Friday, April 2, 2004
Ties to the land. The snazzy library weblog vision page at the University of Minnesota points to a class weblog that announces itself as:
An exploration of Native American ties to the land through a collaborative venture of elders from the White Earth Band of Anishinabe and an Honors class at the University of Minnesota.
This site solves a portion of the audience problem under discussion this week in the CCCC posts (and elsewhere: 1 2 3 4) simply by making the project a big enough collaboration. [1 & P]
An exploration of Native American ties to the land through a collaborative venture of elders from the White Earth Band of Anishinabe and an Honors class at the University of Minnesota.
This site solves a portion of the audience problem under discussion this week in the CCCC posts (and elsewhere: 1 2 3 4) simply by making the project a big enough collaboration. [1 & P]
Thursday, April 1, 2004
Blog poetry. Over at Earth Wide Moth, Dmueller (Derek?) waxes poetic and reminds me somehow of Ezra Pound's little poem about the Metro:
CCCC. But that was last week, and all the fine comp bloggers have dispersed the conference far and wide, floating notes and observations like so many generous leaflets into the blog-blowing wind. # [2 & P]
CCCC. But that was last week, and all the fine comp bloggers have dispersed the conference far and wide, floating notes and observations like so many generous leaflets into the blog-blowing wind. # [2 & P]
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Making waves. The CCCC ripples 
continue with Will Richardson extending the discussion of blogging as reading over at his weblog today, where he generously takes the time to link to, digest, and speak kindly of the lengthy post I wrote yesterday. He mentioned earlier some doubts about whether K-12 students can really blog, and today he talks briefly about
the disconnect [he's] been feeling between the act and the tool of late. The tool requires writing. (There is no blog without writing.) The act requires reading. (There is no blogging without reading.) Without reading, you're just writing, not blogging... #
It's clear that weblog software is a pretty good web posting tool, and educators can use it to collect and pass around student writing, all well and good, without there being any blogging going on. Blogging as a genre (or more likely, a whole series of genres) uses the software's ease of posting, linking, and commenting, along with our regular practices of writing about reading, to build a community engaging some topic of shared interest.
So there is writing and then there is writing -- kind of like Truman Capote's old joke from the Tonight Show, when Carson would name a popular author and Capote would say, "That's not writing, that's typing!"
Writing, the good stuff, reads the unfolding materials of culture with some urgency, with a project, with a point of view, with something at stake, and takes the time to try to make a mark on some bit of the culture, to reinterpret it, to reorder its priorities, to cast it in a new light, to set it in a new context, to have a say about some part of it, and in doing so creates a voice and a position of authority for the speaker. If there is a chance for a strong person to change the world a little bit, this person will change the world.
Writing, the weak stuff that is not much more than typing, repeats stock phrases in pre-established order, preaches to the choir, summarizes without a point of view, catalogs without passion, tells you things you already know, and buries the speaker in a pile of pre-fab materials that have no fingerprints on them, or maybe so many sets of fingerprints that no one's prints can be made out any longer. If they are passing out rewards to conformists, this writer will get a reward. When the secret police pass down the block, they'll know in a glance they don't need to arrest this person.
So we say to our students, you are each an intellectual, you have an active life of the mind, you care about some things deeply, you want to move ahead and fulfill certain goals and dreams for yourself, you want to see your community thrive -- you have projects that matter to you. In light of those urgencies, in light of your projects and the best work of your heart and mind, which of these writers speak to you and which do you challenge or resist? Which of their concepts could be used to carry your projects further, and how? Which challenge the way you've named the world to yourself, and what do you make of that? In the conversation of humanity that you hear going on around you, what do you want to insist upon saying? Where do you want to make your mark? Where can you see a chance for common ground?
