marcusodonnell.com: blogsperiment

J Student blogs at NYT

In a fascinating experiment NYT columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has selected a J student Casey Parks to travel with him throughout Africa and write about their experiences on a blog. Unfortunately this great little experiment is behind the Times Select barrier and requires paid registration (you can get a 14 day free trial or its $50 a year for lots of goodies).

This is a great way to use a blog and Parks is writing an interesting reflective narrative as she comes to terms with the desperate poverty of Africa, meeting with leading politicians and trying to break through to street level in spite of language barriers. She makes a good attempt not just to describe what she sees but to relate this to what it means for her as a journalist:

We’ve met a few people in Africa so far who have complained about Africa never receiving any positive press.

“Why do people only write about the bad stuff?” they ask us.

I’ve had the same question for years about Mississippi. In fact, one of the reasons I want to be a national correspondent is to be able cover the South in a more accurate way. Journalists from New York or other northern cities often swoop in, researching but not understanding the state, then file stories that don’t reflect the complexities of Mississippi.

Yes, it’s easy to report that the state is poor or repressive toward women. But where is the good coverage, the life that keeps people living there?

And I think many people in Africa feel the same way. Of course, I think many journalists writing about horrors in Africa are doing so in an attempt to help Africa, but there has to be some balance. As Prime Minister Mangue asked yesterday, “What about Africa’s progress?”

In thinking about Mississippi in the past, I’ve often thought of the William Blake quote, “Pity would be no more if we did not make somebody poor.” What would the other states do without Mississippi to pick on, to make them feel better about their own evolutions? Last night, looking out toward a very illuminated Yaounde, Cameroon, I asked Naka, “What will the world do once Africa really progresses?”

“They’ll work on Antarctica,” he replied.

Blogs on TV

Interesting post by Donna Bogatin about blogging taking a starring role in a new police investigation series USA networks Psych. What is think is even more interesting is the fact that Gus (played by West Wing's Dule Hill) the sidekick of the starring psychic baddie catcher Shawn, blogs in character on the show's website. The posts aren't usually about incidents that occur on the show, the blog provides a back story including what Shawn and he did at school:

I'll never forget the Bosseigh High alma mater, and not just because we had to sing it all time at school events. I mean, look at it. Have you ever heard of school song so sadistic and poorly punctuated? Excruciating pain? What's up with that? And what's that colon doing at the end of the sixth line? I swear it's not a typo, that's the way the song was written, and for four years, I had to look at it painted in big letters on the wall of the gym. I brought it up to administration at least half a dozen times, all they ever did was give me a form to fill out.

Ask Shawn to sing the song, and he'll gladly oblige. He still knows it, too, and he'll sing it for you the same way he did then – at the top of his lungs, changing the last line to “If we catch your underwear.” Some things never change.

The alma mater isn't the only thing I remember from high school. I haven't forgotten anything, and although it's never fashionable to say it, I really had a pretty great time in high school. And yes, you could say I was involved, if by involved you mean ASB Cabinet, Mock Trial Team, Latin Club, Junior Kiwanis and the V8 Society (a club dedicated to muscle cars, not vegetable juice), I also filled the second half of my senior year for the guy that made the morning announcements, after he got fired for playing “Whoomp! (There it is) one too many times over the school PA.

Shawn was involved, too, but most of the clubs he was in were clubs that he started himself. He was the captain of the napping team, ran an underground newspaper (for which he was the gossip columnist), led an unsuccessful two-day boycott of the Pythagorean Theorem and subsequently founded the Quadrilateral Appreciation Society. Oh, and he somehow lettered in Track and Field even though he wasn't even a member of the team.

Backstories of the characters are becoming increasingly important in building fan communities, 24 and anumber of other shows now post full CVs for their major characters on the show website. With 24 this has been taken a step further by fans who have developed long Wikipedia entries for the key characters.

Technorati Tags: blogging and popular culture

Blogs at Sydney Uni take off

Found an interesting article from the Australian's Higher Education supplement about Sydney University's embrace of blogging. It's bizarre that the most traditional of universities would be the first university in Australia to set up a campus wide blogging project. In May the university set up a system open to all university staff.

“I don't know of any other Australian universities who have set up a staff blog system like this,” says Charlie Forsyth, manager of Sydney's web services. He says the idea is to make it easy for staff to blog, to collaborate with one another, to reach out to industry and the wider public, to share knowledge and engage in debate.

“The blogs will not be centrally moderated,” Forsyth says. But the standard university policy on computers applies; this forbids uses that are “illegal, unethical or inappropriate” or anything that would cause “embarrassment or loss of reputation” to the university.

