People will talk. Daniel Rubin, the blogger at Blinq, the new site belonging to the Philadelphia Inquirer, (where Blinq = BLog of the INQuirer) already has a good eye for the key quotation. He offers this on blogging from Michael Cornfield:

This [the blogosphere] is where all of us go to find evidence of whatever is in the new. When people can put their own hands on evidence, they're going to talk. The Blogosphere has emerged as a forum - half forensic lab, half tavern - where people can gather and think and talk and investigate and contribute to the natural discourse in a way they haven't before. #

The second sentence implies a little theory of human psychology and political science, all at once, and it goes like this: healthy people communicate, healthy societies let them. The third sentence extends the theory: civic communication is at once work and play and social glue. And finally, it's natural. When we can't or don't talk, something or someone -- us? our society? -- is ill.

It's a good day in the blogosphere when a brand new blog offers such pithy moments. [0 & P]

Plagiarism tutorial. The Indiana University School of Education has created an online tutorial for students to learn more about plagiarism. A ten-item quiz at the end tests a visitor's knowledge. [I just got an 80% on the quiz myself, but I confess that I only skimmed the tutorial.] [0 & P]

Cronin on distributed cognition. Just a thought: though he recently blasted blogging, Blaise Cronin's own scholarship provides clues about some ways for academic bloggers to justify blogging as scholarship on the academy's own terms. In "Bowling alone together: Academic writing as distributed cognition," he starts to dismantle the myth of the solo scholar, saying in the abstract:

The twentieth century saw the progressive collectivization of science -- dramatic growth in teamwork in general and large-scale collaboration in particular. Cognitive partnering in the conduct of research and scholarship has become commonplace, and this trend is reflected in rates of co-authorship and sub-authorship collaboration. The effects of these developments on academic writing are discussed and theorized in terms of distributed cognition.

He presents the writing of his own article as a major example of the process:

For instance, in writing this brief communication I talked at length with my colleague Yvonne Rogers (an active researcher in the human-computer interaction and cognitive science communities), drew upon an array of textual resources (including the articles, papers, and books listed in the references), made use of artifacts to hand (a pocket calculator, search engine, text editor, spellchecker, pen and paper), and looked at a number of external representations (charts and diagrams). I did not sit down one Thursday morning and suddenly decide that it was time to write a few words on the subject of scholarly publishing and distributed cognition. First, the idea emerged slowly and unfocusedly from recent and not so recent exchanges with colleagues near and far. Second, my ability to build some kind of argument, linking what we know about authorial practices in the world of scholarly communication with current thinking about distributed cognition in fields such as psychology, cognitive science, cultural anthropology, and education (e.g., Salomon, [1997]), was contingent on my having easy access to the thoughts of others, whether directly (via face-to-face conversation or e-mail exchange) or indirectly (via the published literature or archival e-mail/list-serv postings).

More of the details of his writing process are presented, most of which, like linking above, are familiar to education bloggers. By the end, when Cronin concludes that "academic writing is a high-level instance of distributed cognition," I find myself having hope that in some fashion or another we can someday win a proper place for academic blogging in the hierarchy of the university.

His article is here: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Volume 55, Issue 6, Pages 557-560. [0 & P]

Illustrated Bloglines primer. At Betterdays, there is a very detailed guide to using Bloglines, with a few dozen screen captures to illustrate the process. [0 & P]

Technology and knowledge in an open society. They're still looking for presenters for next month's International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, & Society, to be held in Berkeley. Many topics are listed on their call for papers and presentations, including these that caught my eye:

Theme 1: Technologies for Human Use

* Technology, knowledge and society: re-examining the connections.
* Human-technology interaction, interfaces and useability.
* Cybernetics, informatics, systemics and distributed networks.
* Open computing: the theory and practice of open source and free software.
* Creative Commons.

Theme 2: Technologies for Participatory Citizenship

* Technology, participation, access and equity.
* E-government, e-democracy and cyber-civics.
* Participatory systems.
* The politics of information.
* Technological meets social transformation.

Theme 3: Technologies for Autonomous Communities

* Communities of practice and knowledge-creating communities.
* Virtual communities.
* Communities as publishers.
* Communities as networks: the dynamics of collaboration and community building.
* Differences of sensibility and access: gender, language, culture.
* Cyber-identities.

