A lot of people have been pointing me to this article on using blogs in writing classes instead of term papers. For an extensive answer, see my dissertation from 2007. Just sayin’. But yeah, communication forms change. That doesn’t mean we do away with argument and evidence and critical thinking. I mean, we used to give speeches (without teleprompters) all the time. We spoke poems. Now we have radio, tv, print articles, books, web sites, youtube, all kinds of ways of conveying an argument. We should teach all those.
Earlier this week, Jackie talked about using Twitter and how it’s been going. She finds Facebook more “conversational” for her, but Twitter still has its purposes.
Obviously, I’ve been reinvesting my time here. I spend most of my time online reading other blogs. It makes sense to me to up my contribution again in that medium. And I like writing and I want a bit of a record of my teaching so that when I go to plan next year, I can see what works and what doesn’t. I’m sure some people come here and say tl;dr, but that’s okay. I’ve seen some other people start blogging more again to work against the Twitter and Facebook mentality of 240 characters (or at least shorter posts). And I think that’s a good impetus.
Over the last two years, I’ve pulled back from contributing to most social media, mostly due to time constraints, but as I’ve settled into my new job, I’ve felt not only that I have time to participate, but also a need to participate. My school knows about all my media participation. I post about my activities at school and often my school will retweet or post to Facebook some of the things I do. Which is fabulous. So part of my writing is appropriate for PR. But also, I learn a lot, and I learn a lot more when I’m actively participating. So here’s where I’m building my efforts.
Twitter: I tend to check in with Twitter in the morning after my morning blog reading/posting. I shifted the people I follow to mostly K-12 educators. That has been really helpful to me as those folks post articles about teaching and discuss teaching in many ways. I’ve also participated in several scheduled chats via Twitter, which I also find helpful. My favorite of those is #isedchat, a chat specifically for independent schools. Most teachers are public school teachers and have to deal with very different issues than those of us who are IS teachers. Most of my participation is during those chats. Besides a post or two in the morning, I mostly follow. And I think that’s okay.
Facebook: I am thinking about getting rid of my Facebook account. I haven’t even logged in lately and frankly, I find it kind of creepy. It’s not a professional space for me and I don’t want it to be a personal space. And I have issues with their privacy policies. So that might go away. I’m on the fence still.
Google+: I really like Google+, but I’m not following that many people and/or the people I follow are not posting much. So the traffic is low. Which is sort of a good thing. The people I’m following there are different from the people I follow via blogs and Twitter. And I think that’s a good thing. In fact, the blogs I read are generally not the same people I follow on Twitter either. Google+ encourages more writing than Facebook or Twitter, but not as much as blogging. It’s a good place to post an article and write a brief snippet about it. Some people have suggested that they’re going to use it as a blog, which, frankly, I don’t have any desire to do. But I do like the slightly more thoughtful nature of it. It’s slower than Twitter, less silly than Facebook. That may be a factor of the people not the tool, but that’s the feel of it for now.
I’m still searching for a different social bookmarking tool. I’m sticking with Delicious for now, but I want something new.
Another tool that I’ve used a lot less is Flickr. Partly that’s a function of my not taking as many pictures, but it’s also because the pictures I take on my phone automatically go to Google+, which is very convenient. I could set it up to go to Flickr as well, but meh, don’t really care. I like Flickr very much, and recommend it to people all the time, but I’m not as invested in it personally.
So that’s where I am with social media. There are things out there I haven’t really touched: Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. And maybe I’m old school, but so far, I like where I am.
Over the last year, I’ve noticed several blogs pass into oblivion, either with or without an announcement. This week, Bitch, Ph.D. said goodbye. Several of the blogs of people I’ve been reading for 5 or 6 years are either gone or on a very sporadic schedule. Twitter and Facebook seem more popular, though I have no desire to spend much time there. My WoW guild is having an existential crisis of sorts. Several members have left, citing both a boredom with the way the game works now and an increase in the need to spend time with work or family. I, too, have spent less time online than I once did. At first I did so out of a feeling that I was spending too much time online and not giving enough attention to other things in my life. But now, it’s because I literally don’t have time.