So there is something about the web and weblog software and our historical moment that has made it easy for lots of people to see blogging as a way to be that strong kind of writer who creates and resides, virtually, in that kind of community and who reads and rewrites her culture a little bit at a time at the top of her blog's main column every day. [0 & P]
continue with Will Richardson extending the discussion of blogging as reading over at his weblog today, where he generously takes the time to link to, digest, and speak kindly of the lengthy post I wrote yesterday. He mentioned earlier some doubts about whether K-12 students can really blog, and today he talks briefly about the disconnect [he's] been feeling between the act and the tool of late. The tool requires writing. (There is no blog without writing.) The act requires reading. (There is no blogging without reading.) Without reading, you're just writing, not blogging... #
It's clear that weblog software is a pretty good web posting tool, and educators can use it to collect and pass around student writing, all well and good, without there being any blogging going on. Blogging as a genre (or more likely, a whole series of genres) uses the software's ease of posting, linking, and commenting, along with our regular practices of writing about reading, to build a community engaging some topic of shared interest.
So there is writing and then there is writing -- kind of like Truman Capote's old joke from the Tonight Show, when Carson would name a popular author and Capote would say, "That's not writing, that's typing!"
Writing, the good stuff, reads the unfolding materials of culture with some urgency, with a project, with a point of view, with something at stake, and takes the time to try to make a mark on some bit of the culture, to reinterpret it, to reorder its priorities, to cast it in a new light, to set it in a new context, to have a say about some part of it, and in doing so creates a voice and a position of authority for the speaker. If there is a chance for a strong person to change the world a little bit, this person will change the world.
Writing, the weak stuff that is not much more than typing, repeats stock phrases in pre-established order, preaches to the choir, summarizes without a point of view, catalogs without passion, tells you things you already know, and buries the speaker in a pile of pre-fab materials that have no fingerprints on them, or maybe so many sets of fingerprints that no one's prints can be made out any longer. If they are passing out rewards to conformists, this writer will get a reward. When the secret police pass down the block, they'll know in a glance they don't need to arrest this person.
So we say to our students, you are each an intellectual, you have an active life of the mind, you care about some things deeply, you want to move ahead and fulfill certain goals and dreams for yourself, you want to see your community thrive -- you have projects that matter to you. In light of those urgencies, in light of your projects and the best work of your heart and mind, which of these writers speak to you and which do you challenge or resist? Which of their concepts could be used to carry your projects further, and how? Which challenge the way you've named the world to yourself, and what do you make of that? In the conversation of humanity that you hear going on around you, what do you want to insist upon saying? Where do you want to make your mark? Where can you see a chance for common ground?
So there is something about the web and weblog software and our historical moment that has made it easy for lots of people to see blogging as a way to be that strong kind of writer who creates and resides, virtually, in that kind of community and who reads and rewrites her culture a little bit at a time at the top of her blog's main column every day. [0 & P]
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
CCCC waves and ripples. The CCCC conference sessions on blogging are still sending out waves, as Will Richardson writes about some of the problems Richard Long and others helped me think about during and after the conference. Over in the comments to that post, Tom Hoffman and Will see a virtue in looking at blogging as reading, which strikes me as a wonderful chance to think freshly about the process.
Maybe some folks write flat, empty posts or bad diary posts because they don't know any other genres (they just aren't readers, in one sense) and because aren't responding to anything (that is, they aren't reading anything right now). If they aren't readers in general and aren't reading anything now in particular, then they both won't have the genre chops and won't have any particular content to bounce off of. They will be literate in a basic and functional way, but for two reasons their literacy won't be the active and generative kind we see in people who are really writers.
This sounds like a version of the Burkean parlor*, where people have to hang around and listen to how the insiders talk the talk for some time before they can really join in themselves.