The marketing arm of the university is also embracing blogging with a site called Sydney Life. Here they have employed a series of students to post on their experiences of life at the university

Like most blogs it has regular, journal-like entries with a comment thread. But the home page banner carries the university shield and Cohen, Sydney's marketing information manager, vets every post before it's uploaded.

Can big institutions tame the free-spirited blog format?

“I think it's working because I don't domesticate it too much,” says Cohen, who was fascinated by blogs before she came up with this official use for them.

At Sydney Life she doesn't see a lot of room for posts about dating or wild nights. She says subjects more suited to the readers include how to make friends in first year, insider tips for enrolment day, study and procrastination, as well as immersion in campus clubs and societies.

Spencer, president of the Sydney University Dramatic Society, doesn't regard Cohen's editorial control as heavy-handed; in fact, he's reassured she's there. “Obviously we're writing for a fairly specific audience and it is under the university name,” he says.

He's found it fun, a totally different way of writing, and an inspiration to look into blogging more closely.

Technorati Tags: blogs and higher education

Technorati Tags: blogs and higher education

Publish your homework

Doing a search for resources on e-portfolios I stumbled across this gem from Pete Hubbard

We do need to harness all of the creative energy that is now at the hands of our students (with access.) I say this in my presentations all the time, but how cool would it be for us to remind our kids to “publish your homework” instead of simply hand it in? We can do that now.

Glocer also says that “what we are seeing today is an almost continuing talent show,” and I really like that image. It reminds me of a quote from a book by Marc Rosenberg, Beyond E-Learning I've been working through where he says “don't call them learners:”

“Thinking about e-learning in new ways has to start with existing paradigms that might be holding you back. Calling people what they really are is a good beginning, but if you must use a generic term, a better one might be performer (23).”

Technorati Tags: e-portfolios

Katie Couric to blog?

USA Today's Peter Johnson reports that Katie Couric's new contract with CBS includes a commitment to a “daily, regular presence”. Current NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams already contributes a regular blog to NBC's site and the ABC co-anchors do a fifteen minute daily webcast.

But exactly what form that'll take has yet to be worked out, he says. “I don't think she has decided exactly how she's going to do it or what she's going to do other than have a keen interest in figuring how we can use new media to extend our reach and make sure people who may not be seeing The Evening News get a chance to see the work she is doing in a new form and in a new way.”

This is something new for Couric, who has blogged selectively on various Today projects, such as this year's Winter Olympics, but has never has a daily Web presence.

The Web “is something that Katie's really interested in, and so are we,” Hartman says. “She shares an everyperson sensibility, which is: She loves what the Internet represents and loves the possibilities, whether it's as a journalist, parent, or consumer. But she doesn't claim to know the ins and outs or be a techie.”

Blogstats

Dave Sifry at Technorati has just posted their latest quarterly “State of the Blogsphere” report: In summary:

* Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
* The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
* It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
* On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
* 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
* Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Sifry points out that not only has the number of blogs increased dramatically, so too has the volume of posts per day. Graphs also indicate that posting volume spikes in response to world events. Big news events are obvious, but what is interesting is that tech news - ipod video and mac intel announcements for example - also cause notable spikes.

Technorati Tags: blog stats

Urban Blogging

Interesting article in the NYT about urban activism around a Brooklyn real estate project that has found a focus in the blogsphere. The Atlantic Yards project, a vast residential, commercial and arena development near Downtown Brooklyn, has come in for some tough criticism:

But Atlantic Yards may well be the first large-scale urban real estate venture in New York City where opposition has coalesced most visibly in the blogosphere.

“If Jane Jacobs had the tools and technology back when she was fighting Robert Moses' plans to bulldoze Lower Manhattan, I bet 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' would have been a blog,” said Mr. Naparstek, 35, referring to Ms. Jacobs's seminal 1963 book criticizing the urban renewal policies in vogue among city planners of that era.

About a dozen blogs follow Atlantic Yards closely. The authors are usually Brooklynites, some of them experts in fields like urban development. But even the amateurs among them have boned up on arcane zoning provisions and planning-law quirks that can induce headaches among the less devoted.

The result is an unusual ferment of community advocacy and opinion journalism, featuring everything from manipulated caricatures of Forest City Ratner executives to technical discussions of traffic flow.

As is typical of these blogging projects the blog critics include experts in the area (architects for example) who also blog and bloggers who quickly show their aptitude in the area by coming to terms with obscure planning law. While this has always been true of urban activism, I think the public nature of blogging pushes people into doing more and better research.

The response to this project highlights the fact that blogging is a multidimensional writing/research/communication modality.

This article is in the Time's technology section not its media section although the implications for traditional media are perhaps more important than the mere fact of the technological delivery:

Mr. Oder said he spent up to 25 hours a week on atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com, a successor to his original blog, Times Ratner Report. Hardly a hearing, community meeting or news story relating to the project escapes scrutiny.

