blogging in academia

I wonder how much the buzz in this article will affect academia's view of blogging. "blogging and blugging" can work for graduate students who want a forum for their ideas without having to go through a major publisher; news feeds list prominent blogs in addition to the regular opinion writers, and many of those have switched their methodology to blogging. Yet this really great tool still seems to be on the outskirts when it comes to teaching.
The Ed Techie says:

At this stage, it is more about the social networking than establishing a profile around ideas. The relative importance of a blog may depend on who you are and where you are in your career.

He's saying that the people moving 'beyond' blogging are the ones already established within their field of expertise, perhaps why they feel more comfortable moving to a more plastic flow of information on Twitter or FriendFeed.

I agree with his view that blogs are not just archives . Technology hasn't moved quite that fast. The relative slowness of blog comments and feedback (compared to instant messaging or other networking sites) are part of what make blogs a really great space to think out ideas and interact with other minds. Face to face and real time mediated conversations are great, but there is a definite difference in dialogue when there isn't the immediate pressure to sound 'smart' in your response, when you can read the posted ideas and go away and process your thoughts and eventual response.

I know that when I was an undergraduate I enjoyed listservs and class forums, but there was a problem with members of the class not participating. Blogs however, are definitely more open to being injected with one's personality. There's room to add pictures, font choices, which blogging service you use, etc... With the removal of the university as supplier, one of the layers between the student and posting goes away. It feels like less of a chore set up by the institution (with the university's logo ever present) and more like an demonstration of one's personal intellect. This is not to say that new tools like Twitter wouldn't help with such an exercise, but there is too much unexplored potential in blogging at the undergraduate level to move forward quite yet.

truth

If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.

Across the Universe

Last year, when the trailer for Across the Universe came out, I was ecstatic. Acid tripping through Julie Taymor's reinvisioned 60s with a wicked Beatles soundtrack. And dancing!

Through one scheduling mess after another, I didn't actually get to watch the movie until last week. I am glad I did not pay full price.

Although I think this review sums it up nicely, there are a few other random bits that I wonder if anyone else noticed. I seriously think this movie was funded by various advertisers hoping their 'subliminal messages' would bring in more cash.

Seriously, does this scene not remind anyone of a Microsoft infomercial?
How about this one? Coca-cola anybody?
I'm torn on this one - I thought Gap when I first saw it, but after subsequent youtube views I'm thinking an Eternity commercial, or some other brand that relies on skinny, pretty, reclining people for its image. The main difference is that there are actually nonwhite people in this clip, as opposed to the commercials.

I know I Am Sam gets ripped on for the Pavlovian usage of the Beatles, but I'm still not entirely sure how that's different or worse than using amazing pieces of rock art as mere backdrops for random bits of visual imagery.

my favorite Irish curse

With St. Patrick's Day fast approaching...

"May the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind illegitimate children chase you so far over the hills of damnation that the Lord himself can't find you with a telescope"

No offense meant to any reader, just some food for thought and some inspiration perhaps for creative naysaying instead of relying on four letter words.

This is probably one of the best posts on why Wikipedia and academia don't mix.
It does seem that Wiki goes beyond a typical encyclopedia in detail, especially on certain entries that have twenty different subheadings, yet I can definitely see the need to put limitations on how and where students should use Wiki tidbits.

I was finally accepted to the University of WA English graduate program. Now I just wait and see if I was also accepted as a Teaching Assistant.

*huge grin*

The author of this post seems to be the type of person now voting for Obama. It's interesting seeing how much he correctly projected in terms of the general debacle still currently playing out.

technology

Thanks to my internet being down for a couple of weeks, I was forced to become reaquainted with that seething mass of yellow paper and black ink otherwise known as the phone book. It's a funny instrument, highly useful when Google is off limits, and perhaps even when I do have internet access. The miracle of search engines is not to be belittled, but one does have to have a general idea of what one is looking for. Wheras with the phone book, one might be browsing through looking for, say, a dance clothing shop, whereupon that said person realizes those shops are sandwiched in between 12 dairy suppliers and 4 dart board makers. You can't really find that variety with just one search on Google. I suppose you could look up the Yellow pages online, but that would just be silly.

teaching

About a year and a half ago, I was speaking with one of my professors about graduate school. He was writing me a letter of rec, and he queried why I was just applying to the English grad program and not to Communication (as that was my undergrad degree). I responded off the top of my head (not a safe place to grab stuff from generally) that I didn't want to spend my life performing statistical studies. He seemed somewhat disappointed in my answer and iterated how that really wasn't the focus of the department.

I think I have a better answer now. The more I think about it in this long interim, the more I realize that my true love is teaching. I want to teach college kids to write and how to write well. Now of course I want to integrate what I learned about new technologies and the like, different texts = different ways of writing. But even then in my professor's office I knew on some subconscious level that I was interested more in the structure rather than the content.

It's really the teaching. In my current part time job as a writing tutor, I love it when the kids finally "get" something and when I see their writing improve. Even if it takes a long while, at the very least I seem to be good at helping them see that writing is not the horrific behemoth they once thought.

Hopefully the above ideas come across not quite as cheesy but just as heartfelt as they would in person.

once again

Well, all my stuff is ready and compiled, except for my writing samples that I will print out at the Odegaard Library. At approximately 2:30 today I will have just turned in my application for the UW's English doctoral program. Here's hoping the English classes I took this summer and fall earn me some brownie points. They were quite fun/stimulating/freakin hard/yet interesting at the very least.

"blogging and blugging"

Interesting article.

Religion and Tech?

In Jerry Seinfeld's latest interview, he discloses how he used tenets of Scientology to improve his interpersonal communication and performance skills, going so far to say as "It's all technology."

In another article also posted today on msnbc, tech is used to create Jesus 2.0. The proliferation of Christian based, or faith based websites is being touted as shifting the way we worship.

Now I use a few websites myself for theological questions - enduringword.com being one. But does this really change the way I worship? I'm definitely getting more information, perhaps more quickly than in the past when I would have waited for an opportunity to talk to someone with expertise in the area I had questions about.

In the Jesus 2.0 article, this quote disturbed me, and really gets to the point of this post.

"Spark Networks spokeswoman Gail Laguna argues that religion has a real power to pull together a niche market online" (my emphasis).

Not addressed in this article is how these online sites are being funded. Pop up ads? Donations? Specific churches funding them? When Seinfeld took Scientology classes, how much did he have to pay for them.

I'm finding this recent conflation of technology and religion, all the while ignoring the undergirding economic forces, highly disturbing.

Slate.com has quite a few instances of this, albeit a bit more implicit. "Blogging the Bible" was quite popular on the front page for a few months. There was recently a bit of buzz concerning the man who lived every rule (really?) of the Bible for an entire year. Now, journalism, especially online journalism, is a bit trickier to unpack in terms of economics, besides the fact that journalists want to get paid. But in the case of the Biblical guinea pig, he had a book coming out describing his experiences.