If you are a reader and if you are reading, you start to be able to find something you want to say beyond shallow commonplaces, and you start to know how to say it, and maybe even who to say it to. Then the later comment from Dennis Jerz seems right to me: links and comments can then help you form networks and create audiences, as he says. He points out that this is a constructive act, rather than mainly an interpretive act, and I agree in part: the linking does construct the relationships with others that make audience possible. But prior to making those links and animating them, I think, are the acts of interpretation necessary in Burke's parlor -- you have to learn how to read or hear, which is interpretation, before you can write or speak or before you can make those constructive links to others, it seems to me.
We can tell that Dennis is right at least in part because we've all seen complete blog posts that are, implicitly, like this one that I'll make up here:
I'm such an important blogger that I don't have to give you any reason as I urge, even command, you to visit this link.
But when famous A-listers write those self-satisfied one-line posts, they aren't really blogging well. Instead, they are just spending the social capital they've already accumulated. They accumulated that social capital by first learning how to listen and read the professional and blog genres that interest them (interpretation on one level), then following the conversation closely enough to know how to contribute something (more interpretation), and then, when they are at their best, linking in richer, fuller posts that build social networks, yes, but that also discuss what they are linking to (interpretation again). I think Jorn Barger said that good links add value to the thing being linked to -- for interpretation, Kurt Spellmeyer sometimes says, is saying something the text has not already quite said. Not just quoting it or pointing to it, not just linking alone.
And of course it becomes useful to end the thought experiment, to stop thinking about blogging as reading and start thinking about it as writing again, as usual, but maybe Will was onto something even better when he chose Jay Rosen's quotation for his masthead: "Every reader is a writer, every writer is a reader." Properly understood, reading is writing and writing is reading. Could it be that students who don't read, even though they can, are people who, on one important level, don't and can't write?
And maybe that means that links are vital for new bloggers for a completely non-constructive reason. Instead of assigning students to go write, we should assign them to go read and then link to what interests them and write about why it does and what it means, not in order to make a connection or build social capital but because it is through quality linking (not the flaccid A-list stuff I spoofed above) that one first comes in contact with the essential acts of blogging: close reading and interpretation. Blogging, at base, is writing down what you think when you read others. If you keep at it, others will eventually write down what they think when they read you, and you'll enter a new realm of blogging, a new realm of human connection.
If there is any truth to this line of thought, then we should place more emphasis on, have more faith in, reading. We should teach close and careful reading as the essential practice of blogging that allows us to generate something worthwhile that may enage an audience and create a community. And with that thought I bring this rambling post to a close.
*Where does the drama get its materials? From the "unending conversation" that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. -- a quotation from Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (110-11). [1 & P]
Maybe some folks write flat, empty posts or bad diary posts because they don't know any other genres (they just aren't readers, in one sense) and because aren't responding to anything (that is, they aren't reading anything right now). If they aren't readers in general and aren't reading anything now in particular, then they both won't have the genre chops and won't have any particular content to bounce off of. They will be literate in a basic and functional way, but for two reasons their literacy won't be the active and generative kind we see in people who are really writers.
This sounds like a version of the Burkean parlor*, where people have to hang around and listen to how the insiders talk the talk for some time before they can really join in themselves.
If you are a reader and if you are reading, you start to be able to find something you want to say beyond shallow commonplaces, and you start to know how to say it, and maybe even who to say it to. Then the later comment from Dennis Jerz seems right to me: links and comments can then help you form networks and create audiences, as he says. He points out that this is a constructive act, rather than mainly an interpretive act, and I agree in part: the linking does construct the relationships with others that make audience possible. But prior to making those links and animating them, I think, are the acts of interpretation necessary in Burke's parlor -- you have to learn how to read or hear, which is interpretation, before you can write or speak or before you can make those constructive links to others, it seems to me.
We can tell that Dennis is right at least in part because we've all seen complete blog posts that are, implicitly, like this one that I'll make up here:
I'm such an important blogger that I don't have to give you any reason as I urge, even command, you to visit this link.