He started blogging last September, he said, because “Brooklyn would be one of the largest cities in the country if it were a separate city.”

“Then,” he added, “it would have its own daily newspaper, which would pay a lot more attention to the largest real estate development in its history.”

Technorati Tags: blogging activism, blogging and journalism

Student's grow-up with blogs

Dennis Jerz' blogging project at Seton Hill is the subject of a good profile in the Pitsburg Post Gazette, which he gleefully pointed out to Kairos readers.

The anecdotal piece raises a number of key issues about blogging and higher education. The headline “Freedom of speech redefined by blogs: Words travel faster, stay around longer in the blogosphere” tells you that this isn't going to be the standard media blog bust. The anecdotes in this article actually sum up some of the key points any introduction to blogging in higher education might like to make:

1. Student blogging can lead to dialogue with the wider academic sphere:

Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author “seems like a bitter man.” In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there.

Except she didn't just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the way from England, pledging to re-examine an upcoming edition given her critique.

2. Students move from being users to being co-creators of the internet

Students find that their musings on topics from Plato to video games have been discovered by a parent back home who typed their name into a search engine such as Google. Or they'll discover their homework was incorporated hundreds of miles away into a stranger's Internet research.

“In another generation, these students would have simply been users of a computer,” Dr. Jerz said. “Now, they are co-creators of the Internet.”

That is both good and bad.

“I remind students that their blogs are public,” he said. “Someday, they'll be in a job applicant pool, and a potential employer will run their name through Google, and the angry ranting Web log they wrote at age 17 will turn up.”

3. Problems can become “teachable moments” with real world grit, even though boundaries have to be found and enforced

The piece details a number of students who have been suspended at other universities for posting harmful or defamatory posts about staff, students or minority groups. But these instances can become “teachable moments”:

Those cases, and others like them, illustrate the importance of what some say is an emerging campus trend: Faculty are discussing with their students how the medium is transforming free speech.

“It's a substantial change in how we engage in discourse, especially in this country,” said Alex Halavais, an official with the Association of Internet Researchers who teaches at the University at Buffalo, part of The State University of New York. “As such, I think universities have a duty in some ways to provide students with the tools they need to better participate in that discourse.”...

[Amy Eisman, director of writing programs with the school of communication at American University] said students were more likely to discover boundaries themselves, sometimes by a rough experience.

4. Students learn to be bloggers and this learning experience can help them position themselves as adults within the public sphere:

Jason Pugh, 20, a junior from West Mifflin, said he'd watched the level of discourse rise as freshmen come to campus and see how upperclassmen build reasoned arguments. “There's a difference between just saying, 'You're wrong,' and saying, 'I disagree because of point one and point two,' ” he said.

He views his own blogs as a far cry from the all-opinion rants of his freshman year. “I've learned to do better research, so I don't sound like I'm someone angry at the world.”

Technorati Tags: blogs and higher education

Blog as place and genre

Excellent piece in Kairos on “Blogging Places”. Tim Lindgren explores a range of new place blogs that are primarily concerned with locality and ecology as distinct from the global or purely personal approach of much of the blogsphere.

Some unrepresentative cherry picks:

On blogging genres:

Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd suggest, blogging is remarkable for its ability to adapt to particular rhetorical exigencies, such that “already it may no longer be accurate to think of the blog as a single genre.” In other words, it now may be less meaningful to discuss blogging in general than to examine distinct varieties of the genre such as war blogging, political blogging, academic blogging, or—for the purposes of this study—place blogging. Rather than treating place blogging as a genre of its own (or even as a subgenre), this study will primarily examine it as an adaptation, or perhaps more precisely, a localization of blogging with both generic and geographic qualities....

Anis Bawarshi's manner of describing genre seems particularly apt in this context: in his words, a genre is “both a habit and a habitat—the conceptual habitat within which individuals perceive and experience a particular environment as well as the rhetorical habit by a through which they function within that environment” (84). In Genre and the Invention of the Writer, Bawarshi suggests that writing is by nature a form of inhabitation: “Writing takes place. It takes place socially and rhetorically. To write is to position oneself within genres--to assume and enact certain situated commitments, identities, relations, and practices” (14). Moreover, a genre possesses “ecological” qualities that enable it to “coordinate a symbiotic relationship between social habitats and rhetorical habitats” (82).

On Journalism and place blogging

The journalistic ancestry of blogging is apparent in local blogs like Simon's Living in Dryden in which he documents the political and community life in his area of upstate New York: “At this point it's clear that there's more than enough going on in Dryden for stories every day. There is an incredible amount happening here, and only a fraction of it can make the paper” (“Six Months”). Simon provides an independent source of news to supplement the conventional print sources, and it is clear throughout that this role as an independent journalist is a local one—he writes as a local for a local audience. For this reason, his blog tends to serve as a growing archive of the local knowledge he considers important for responsible civic engagement in the community.