I have a couple of thoughts about what appears to me to be not a “death of blogs” or “death of the online world” moment, but certainly a moment of transition. Some of the disappearance, especially of blogs is a factor of commercialization. As corporations set up blogs or media outlets like the Huffington Post arise, the small-time blogger has a harder time keeping up. It’s impossible to keep up volume-wise and there’s the inevitable loss of audience as a result. There are exceptions, but I do think a lot of us liked blogging because it felt like a community. We got comments. We had conversations in the comment threads, between blogs, etc. I see that happening much less now. I used to comment a lot. It’s much more rare now.
I also wonder if some of us who’ve been online a while are getting bored. Honestly, I’ve been participating in online communities for twenty years. Every four or five years, the world would shift and a new type of community would emerge. Nothing new along those lines has really emerged for a while. Yes, there’s Facebook (been there since 2004). And there’s Twitter (been there since 2007). Neither of those offer the in-depth reading I want, nor the community I’d like.
I also think the online world is being used for other things. Gaming thrives, but older games like WoW are losing their appeal, especially for those who’ve been playing for a while. All of my guildmates agree that it wouldn’t be fun for us without the community aspects of the game, but increasing games are not meant to build community. We’re still waiting to see if the expansion brings that concept back, but even I feel kind of blah about it. Video has exploded, bringing our tv mentalities to the web. So we pull up video on Hulu and watch for a 1/2 hour or hour and then we feel like we’re done. And then there’s our phones and other devices, like the iPad and the Kindle, which offer other kinds of activities, most of which are disconnected.
I realize there are some people out there just now discovering all the wonders of the Internet, but for me, it’s starting to lose its luster. And that’s left me with a bit of gap, entertainment wise. My family asked me why I wasn’t raiding last night. And I said, essentially, “Meh.” I told Geeky Girl I needed a new hobby. She asked me what I liked to do, and it was hard to come up with anything. When I was kid, my hobby was writing, thus the appeal of blogging. As I got older, I picked up needlepoint, but that takes more time than I have and I’m not that interested in the results. I’ve never been much of a gardener. Most plants that come into my house don’t leave alive. I have no artistic talent for painting or pottery or even jewelry making. I’m interested in politics, but not enough to go out and volunteer a lot. And even though I have some time for myself, between work and managing kids and the house, I’m not looking to fill a huge amount of time.
Don’t worry, I’m not shutting down Geeky Mom any time soon, but I am doing some thinking about my life online. I think it’s fair to say that the Internet will always be a part of my life, but what I choose to do on it (with it?) may be transitioning, as, I think it is for many people.
I love this blog. It has honestly kept me going through some particularly tough times over the last six years. Even as the comments have dwindled, just putting stuff out there knowing that someone might read it has felt pretty good. These last couple of weeks, I have been quite busy in the lead up to getting my new job, about which I’m quite excited. As I’ve spent less time in front of the computer, or at least on the web, I’ve been re-evaluating my time spent online (in case regular readers couldn’t tell). I’ve tried to spend at least half my day completely away from the computer: doing housework, reading, or being outside. I’m trying to set a good example for my kids, who don’t really see the difference (even though they’re both at an age where they might be expected to) between the intellectual work I do online and the playful things I do. Given my career, I obviously can’t escape the computer entirely (and don’t want to), but I do think I need to spend more of my leisure time doing other things, preferably with my family, coaxing them into leisure activities that are not screen-based.
This blog, for me, is mostly leisure. At one time, it contributed greatly to my professional development, and it may do that for me again someday. But for now, I’m going to focus on it less and put my energies elsewhere. I’ll be popping in from time to time over the summer, perhaps once a week. But I’m no longer going to feel compelled to post something every day. There’s at once not enough and too much going on for me to do that. I will try to return to daily posting in the fall, but it may be the case that my work will not allow me the time to do that. I’m still going to be reading people’s blogs, as that’s been a great pleasure of mine, and maybe, without my own blog to tend to, I can comment more. I’ll see you all on the flip side!
I’ve added a widget to the sidebar to collect the recipes from my random recipe project. I’m retroactively adding things to it and I’m also hoping to auto post some of them.