But when famous A-listers write those self-satisfied one-line posts, they aren't really blogging well. Instead, they are just spending the social capital they've already accumulated. They accumulated that social capital by first learning how to listen and read the professional and blog genres that interest them (interpretation on one level), then following the conversation closely enough to know how to contribute something (more interpretation), and then, when they are at their best, linking in richer, fuller posts that build social networks, yes, but that also discuss what they are linking to (interpretation again). I think Jorn Barger said that good links add value to the thing being linked to -- for interpretation, Kurt Spellmeyer sometimes says, is saying something the text has not already quite said. Not just quoting it or pointing to it, not just linking alone.
And of course it becomes useful to end the thought experiment, to stop thinking about blogging as reading and start thinking about it as writing again, as usual, but maybe Will was onto something even better when he chose Jay Rosen's quotation for his masthead: "Every reader is a writer, every writer is a reader." Properly understood, reading is writing and writing is reading. Could it be that students who don't read, even though they can, are people who, on one important level, don't and can't write?
And maybe that means that links are vital for new bloggers for a completely non-constructive reason. Instead of assigning students to go write, we should assign them to go read and then link to what interests them and write about why it does and what it means, not in order to make a connection or build social capital but because it is through quality linking (not the flaccid A-list stuff I spoofed above) that one first comes in contact with the essential acts of blogging: close reading and interpretation. Blogging, at base, is writing down what you think when you read others. If you keep at it, others will eventually write down what they think when they read you, and you'll enter a new realm of blogging, a new realm of human connection.
If there is any truth to this line of thought, then we should place more emphasis on, have more faith in, reading. We should teach close and careful reading as the essential practice of blogging that allows us to generate something worthwhile that may enage an audience and create a community. And with that thought I bring this rambling post to a close.
*Where does the drama get its materials? From the "unending conversation" that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. -- a quotation from Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (110-11). [1 & P]
Monday, March 29, 2004
Not actually blogging. Richard Long of 2River makes a good point in his post-CCCC post about using blogging software simply to carry out assignments that we used to do other ways:
Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts? #
My first semester with weblog software, as I learned the software itself, I mainly asked people to use it for trading information, drafts, and feedback -- all things we might have done other ways in the past. [The software was, by the way, very good for that.] My second semester extended that to research projects chosen by students, with other students reading the work by classmates along the way -- a not very pure imitation of a weblog with a topical focus. But still these were not quite weblogs as you would see them in the wild, and not all the students could see the opportunities the genre offered them. Those that could see it wrote the most blog-like sites. This semester I'm not using the software in classes, as I regroup.
It was a pleasure to meet Richard and other bloggers at CCCC, and his point stays with me. While the software can do several things, weblogs themselves are a more particular set of practices with their own virtues. So here is a hypothesis:
The more you recognize what you see on the web page from some other genre or some other place, the less the thing is a weblog. Or maybe: ...the less the thing is taking advantage of being a weblog. And that is all the more true of wikis, I'd say.
A next step would be to talk about what we take advantage of when we write blogs or wikis, then. We should be able to name what all the features of a blog or wiki really accomplish, then. [0 & P]
Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts? #
My first semester with weblog software, as I learned the software itself, I mainly asked people to use it for trading information, drafts, and feedback -- all things we might have done other ways in the past. [The software was, by the way, very good for that.] My second semester extended that to research projects chosen by students, with other students reading the work by classmates along the way -- a not very pure imitation of a weblog with a topical focus. But still these were not quite weblogs as you would see them in the wild, and not all the students could see the opportunities the genre offered them. Those that could see it wrote the most blog-like sites. This semester I'm not using the software in classes, as I regroup.
It was a pleasure to meet Richard and other bloggers at CCCC, and his point stays with me. While the software can do several things, weblogs themselves are a more particular set of practices with their own virtues. So here is a hypothesis:
The more you recognize what you see on the web page from some other genre or some other place, the less the thing is a weblog. Or maybe: ...the less the thing is taking advantage of being a weblog. And that is all the more true of wikis, I'd say.
