Looks like Barclay Barrios' blogging consortium will be presenting at CCCC.
The blog consortium that I have been corresponding with was accepted for two presentations at CCCC: "U Blog: A practical introduction to using weblogs for the classroom and research" and "Calling All Bloggers: Academic Bloggers Sharing Strategies and Resources."
Exciting, no?
I've posted information to VisRhet about fair use and copyright, something I now realize should have been done much earlier.
For a class that will be conducting itself partially online, that discussion is crucial. It is a conversation that should begin in 101 and 102 with things like the library tours and discussions of source evaluation, but the discussion gets richer and deeper in upper-level classes because there's more talk about repurposing information.
We had an interesting, if impromptu, discussion this week in the Visual Rhetoric and Design class. We talked about blogs, specifically, we talked about using them in the classroom, what people liked and didn't like about them.
Since I really appreciate the blogging format, I was most interested in what they didn't like about blogs. Those places of discomfort often reveal more about someone then their likes.
This class has a greater number of professional writing majors then the lower-level classes, which to me made it a perfect choice for blogging since so much of professional writing happens, or is distributed online now, a trend which shows no sign of slowing down.
One student expressed a discomfort with the use of such public medium in education. They felt that the education process should be one that allowed for mistakes to be made and progress to occur in private.
It really made me think about the value and energy that goes into thoughts of failure and being wrong and the process of growth and change. I think that in online culture, much like entrepreneural culture, failure is just seen as a part of the process of growth and not necessessarily as something earth-shattering or permanent. That is not how much of the culture thinks about failure, however.
The 102 classes are off and running. Shari's class has begun blogging after a brief introduction.
She chose a controlled form of blogging; she posts and they comment.
The article "(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything..." explains the increasingly distributed nature of creative works of all kinds. Used to be, big media outlets like book publishers and television producers were the gatekeepers for what was smart and/or entertaining.
Increasingly, the public decides for themselves what is interesting and what is not. Anyone can publish a book, put up a website or blog like this one, or make a digital movie and have it distributed online for peanuts. That pulls quite a bit of power away from mainstream media outlets and they're forced to play catch-up. They've gone from being gatekeepers to being me-toos.
Slowly and surely, the blogging teachers are discovering their blogs and figuring out what they want to do with them.
This week, for Visual Rhetoric, I'll be assigning a word document redesign as an introduction to dealing with graphics and styles. Word's style begin discussions about separaing content from design, providing the metaphor for beginning html, if any of them want to get that far.
Having to look at graphics and styles and layouts also draws home for some of them that writing is more then just thinking about words. How your words look can influence how they are received.
I'm so excited that, after a bit of installation hell, we've managed to get Loboblogs up and running.
So far, there are five blogs set up, four for specific classes (mostly 102 and tech writing), one for CFP's, one for employment listings, and a couple of other random blogs for organizations.
I'm hoping that these brave souls who are making the blog venture will appropriate the space as their own and use the blog according to their needs. The CFP blog (proposal listings) will be journal-style. The classroom blogs will mostly be group blogs, though some will be just single-user.
So, YAY for loboblogs!
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