Trackback info

Not sure I understand the Trackback thing either, didn't even know I installed it. But here's all I've been able to find out about it.

http://www.haloscan.com/news/

Ok, Joe Duemer is at Clarkson, looks like he might be a lit prof (got to do more research), and these seem to be comments on his blog (of which he has a lot of other kinds of links as well). Check out his homepage: http://chujoe.net/

So, watching this whole thing that has happened on Joe's blog has me thinking about ownership issues. It's almost beyond an intersection of public & private here. It's Joe's blog, and the argument has absolutely nothing to do with anthing he said. Is the space his anymore? But it's public space. Anyone can post there. So he doesn't own it. Neither do any of the others own each others' blogs, yet they want to control the space, what gets said about whatever else. Is something that someone says about you yours or that person's? Who owns words?

And what about authorship here. You don't write your own blog. But it's yours, so we think, "it's my blog and I write it." Well, not really. We all write each other's blogs together. We shape them together. I write about books, movies, etc. because that's what my friends write about. I don't write about too many really personal things because I don't want people to read them. But some things that I don't consider all that personal could be used to represent me in ways I don't want to be represented, so I can't actually control this. There's a lot of inter-authorship (is that a word? I just don't think co-authorship works here) going on in a blog.

More thoughts... I really am curious to hear your responses to my questions, as I figured you did this in your classes, but I wasn't sure exactly how. I am beginning to see ways I could bring other kinds of writing in BTW. I am especially seeing ways we could do more of a new media focus. My students might hate this. But I think I could even do another course I proposed on this topic, although my students might hate that too because it'd be "too theoretical". I don't know. I have many good ideas, but much bad audience analysis.

Yesterday, since the paper prototype thing, I am thinking about prototypes. They use these things to do almost everything, like a wooden box to decide what size a PDA should be, or car prototypes, etc. We are going to use paper, scissors, sticky notes, tape, pens, & pencils to create a mock website that users could test to see if the arrangement of information makes sense to them. What could we do with this other than what people usually do? Where are the distinctions between work & play here?

One of my students, Lauren, said last night, that she is in technical writing basically because she doesn't have to think for herself. She is very sweet, and she didn't say this in a mean way, but I was shocked. I guess I should have known it. She explained that she hates having papers where she has to come up with something to say about anything, a book, etc. I don't think it's that she has nothing to say, but that it's difficult to write about what you have to say. (I relate to this because I have such a hard time writing about things I care about). She says she hates writing. But not really, she just hates expressivist writing. I told her, it's not that you don't get to think for yourself in technical writing, it's that you don't get to write about whatever you want. But the thinking part is not attached. You have to think for yourself in order to be a good technical writer.

Bringing this back to blogs, why do people like them? They are an informal way for you to express whatever ideas you have. They are public, so you can express them to an audience. They don't require planning, or "thinking", and you can say whatever you want. So what's the disconnect here? Why don't people think they can say whatever they want in school? What are the constraints in that environment? How does the audience of a teacher (judge?) affect the message? Why is it easier to write about something that you are assigned to write about in a school form, but to write about whatever you want in a blog? How are people constrained in writing blogs (for example, I don't predict my class will write whatever they want in the blog for our class)

So many questions...

Fear not

HTML is wonderful. Do you remember anything about it? Janine's HTML tutorial is one place to start. Probably I learned most of what I know about HTML from doing my website for Gail's class when I manipulated the code to make my funky drop down menu.

As far as adding comments, I just went to Haloscan and followed the directions. You paste it into the places in the code where they say it goes. I showed Joe this weekend and he got it, so I have confidence you can do it also (or at least I can teach it).

Blogging is so interesting. But I can't seem to shake my DVD obsession this morning. My thought about what to do with blogs is start reading everything I can about new media. As blogs are a new genre, I wonder how DVDs are a new genre, in comparison to VHS. The movie watching experience is very different. There are so many different ways to experience the film these days, from extra footage to commentary to short films about the making of the movie to marketing, etc. etc. It's almost like movies have been made into a new genre as well. I suppose this is stuff people are doing, looking at the ways new media makes things into remediated genres. I don't know if I'm truly thinking about something new with this line of thinking. I also think I'd have to structure an entire course around DVDs in order to explore this because there is too much out there. But I wonder if there is a great reading response in this somewhere.

I think the blog qualitative research idea could be great. That is perhaps something that hasn't been done yet with blogs. The person who was writing her dissertation on blogs at the Fem Rhet conference, I don't think she was doing qualitative research. I wonder how Paul would feel about this? We'd have to do a lot more definitive work about what we wanted to do.

Do you think there are other practices we enact in class that students continue to do outside of class? For example, the probably don't webboard all that much, but a lot of people out there do, so you never know. They probably don't write outlines for papers, at least not on average. But are there other practices they might pick up? What do you guys do in your classes in relationship to students' current writing practices (not just in school but in general) Anything? Do you ever have them look at the ways they use writing outside of school?

And why do some groups really take up practices while others don't? For example, no matter how hard I try, I have never been able to get my students to use blackboard to discuss things. Perhaps they didn't really want to discuss the topics I gave them. Sometimes even when they did want to discuss, they didn't really respond to each other. I have not been able to figure out how to work on that.

Turns out I can't add comments until you make me an administrator. Do you think you can do that? If you do, I know how to add the comments.

I like the dating blog. Btw, should we set up comments for this? Or should we just comment on each other's posts this way.

Another link from a blog hater.

RMIT's Metablog

This University in Melbourne Australia has a metablog about the uses of blogs in education for their University. Interesting how limited this conversation is here. (RMIT and Metablog are different links)

Another question: What about blogs for information gathering? I'm thinking about people we know reading each other's blogs to find out personal information to be angry about, internet "yelling" at each other because of something they said on a blog, etc. It's almost like snooping, except it's public.

I also think about (and by the way I would never do this), how once I was looking at my blog on your laptop for some reason (I think I was downloading Framemaker on my computer), and your personal entries showed up. I of course didn't read them, but it's interesting how a public object (or maybe it's a private object) isn't so public, or private at all. And that's the nature of blogs. They are this amazing intersection between what have long been considered strictly public or private practices. But how private are journals anyway? We archive them in libraries, we read them published as books, we sometimes steal each others' for bribery. Interesting interesting.

I also thought about how if someone stumbled on my personal blog, they could probably find out who I was by either the times I've mentioned the University of Illinois or linked to Shawn or E who mention the town, the University, and other such things often. How many Hannahs are there in the English department? Exactly. And if you know my first name and some of my interests, you can find my blog in 10 links on Google. So how private is it? But then again, how public? Who would want to read it? Are my personal thoughts really of that much interest to people? If I'm unimportant, than so is my blog.

This is a rant about bloggers that Janine sent me.

One of my favorite blogging questions of the day:

When talking about a blog with almost all images and very little text: "Is this a blog?" Leading to, what are the conventions of a blog, and is it a blog if it doesn't follow those conventions?

Are blogs truly searchable? In other words, you can't actually find something you're interested in unless you know what you're looking for... Looking at blog archives tells you nothing about where you want to go. So how else could we conceive of archiving other than just chronologically? And is archiving like that possible (I'm sure it is, but we probably don't even think of that) And how does archiving a blog compare to archiving someone's journal in a collection?