On blogging as rhetorical place

For Nicholas Burbules, the web is a “rhetorical place” rather than a “rhetorical space” because a place is “a socially or subjectively meaningful space.” In his formulation, this place has 1) “navigational and the semantic elements” such as an “objective, locational dimension: people can look for a place, find it, move within it” and a 2) “semantic dimension: it means something important to a person or group of people, and this latter dimension may or may not be communicable to others.” (78) In his mind, space “does not capture the distinctive way in which users try to make the Web familiar, to make it their space--to make it a place.” By contrast, “calling the Web a rhetorical place suggests...that it is where users come to find and make meanings, individual and collectively ” (78).

In his typification of “place blogs” Lindgren extends Miller and Shepherd's genre analysis of blogs. Miller and Shepherd talk about the “ancestral genres” of blogs and a process they call “speciation”:

Because blogs appeared so suddenly and so recently, and because evidence about them and those who use them is so available, we have an unusual opportunity to study the evolution of a genre. In this case we can examine what the evolutionary biologist would call speciation, the development of a new genre, rather than the process of adaptative transformation,.. Jamieson's work on early presidential oratory (1973, 1975) and Miller's study of the Environmental Impact Statement (1984) did examine the creation of new genres, the first as precedent-setting responses to unprecedented situations, the second as a rhetorically unsuccessful but legally mandated response to a situation defined by“or brought into being by” Congress. One important way to study the rhetorical innovation of a new genre, Jamieson argued, is to look for the “chromosomal imprint of ancestral genres” (Jamieson, 1973); for example, the presidential inaugural can be fully understood as a genre only by seeing in it the imprint of the sermon (Jamieson, 1973), and the State of the Union address can be understood only by seeing it as a successor to the King's Speech to Parliament (Jamieson, 1975). These ancestral genres should be considered part of the rhetorical situation to which the rhetor responds, constraining the perception and definition of the situation and its decorum for both the rhetor and the audience.

Lindgren uses Bolter and Grusin's term “remediation” to describe this process. He sumarises Miller and Shepherd's ancestral forms:

• genres of political journalism: pamphlet or broadside, the editorial, and the opinion column.
• personal genres: journal and the diary, along with the newer electronic genres of the home page and the webcam
• genres of collecting and organizing information: clipping service or media monitoring service, commonplace book

He then ads to this list the specific ancestral genres of place blogs:

Personal Essays

When Chris from Bowen Island Journal describes place blogs as “collections of stories of the writer's engagement with a place, including the land and culture of a place,” he points to the influence of the essay tradition....

Travel Writing

Traveling often enables a writer to step outside of her routine and perceive a place with new eyes, to see what appears to be natural or inevitable as something constructed.....

Ethnography and Journalism

If place blogging exhibits ancestral ties to the nature writer's log or the field notebook, it also shares affinities with the notebook of the ethnographer or journalist.

Such a classification is very useful for thinking about many different forms of blogs and provides a useful way of inviting students to do a range of different writing within the blogging environment.

Technorati Tags: blogging genres

Bigger than Jesus

Any article that begins: “How big are blogs? Bigger than Jesus. Bigger than sex” sounds like it's going to be yet another blogsploitation spiel. However Daniel Rubin's article in the Philadelphia Inquirer is a pretty good summary of major blogging trends.

If 2004 was the year blogs entered the language (so says Merriam-Webster), then 2005 was the year they found their voice. Mainstream media embraced blogs, corporations embraced blogs, spammers embraced blogs.

It was a time of great convergence, with indie blogs joining together to capture audience and advertising, as brand-name media shed their institutional voices to go unfiltered where the readers were.

I think it is this friction between the institutional adoption of blogs and their original independent impulse that is one of the most interesting things about the current evolution of the blogsphere. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew internet project makes the point that we are in a key transitional moment:

“The mainstream media opened its arms to bloggers in crisis moments in all sorts of ways,” Rainie says. “We have entered this melding stage of thinking... . We've been through anger and fighting. Now we are in the wary-embrace stage. At some point, it will be wholesale endorsement.”

The question becomes will it be endorsement of the form or endorsement of the ethos of the blogsphere.

The Sydney Morning Herald produced one of the earliest mainstream experiments with Margo Kingston's webdiary. It was a genuine evolving space with a commitment to diversity and discussion that became a community for negotiated discussion not just a bullitedn board. For reasons that still remain unclear Kingston was shafted and had to go independent. She has now retired from the blogsphere, even though others have continued her project.

The Herald has replaced her with The Contrarian which like many mainstream media blogs is a traditional column with a comments facility

The real change will come when mainstream media realise that blogging is a new way of relating to content not just a new way of disseminating it.