A next step would be to talk about what we take advantage of when we write blogs or wikis, then. We should be able to name what all the features of a blog or wiki really accomplish, then. [0 & P]
Sunday, March 28, 2004
Home again. After a good conference held in the Epcot-like downtown area of San Antonio, and having gotten through the Chicago O-Hare airport with far fewer hassles than hundreds of other people yesterday, I'm back home and enjoying easy access to the New York Times and wireless (my hotel was just installing DSL and wireless this week, and had no business computing center). On the plane I read three strong articles a student chose for a seminar presentation and found myself eager to attend Monday's class to see where she would lead her portion of the discussion. Family members liked the small gifts I brought back from the trip; we had waffles for breakfast; the youngest had made real advances in her ability to play chords on the ukelele while I was gone. Life is good.
[0 & P]
Saturday, March 27, 2004
After the conference. Attending a few blogging and wiki panels and talking shop with folks, I come away thinking this:
1. I am all the more interested in blog genres that have a project or focus that doesn't remind one of a diary. People write diaries for good reasons, but school has other fish to fry, for the most part, and if students write diary blogs for school it is probably because we haven't taught them any other genre and its value.
2. Each kind of blog may appear to be a genre, but is really a series of mini-genres or common rhetorical moves that make up the big genre. We need to elaborate on that genre or rhetorical knowledge if we are going to teach via weblogs as well as we might.
3. Aim big. Create something with your students that has real value -- something that would deserve 50,000 visits. Why not?
4. Don't let the archive suck all the life out of your writing -- one way or another, via wikis or elsewhere, make something with a lasting shape, not just a column that slides off the screen into oblivion...
5. ...even though the audience relationship you can build in blogging is real and substantial, once you get there.
6. I have a hunch that half the problem with student blogs is a problem with audience, but not the problem mentioned in conference papers. It's just that there is, for all practical purposes, no audience for a new blog, and only a skilled writer knows how to write with no audience (and even skilled writers are sometimes defeated by that prospect for months or years). If you have no clear project, no clear audience, no clear purpose, what can you write about except how bad the dorm food is?
7. The passion of bloggers is a thing to behold, in person, and may lead to new wonders. Otherwise, though, they seem as varied as you might expect -- though easily more men than women.
Anybody else want to report? [0 & P]
1. I am all the more interested in blog genres that have a project or focus that doesn't remind one of a diary. People write diaries for good reasons, but school has other fish to fry, for the most part, and if students write diary blogs for school it is probably because we haven't taught them any other genre and its value.
2. Each kind of blog may appear to be a genre, but is really a series of mini-genres or common rhetorical moves that make up the big genre. We need to elaborate on that genre or rhetorical knowledge if we are going to teach via weblogs as well as we might.
3. Aim big. Create something with your students that has real value -- something that would deserve 50,000 visits. Why not?
4. Don't let the archive suck all the life out of your writing -- one way or another, via wikis or elsewhere, make something with a lasting shape, not just a column that slides off the screen into oblivion...
5. ...even though the audience relationship you can build in blogging is real and substantial, once you get there.
6. I have a hunch that half the problem with student blogs is a problem with audience, but not the problem mentioned in conference papers. It's just that there is, for all practical purposes, no audience for a new blog, and only a skilled writer knows how to write with no audience (and even skilled writers are sometimes defeated by that prospect for months or years). If you have no clear project, no clear audience, no clear purpose, what can you write about except how bad the dorm food is?
7. The passion of bloggers is a thing to behold, in person, and may lead to new wonders. Otherwise, though, they seem as varied as you might expect -- though easily more men than women.
Anybody else want to report? [0 & P]
Friday, March 26, 2004
Conference highlights. Different for each person, of course. I liked very much hearing Robert Scholes talk about reimagining the English major so its value would be more well understood. A panel of folks talking about Kurt Spellmeyer's work addressed some of the same problems. Both sessions urged us to look squarely at the skills and values and knowledge we profess as they play themselves out in our students' lives. We ought to be able to answer these questions: what are we teaching and what is it good for?