Several other people, disappointed in having their Haloscan comments disappear, have moved their blogs. Phantom Scribbler notes that comments have gone the way of the do-do bird, thanks to platforms like Facebook and Twitter. I have never gotten a huge amount of comments, as some bloggers have. Compared to Phantom’s Whining Wednesday and even to many of Laura at 11D‘s posts, I was hosting an intimate dinner party compared to their big tent affairs. And that’s been okay with me, though I do like having conversations better than standing on a soapbox. One thing Facebook and its ilk can’t capture is a conversation around someone’s idea or commentary. A blogger writes something and people have things to add. Other people come along and add not just to the original idea, but the new ones. The original post is more than it was, thanks to the additions of the people who contributed. I remember struggling to find a way to post recent comments on the sidebar because I wanted to highlight that conversation. Sure, it was a way to say, “Hey, people actually read my blog!” but more than that, I saw as an invitation for people to contribute, to participate in the conversations that were already going on.
It’s been interesting to be a part of this phenomenon from nearly its beginning. When we all first began, we commented a lot because there weren’t a lot of us out there. We had no one else to talk to. Now, there are blogs and/or commnets associated with nearly every major publication and broadcasting company. There are places like the Huffington Post for people to turn to for blogs on every topic from politics to entertainment to the arts. People do comment there and at the New York Times, and at The Washington Post, but they devolve quickly sometimes and/or they sound like the call-in radio callers, some of whom sound like they could have their own show and some of whom you know you don’t want to run into in a dark alley. Compared to that, commenters here and on other blogs I read had the feeling of running into old friends at the grocery store. Oh, there’s Wendy and Janice and bj and Grace and Phantom and jo(e) and Susan and Elizabeth again! Hello, how’ve you been? What’s new and interesting in your world? I think as long as it feels like that. As long as people want it to be a kind of camaraderie, comments will linger. There may not be as many of them, but they’ll be there just the same.
P.S. I’m still hoping to find a way to import comments here. We shall see.
I know normally Friday Fun involves funny cats or stick figure drawings, but to me, playing around with new platforms is fun. I’ve had hosting for a long time now and just set up this new domain and installed WordPress. Took me about ten minutes. No, really. Though I can poke around in the innards if I want, I don’t have to, and that’s what I like about WordPress. I’m looking forward to having more options here, to being able to change the look when I want to, to generally have more control. So yippee!
So, my comments are gone. Haloscan was bought out, and, unfortunately, they want to charge for their comment system. So I exported 7,456 comments, over five years’ worth of comments. All the old posts have no comments now. I think this one will have comments–we’ll see. And all that crap under recent comments–no clue. Sigh. It was a good run. We’ll miss you Haloscan.
So, my project for the summer is to restart, for about the umpteenth time, a book project about facing fear and anxiety over social media tools. Thankfully, I have two wonderful colleagues, Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill helping me out. We decided to dive in after our latest presentation on the topic and have set ourselves a fairly ambitious deadline to get something written. I suggested that we start with topics and ideas that we feel most close to, which is different for all of us, and see where that takes us. Since I wrote a whole dissertation on blogs, that’s where I started.
On Monday, I was at a social event with some folks I hadn’t seen in quite a while (hey, to any of you reading this!) and they, of course, asked how things are going. I told them that I’d just returned from a conference where I’d given a presentation. They asked, on what?, expecting me to say on something to do with technology in education. I said fear. They did a double take. I explained that my colleagues and I had decided that the underlying reason for much of the resistence to social software was fear. They said, oh, and I thought it was because I didn’t want to share my personal life with the world. I corrected them briefly that we weren’t talking about fear of setting up your Facebook profile, but of using social software in teaching and research, which can be done in a private setting or with other kinds of parameters that reduce exposure. We’re talking about using these tools professionally, in learning, not to talk about what kind of pajamas we’re wearing.
Only 9% of the population has created a blog, so I don’t expect creating and maintaining a blog to appeal to everyone, but just as very few students continue writing or doing math or thinking about sociology after they leave college, the experience of blogging can have lasting effects. I’m sure that students exposed to sociology look at the world differently than they would have otherwise. But, given the small number of people who do blog, I decided to start by writing about reading blogs. My husband has been a consumer of blogs since the dawn of Slashdot and he reads only a handful of blogs regularly, and he *loves* them. When he spouts off about something he read on a blog and starts making connections, I tell him he needs to get his own blog, and he agrees, but then he never does it. There are many more like him.
