jill/txt

Internationally, Microsoft is one of the companies with the most bloggers - though that’s probably not too surprising since they’re also one of the biggest companies, with something like 60-70,000 employees globally and growing. Robert Scoble, one of the most profilific Microsoft bloggers (though no longer at the company), writes extensively and very enthusiastically about the Microsoft blogging in the first chapter of Naked Conversations (the thesis being that mostly due to blogs, people no longer see Microsoft as the evil empire). Lilia Efimova’s case study of Microsoft blogs is another interesting documentation and discussion of this.

Last month, when I gave a talk on corporate blogs for Microsoft Norway’s online services group, they told me that they didn’t know of any Microsoft employees blogging in Norway - or rather, some have personal blogs but never identify themselves as Microsoft employees and they blog about things that have to do with Microsoft. They’re planning on starting, though.

So quite possibly, Kristine Jørgensen’s blog Lycitea’s Adventures is the first Norwegian Microsoft blog. Kristine did her MA here in Bergen and has just finished her PhD on games in Copenhagen - and as avid readers may remember, she got a cushy job as Microsoft Norway’s x-box lifestyle specialist. (X-box lifestyle? Ah well, whatever.)

I’m also happy to see it because I’m teaching “Corporate blogging” today, and giving a talk about it to Chess on Friday, so more Norwegian examples are great!

Norwegian-speakers who are interested in the question of how blogging relates to journalism (such as those of my students who have chosen the “Are blogs journalism?” assignment) would do well to look at Olav Anders Øvrebøs report on this matter:

Øvrebø, Olav Anders. 2006. Under medienes overflate: Et forskningsprosjekt om blogging og journalistikk. Available from http://www.oov.no/prosjekter/undermedienesoverflaterapport.html.

The topic for today’s class is blogs and journalism. We already talked a bit about the development of newspapers when we were talking about Habermas and the public sphere. Today we’ll be more specific. Some of the matters we’ll touch:

• We’ll start by watching Epic2015
• What is Google News? What’s up with this “no human intervention=objectivity” thing?)
• In his book Gatewatching, Axel Bruns argues that we’re witnessing a shift from the gatekeeping of traditional media to the gatewatching of participatory media. A review of the book summarises somewhat.

Gatewatching hasn’t yet arrived at the University Library (mysteriously enough) but I have a copy if anyone’s curious.

• The report We Media is online in its entireity: “We are at the beginning of a Golden Age of journalism — but it is not journalism as we have known it. Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, “citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer.” However, mainstream news media have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms.” The report describes the situation and proposes ways for traditional media to respond to these challenges.
• Academic paper by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell: “The Power and Politics of Blogs“
• Journalist Paul Andrews’ discusses whether blogs are journalism.
• Norwegian students should look at journalist, blogger and researcher Olav Anders Øvrebø’s research report on blogging and journalism His weblog, Undercurrent, is in English and often deals with blogging and journalist.
• Cyberjournalist.net is a fairly popular blog “that focuses on how the Internet, convergence and new technologies are changing the media.”
• Search Google Scholar and find lots more.
• Story dated yesterday: Associated Press are trying their hand at citizen media

Here are some examples of blogs that might (note: might) be thought of as a form of journalism:

• Salam Pax, the Bagdad resident who blogged during the initial attacks on Bagdad in 2003. His blog is still active, and the Wikipedia article on him gives the full story. Back in 2003, a lot of people doubted his authenticity, which has since been confirmed.
• Christopher Allbritton was an independent journalist who collected $15000 of donations to fund an independent trip to Iraq in 2003. That that even worked is sort of amazing. He has since been hired by mainstream media due to issues of safety - being alone in Iraq is lethal.
• There are many US soldiers who blog and post photos and videos while in Iraq. Is that a form of journalism?
• How about this Swedish woman who blogs while in jail? Here’s my blog post about her blog.
• Or all the Iranian bloggers who are banned from criticising their government but find ways to do so anyway online?
• What about someone like Drusilla who regularly picks apart articles in mainstream media?
• Or a website like Outside.in that tries to cover all the hyper-local news that mainstream media can never get to?
• And of course, bloggers scalped Dan Rather