I liked meeting bloggers whose work I have been reading and discussing, and I was very happy to hear a whole panel on wikis whose highlight, for me, was M. C. Morgan's clear discussion of wiki rhetoric, with its thread and then document phases and their democratic implications. Suddenly I was tempted to throw blogs out the window for the radical space of wikis! Or at least post a seed wiki page listing the major challenges our department faces in its various writing courses, teach everyone how to post, and stand back and see what happens.
I had the funny realization as I talked for a few minutes at the blogging SIG session and as I listened to one or two blogging presentations that bloggers face a conference dilemma that others don't face: when it comes time to stand up and talk, a portion of our audience has already read our best ideas weeks or even months ago.
And of course it was good to see old friends doing well there in the shadow of the Alamo, which was surrounded by posh catering tents and stage lights for Saturday's premier part for the new movie about the historic battle. [0 & P]
I liked meeting bloggers whose work I have been reading and discussing, and I was very happy to hear a whole panel on wikis whose highlight, for me, was M. C. Morgan's clear discussion of wiki rhetoric, with its thread and then document phases and their democratic implications. Suddenly I was tempted to throw blogs out the window for the radical space of wikis! Or at least post a seed wiki page listing the major challenges our department faces in its various writing courses, teach everyone how to post, and stand back and see what happens.
I had the funny realization as I talked for a few minutes at the blogging SIG session and as I listened to one or two blogging presentations that bloggers face a conference dilemma that others don't face: when it comes time to stand up and talk, a portion of our audience has already read our best ideas weeks or even months ago.
And of course it was good to see old friends doing well there in the shadow of the Alamo, which was surrounded by posh catering tents and stage lights for Saturday's premier part for the new movie about the historic battle. [0 & P]
Thursday, March 25, 2004
CCCC blogging session. Though I'm not finding it easy to post here, I did attend a session on blogging by faculty members of Belmont University. Most of the student blogs mentioned frequently involved personal rather than academic writing, and I went away from the session continuing to think about genre: weblogs as involving more than one genre choice, and our assignments also involving a range of genres, and students bringing with them expectations about genre and skill (or not) in various genres.
So it is not surprising that students often pick up on the personal elements of weblogs, unless we have a shared project that directs our work elsewhere -- they may very well know journal or personal genres much better than other weblog genres, and we may or may not teach or even require any other genre in course weblogs. I think we should make a choice for our courses, and if a more academically-focused or professional or community-service weblog, say, makes sense in the course, then we should teach and require that genre. There are great weblogs that are focused like this, and we can read these with our students and learn more about the genre together.
Weblogs being what they are, I suspect that we will find some blurring of genres in the posts our students write, but part of the work we do is to teach genre, so even in the blogosphere I'm in favor of carrying on that work. Let's do something particular on course weblogs. Let's have a project. [0 & P]
So it is not surprising that students often pick up on the personal elements of weblogs, unless we have a shared project that directs our work elsewhere -- they may very well know journal or personal genres much better than other weblog genres, and we may or may not teach or even require any other genre in course weblogs. I think we should make a choice for our courses, and if a more academically-focused or professional or community-service weblog, say, makes sense in the course, then we should teach and require that genre. There are great weblogs that are focused like this, and we can read these with our students and learn more about the genre together.
Weblogs being what they are, I suspect that we will find some blurring of genres in the posts our students write, but part of the work we do is to teach genre, so even in the blogosphere I'm in favor of carrying on that work. Let's do something particular on course weblogs. Let's have a project. [0 & P]
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Prepping the CCCC conference. Here are some links I'm organizing for a handout for the blogging roundtable at this week's CCCC conference in San Antonio. I will be adding to this over the next few days.