When I gave my talk at University of Mary Washington, it was reading of blogs I started with first. When I described my argument to my husband, explaining that I wanted to dispel the myth that all blogs were stupid, he said that would be simple, just have them read Tim Burke or Janet Stemwedel and you’re done. Of course, the problem is, that even showing them these blogs isn’t always enough to dispel their disdain for blogs. Those are outliers, they say. The rest are rubbish. And I wanted to take the argument a bit further. I wanted to say, hey, blogs are just as good as some peer reviewed material. Heresy! And I think they are in many cases for many situations, even within academe. At the very least, we can surely say that peer review is not above reproach. (See Janet’s blog for stories of cheating and tragedy in peer review.)
So I shouted out to my twitter faculty friends a question about whether they allow their students to read blogs. I got some funny responses about how much power faculty have to “allow” their students to do anything. So I rephrased it to ask if they’d let their students use blogs in academic work. Faculty on Twitter are necessarily more open to social media than many others, and so I got the expected answers. Many, in fact, required their students to read blogs, and many encouraged it, and used blogs as a way of teaching digital literacy and critical thinking skills. Which is what I usually say to the skeptics, and now I can point to actual real live faculty who use blogs in just that way.
Journalists are afraid that blogs are going to put them out of business and I started thinking, wondering, whether faculty had that fear as well. Despite my saying that blogs can be just as good as peer reviewed material, I think that unlike journalism, the audience for the two media are different people. And, I think, that students don’t actually read many blogs. But the faculty who do resist, the ones who ban not just blog reading, but using the Wikipedia, they seem to not trust their students to be able to make good judgements, and rather than teaching them how to, they keep them away from “bad” material. But what else might be at work there? That seems somehow too simple. Any skeptical faculty out there, or any people who work with skeptical faculty who have thoughts?
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Virginia Heffernan writes a piece in the New York Times about the low quality of comments on news sites like the New York Times, the WaPo and Slate. She says:
But as it is, online commentary is a bête noire for journalists and readers alike. Most journalists hate to read it, because it’s stinging and distracting, and readers rarely plow through long comments sections unless they intend to post something themselves. But perhaps the comments have become so reader-unfriendly, in part, because of the conventions of the Web-comment form.
She blames the 24/7 access in part, with late-night tin-foil-hat-wearing people often being the first to weight in on an article, setting the tone for the discourse of the rest of the comments. Also, people who comment tend to be people who have the time and inclination to comment and these are not necessarily the sharpest knives in the drawer.
I actually wrote a best-practices document on how to write good comments, aimed at students working in class blogs. Here’s what I said:
1. Comment on the original post topic.2. Contribute something new to the conversation.
3. Even if you disagree, remain polite.
4. Don’t comment for the sake of commenting. Don’t just say, “Yeah, I agree.” You’re not adding to the conversation.
5. Keep your comment fairly brief. If you find yourself wanting to say a lot more, write your own post and then link to it in the comments.
6. Leave a link. This can be a link to your blog that you type into the comment form or leave a link to resources that might help the author.
Obviously, these take into account the usual short form students often resort to in online forums. These suggestions are for K-12 students. The second point, I think, is the most important, and perhaps what Heffernan is most disappointed by in reader comments. Most comments seem to be self-serving and/or polemic and the commenter does not seem to want to engage in a conversation with the author. But I think the article authors are also to blame for this. Rarely do I see an author weigh in in the comment section. I’m not suggesting they feed the trolls, but they could certainly respond to the comments that do have merit, which might encourage people who want to engage in a conversation instead of a shouting match to comment more often. The trolls might eventually get drowned out by the reasonable commenters.
I really like comments on articles, even the ones that aren’t so nice. Newspaper articles and blogs seem to me to be like soapboxes even more than personal blogs are. They don’t always invite reader commentary in their rhetorical strategies. They set themselves up as experts who know the answers. I like seeing what other people think in the comments. It’s a way of gaging my own reaction. Am I crazy for hating/loving/being confused by this? What arguments can be made against this? What does this mean in a larger context? It is also a window into the audience. Comments on IHE articles always cause me to raise my eyebrows. Comments on tech articles reveal a bit about the culture of the field. I like having that insight, even if it’s messy and crazy and a bit scary at times. I think it’s good to know that not everyone in the world is reasonable. Though it might also be good to show those people how they might become more reasonable while still getting their voices heard.
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