Blogs opening political discourse

This Boston Globe article 'Blogs' shake the political discourse discusses the role that blogs are playing in the upcoming political election, and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. They contrast Edwards campaign's rejection of the blogging medium in contrast with the Dean campaign's love affair with it.

They also didn't mention that Dean is getting significant campaign contributions based on his online participation. Dean was a guest blogger for the Stanford Law School's blog and really brought a personal voice to his public campaign. Deans grassroots campaign is energizing a class of young, educated people that have been ignored since Clinton's first campaign for the presidency. It will be interesting to see how far it goes.

BlogChangeBot

At last, an easy to send notifications without having to add everybody's email address to the 'notifications' page.

With BlogChangeBot, you get IM'd every time your favorite blog is updated.

1. Go to your AIM window (or download AIM)
2. Add Blogchangebot to your buddy list
3. Open a window 'speaking' to blogchangebot and type 'subscribe www.yourblog.com' where 'your blog' is the URL for the blog you want notification on.
4. Hilarity ensures

MT; it does everything but create content

In this article, Matt Haughey talks about using MT to manage an entire site, and how to use SSI's and the template systems to do that.

I do an extremely small, limited version of that here on Weeblog, and I intend to do a bigger version of the website I manage at work. I'm learning a lot about the whole site management process thanks to a co-worker who has a much bigger and more difficult job managing his network of 19k-odd users at the Long-Term Ecological Research center.

Unsuccessful Reputation Management

Chalk it up to "when your process gets laid open to the world even more then you think it should be."

Blogger A is a controversial figure.

Blogger B claims that Blogger A is prone to outbursts online, which Blogger A later claims he never made and then removes from his blog.

Blogger B sets up a site that monitors Blogger A's blog and highlights deletions, additions, and changes to old material.

Blogger A loses credibility when the world can see him deleting paragraphs of text (text he's claimed wasn't there?).

This prompts arguments about copyright, common license, and fair use.

In the end, however, they both lose when they both spend their reputation currency on something rather personal-looking and ugly.

And, of course, MetaFilter talks about it.

Microsofty bloggers

Apparently Microsoft employees are beginning to blog, which is forcing the company to set policy outlining the kinds of information that is ok for outside consumption, and the kind that isn't.

In the beginning of the article, an employee explains that he chooses the content for his blog with three people in mind; his wife, his boss, and Steve Ballmer.

This is an excellent example for the kinds of audience questions that public writers of all kinds must answer before they commit their words to electronic immortality.

NYT Blog Article (Tech Section)

The article Blogs in the Workplace discusses the increasing use of K-logs (knowledge logs) in business intranets, for everything from project management to email alleviation to employee morale.

Observation: many, many students will be using blogs or something blog-like in their business lives, but right now they aren't being prepared for that kind of writing.

Blog teach-in Part I: The Teaching Technical Writing Students

A few weeks ago, I had a blogging day with the "Teaching Technical Writing" students and a few of Susan Romano's 537 students who will be teaching Comp 101 and 102 in the Fall. I gave them access to CompTheoryBlog as their test blog, which seemed appropriate considering we used it for CompTheory for much the same purpose.

I decided to begin the class by talking about the Teaching for Technical Writing student experience, since it's the class I was actually in, and I'm extremely interested in the dynamics of the class.

Background:

The class (12 students) was pretty evenly divided between Literature/Creative Writing students and Professional Writing students. Many of the professional writing students had experience in technical writing.

What happened:

When everyone arrived in the lab, I handed out my MT Posting Instructions and told them to log in and change their password (it was explained in the handout). As people had trouble, I wandered around answering questions when people appeared to be having trouble.

Then I started my talk. I explained the structure and purpose of blogs, both individual and group. I talked about blogging as a project management tool, and why it was valuable to have a central location for interactions and documents related to a specific project. I talked about community warrents and online ethos, and how important they are in an online world when nobody knows you personally. I then talk about rhetorical situations and how it prepares students to deal with multiple audiences for their writing, and how it can give shy students the opportunity to contribute.

I answered a few questions, and then set them loose blogging.

Arguments that I expected and got:

• "How is this valuable."
  Personally, I find it annoying to have to constantly communicate the real need for writing instruction that goes beyond the played-out five-paragraph essay.
  
  To respond to this "why does this matter," argument, I tried my best to explain that 99% of the writing that most students will do in their lives won't be in essay form. Because a writing teacher cannot prepare students for every form of writing they'll need to someday undertake, it would help to expose students to a wider variety of writing situations. Blogging gives students the opportunity to write for multiple audiences and in rhetorical situations that are unstable, just like what they'll need in their lives. Most students won't end up in writing careers, but they will end up having to compose email where they won't know all of the recipients, they'll have to write a huge variety of other things as well. Preparing them to examine the rhetorical situations in which they write prepares them to handle any writing situation. It's hard to vary the rhetorical situation when the audience is always the teacher.
  
  Having students produce publically-available material also forces them to really consider the implications of their language and their views. It raises the possibility for feedback. Most people get little feedback on their writing, and aren't really forced to consider what the language they use says about them. I usually insert the reputation management discussion here, where I have them google me on groups.yahoo.com and view the results, and what it says about me as a person.
  
  My advisor was also rather dismayed at the reductive way in which some approached the writing needs of their students. At the same time, however, the blogging format was compelling enough that they sat down and wrote for almost a solid hour. The lab was silent except for the click-click-click of their keyboards. For that alone, I think blogging is valuable for a writing class.

Things I didn't expect:

• I didn't expect the positioning that I saw, where it was apparent that statements were being made that weren't the writer's opinion, but were intended to elicit discussion on a particular topic. In blogging communities, of course, this is discouraged because one should never say what one doesn't mean because of the damage to one's ethos. I have to think more about this because, frankly, it was so unexpected for me.
  
• The "how is this argument." It's tough to talk about my ideas about argument when people's opinion of what constitutes argument are so different. There was some outright rejection of the "every communication between or among people is an argument."

Lessons

I don't know that I'll do anything differently next time, but as always I wanted to do more. I'd delve as deeply into argument theory as I could manage, and link it to online argument and the idea of reputation management as an online form of ethos.