Blogroll: the list of links to other weblogs maintained in the right or left column of most blogs. This list can be stored on one's own software in html code, imported from a service such as Bloglines, or maintained as a mini-blog coded to appear there beside the main weblog entries (a somewhat advanced feature of weblog software).
Use the blogrolls of these blogs to check out a particular realm of blogging:
Food Blogs: Chocolate & Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier here
Education Blogs: Will Richardson here
Journalism: Jay Rosen here and Ed Cone here and The Blogging of the President here and The Campaign Desk here and CyberJournalist here and Warblogs here
Nature: Lisa Thompson's Field Notes here
Government: Tom Watson, a British Labour MP keeps a blog here
An introduction to the A-list of blogging: Dave Winer, here ['A-List' is blogging slang for the most famous, most visited weblogs.]
People with Projects: some of the most interesting blogs are tightly focused on the writer's project. Students could certainly collaborate on this kind of weblog.
Nature writing: A Donegal Hedgerow by Stuart Dunlop, a weblog in which Mr. Dunlop offers pictures taken nearly every day of the flora and fauna of a picturesque rural area in Donegal, Ireland. The site has attracted much attention, and now Mr. Dunlop teaches schools how to set up their own nature studies on the web. here
Land and culture of Vernon Burton's Mississippi flood plain project here
Food writing: Julie Powell's Julie/Julia Project traced her successful attempt to cook all 500-plus recipes from Julia Child's French cooking masterpiece in the space of one year. This will no doubt become a book sometime soon. here
The Secret Life of Bees: Will Richardson's students made a website about the book that is still getting thousands of visits long after the course that made it ended here
People or groups using weblog or weblog-like software to create web periodicals:
In These Times -- here
The Campaign Desk -- here
On the Trail (New York Times) -- here
The Revealer -- here
Hotelmarketing Newsweekly -- here
Good News India -- here
Butterflies and Wheels -- here
Web Tools Newsletter -- here
Progress Report -- here
National Geographic News -- here
openDemocracy -- here
Washington Monthly -- here/
The Gadflyer -- here
Information Commons -- here
AlterNet -- here
CounterPunch -- here
Documents and resources:
Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan's early Blogger's Manifesto here
Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy essay here
M. C. Morgan's online courses on wikis and web rhetoric here and here
Electronic portfolio programs here and here
A toolkit for holding electronic discussions here
An interpretation of the blog-influenced fall of Trent Lott here
How to make authentic alien crop circles here !
NYU's Virtual Casebook Project for in-depth study of culture here
A glossary of web terms here
One way to use a weblog to compile bibliography here
Three elements of a dynamic website here
Bloglines: a free news aggregator that can gather all your RSS feeds into one location, maintain your blogroll, search weblogs for our favorite subjects, and present a focused weblog collection for your students here
Blogroots: a news listing devoted to developments in blogging and its technologies here
Danchan, a provider of free weblogs here
Jose Luis Orihuela provides links to academic weblogs in Spanish and Portuguese here
Kairosnews collects a number of weblogs on rhetoric and writing here
PhDweblogs collects links to blogs kept by Ph.D. candidates in a variety of fields here Professors Who Blog is here: here
Oliver Wrede's conference essay on weblogs and discourse here
Rebecca Blood's collection of her major pieces about the history and nature of weblogs here
Jorn Barger's instructions on good linking practices here
Tim Berners-Lee's 1997 vision for the web here
Web Tools Newsletter here
UTT Weblog Cyber-journalistes (Journal sur l'usage des Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication dans l'enseignement et la formation) here
A group of links about the nature of blogging here
Jay Rosen's two posts about the conservative and radical traits of weblogs here and here
Weblogs: A Swiss Army website, parts one and two here and here
Web 2.0 theory here
Genres
Commonplace book -- a genre suited to collaboration and solo meditation here
Rubrics for rating a weblog? here [0 & P]
Blogroll: the list of links to other weblogs maintained in the right or left column of most blogs. This list can be stored on one's own software in html code, imported from a service such as Bloglines, or maintained as a mini-blog coded to appear there beside the main weblog entries (a somewhat advanced feature of weblog software).
