any action against it, but wouldn’t it be ironic if someone did decide to boycott technorati, using the service itself as an initial organizing tool for the boycott?