Theme 4: Technologies for New Learning

* Learning by design: curriculum and instruction in the era of networked computing.
* Interactive and collaborative learning.
* Digital meanings, multimodal communications and multiliteracies.
* Organisational learning and the learning organisation.
* The virtual university.

Theme 5: Technologies for Common Knowledge

* Technology in the service of the 'knowledge society'.
* Data, information, knowledge, wisdom: re-examining core concepts.
* Knowledge management: nurturing personal and common knowledge.
* Participatory design.
* Creative Commons and commercial realities: what are the economic conditions for knowledge and innovation? [0 & P]

National Book Awards tonight. This year's National Book Awards should be posted on their website by 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time. I'm eager to find out if my former teacher, the late Donald Justice, will be recognized, as I hope. Looking at the site, I see a nice collection of paragraphs and mini-essays by past winners all talking about books that changed their lives. Here is the wonderful writer of juvenile fiction, Richard Peck:

I believe Alice in Wonderland was the first book to change my life, thought I don't think I've yet read it right through. My mother read it to me when I was five. She read to me sedulously, having no intention of sending off an ignoramus to first grade. One afternoon my aunt came in and said to her, "What are you reading to him?"

"Alice in Wonderland," my mother said.

"What's it about?" my aunt asked.

"I wish I knew," my mother answered.

I was struck dumb. At five I thought my mother knew everything. If there were depths in books that even she hadn't plumbed, that was the life for me.

It's too bad these little pieces about life-changing books are stuck deep inside a static page instead of rotating, through the wonders of templates and feeds, in a more prominent spot on that site and in sidebars of other sites. Down with static sites . . . . Well, at least we can link to it.

If you and your favorite young reader are new to Richard Peck, walk don't run to the bookstore or library to get the two books that focus on Grandma Dowdel, A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder. There is also a wonderful book on tape version of at least the first one, a masterpiece of hilarity for long car trips. Peck learned so well from Mark Twain, as you'll quickly see -- he says:

From Mark Twain I learned that humor is anger sent to finishing school. [0 & P]

Standing searches. I'll be in the computer lab with students tomorrow introducing standing searches on Bloglines and Google News, and I'll be asking them to use these tools in their blogging and research in the weeks ahead. It seems to me that standing searches, whether these or others, must be part of the essential toolkit these days. Our library's online data bases offer standing searches, too, but they haven't been (to me) very user-friendly yet and I can't assign them until they I can get them to work properly for me. [5 & P]

Scholastic journalism resources. I just ran across a large collection of web resources for people involved in scholastic journalism at our sister (uncle? father? estranged cousin?) campus, Indiana University in Bloomington. Lots of things you'd hope for are there, such as design guides, media watchdog sites, legal resources, news services, sample policy statements, and style guides. There are even a few streaming audio stations broadcast by high schools.

And maybe best of all, this substantial site was made by students as a class project:

The site was developed as a project for the J425/525 Supervision of School Publications classes at Indiana University, Bloomington. The course is taught by Prof. David Adams, a former high school journalism teacher and current faculty member and student media adviser at Indiana University.

This site was originally compiled by Angel Brown, Christina Collins, Michelle Laird, Chris Sikich and Brooke Thompson as part of a class project for the course J425/525, Supervision of School Publications, in the fall of 2000. It was updated extensively by Sarah Bullock in 2001. Most recently, the site was redesigned and updated by IU graduate students Beth Moellers and Lori Henson in December 2003. More related site links continue to be added as well as more original material developed by those interested in scholastic journalism issues, editorial policies and educational resources. [0 & P]

The U.S. Geological Survey rocks. I spent some time wandering around the attractive, user-friendly, science-rich pages of the USGS web site. You can go quite a ways on this site -- I found a page on reading geologic maps, for example. Some sections are meant for K-12 and others seek a wider audience.
[0 & P]

Literary radio series on the web. I see that the University of Iowa's radio station, WSUI, teams up with Iowa City's distinguised bookstore, Prairie Lights, to broadcast a weekly reading series called Live from Prairie Lights. The archive includes dozens of poetry and fiction readings and the occasional other event -- I noticed a reading and discussion of MoveOn's book about activism, for example. There is supposed to be a rebroadcast of a reading by Donald Justice soon to remember the poet who died earlier this month, too. If you ever pass through eastern Iowa in Interstate 80, stop in downtown Iowa City and visit Prairie Lights. For one thing, there is no better poetry selection for hundreds of miles in any direction. [0 & P]