Use the blogrolls of these blogs to check out a particular realm of blogging:
Food Blogs: Chocolate & Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier here
Education Blogs: Will Richardson here
Journalism: Jay Rosen here and Ed Cone here and The Blogging of the President here and The Campaign Desk here and CyberJournalist here and Warblogs here
Nature: Lisa Thompson's Field Notes here
Government: Tom Watson, a British Labour MP keeps a blog here
An introduction to the A-list of blogging: Dave Winer, here ['A-List' is blogging slang for the most famous, most visited weblogs.]
People with Projects: some of the most interesting blogs are tightly focused on the writer's project. Students could certainly collaborate on this kind of weblog.
Nature writing: A Donegal Hedgerow by Stuart Dunlop, a weblog in which Mr. Dunlop offers pictures taken nearly every day of the flora and fauna of a picturesque rural area in Donegal, Ireland. The site has attracted much attention, and now Mr. Dunlop teaches schools how to set up their own nature studies on the web. here
Land and culture of Vernon Burton's Mississippi flood plain project here
Food writing: Julie Powell's Julie/Julia Project traced her successful attempt to cook all 500-plus recipes from Julia Child's French cooking masterpiece in the space of one year. This will no doubt become a book sometime soon. here
The Secret Life of Bees: Will Richardson's students made a website about the book that is still getting thousands of visits long after the course that made it ended here
People or groups using weblog or weblog-like software to create web periodicals:
In These Times -- here
The Campaign Desk -- here
On the Trail (New York Times) -- here
The Revealer -- here
Hotelmarketing Newsweekly -- here
Good News India -- here
Butterflies and Wheels -- here
Web Tools Newsletter -- here
Progress Report -- here
National Geographic News -- here
openDemocracy -- here
Washington Monthly -- here/
The Gadflyer -- here
Information Commons -- here
AlterNet -- here
CounterPunch -- here
Documents and resources:
Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan's early Blogger's Manifesto here
Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy essay here
M. C. Morgan's online courses on wikis and web rhetoric here and here
Electronic portfolio programs here and here
A toolkit for holding electronic discussions here
An interpretation of the blog-influenced fall of Trent Lott here
How to make authentic alien crop circles here !
NYU's Virtual Casebook Project for in-depth study of culture here
A glossary of web terms here
One way to use a weblog to compile bibliography here
Three elements of a dynamic website here
Bloglines: a free news aggregator that can gather all your RSS feeds into one location, maintain your blogroll, search weblogs for our favorite subjects, and present a focused weblog collection for your students here
Blogroots: a news listing devoted to developments in blogging and its technologies here
Danchan, a provider of free weblogs here
Jose Luis Orihuela provides links to academic weblogs in Spanish and Portuguese here
Kairosnews collects a number of weblogs on rhetoric and writing here
PhDweblogs collects links to blogs kept by Ph.D. candidates in a variety of fields here Professors Who Blog is here: here
Oliver Wrede's conference essay on weblogs and discourse here
Rebecca Blood's collection of her major pieces about the history and nature of weblogs here
Jorn Barger's instructions on good linking practices here
Tim Berners-Lee's 1997 vision for the web here
Web Tools Newsletter here
UTT Weblog Cyber-journalistes (Journal sur l'usage des Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication dans l'enseignement et la formation) here
A group of links about the nature of blogging here
Jay Rosen's two posts about the conservative and radical traits of weblogs here and here
Weblogs: A Swiss Army website, parts one and two here and here
Web 2.0 theory here
Genres
Commonplace book -- a genre suited to collaboration and solo meditation here
Rubrics for rating a weblog? here [0 & P]