Since I just handed out the first paper assignments yesterday, today a link to 57 tips (!) for writing your term paper might be in order. Lifehack.org also has many suggestions for how to hack your studying skills. (For the un-initiated: this kind of stuff is also known as productivity pr0n and one should be wary of spending more time reading it than one spends being productive…)

Lots of great responses to the assignment this morning! Thanks guys :) Here’s today’s plan:

• Hand out paper topics and discuss them.
• I think Olav might not be here today, but if he is, I’m going to ask him to show us how he did the merged RSS feed for all the student blogs. If he’s not here (he mentioned a collision with another class) I’ll have to show em myself I guess.
• I’ve photocopied a few of the best reponses to blog post 2, and we’ll discuss them and talk about interlinking and such.
• We’ll go to Rune Klevjer’s lecture on the Columbine Massacre game.

This means we’ll be postponing the original topic - confessional blogs and fictional blogs - till next Wednesday.

On Wednesday we’ll be doing this:

• I get to show you Michael Wesch’s awesome video of Web 2.0 in three and a half minutes.
• A quick rundown of some of the sociological background to social networks.
• Derek has agreed to show us how Facebook, a social networking service that’s immensely popular in the US (95% of college students use it), works. (Thanks Derek!) Do any of the rest of you use social sites? I’ll show Underskog, Flickr.com and LinkedIn, which are examples of sites using social networking and serving various demographics.
• We’ll talk about your blog posts. Here’s the list of class blogs. (OK guys, only THREE of you did the assignment. That’s abyssmal. That means these three and me get to discuss the blog posts and the rest of you get to go to the lab and write your assignments.
• We’ll discuss danah boyd and Judith Donath’s paper (download PDF from danah’s publication website on “Public displays of connection.”

On Thursday Rune Klevjer is giving a lecture on a topic that’s very relevant to the second focus area in this class, games and society, and so we’ll be taking an excursion and going to that lecture in the second half of the class (from 3 pm till 4). During the first half of the class we’ll discuss Serfaty’s chapters that we read this week, and talk about confessional and fictional blogs.

I handed out a worksheet for this week last Thursday, which includes the blog assignment that is due next Wednesday. This will be the last worksheet this semester.

This video is amazing - it’s the stuff I teach! From the materiality of writing (handwriting and digital) through hypertext, HTML, XML, the point of it all - I wish I had made this video. And I was so pleased to see that the guy who made it, Michael Wesch, is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology - and this video is currently the fifth most popular video in the blogosphere, according to Technorati [Update at 9 pm: now it’s the most popular…]. That pretty much dwarfs any conventional kind of popularising research academics are supposed to do. Go digital academics!

I guess the only thing I was left wanting at the end of the video was more about how the machine is using us - the title is the machine is us/ing us after all.

Today’s class will begin with a discussion of the worksheets I made up for this week. I’m interested in what the students think of them. We’ll also be looking at their blogs and we’ll talk about the assignments.

The main topic for today, however, is to introduce blogs as a cultural phenomenon, and to begin talking about what they are. I’ll use the following summary to spin off into the web and show the students examples on the projector. (more…)

I’ve been so impressed by the utvidet arbeidsplan (”expanded work plans”) my daughter’s been bringing home from school after the latest reform of schools in Norway that I’ve tried to make one for my students. The idea is to give them a very clear overview of what they’re supposed to be learning and how to go about learning it. But it may well be ridiculous - will you please have a look and see what you think?

One advantage for me is that having estimated times for the various tasks I can actually see that what I expect them to do outside of class is entirely consistent with the amount of time they’re supposed to be spending on studying. My daughter’s fifth grade worksheet doesn’t show time estimates, I got that from the European Tuning project, which I heard about when I (as head of department) was asked to report on how our department calculates student workload and would the Tuning system be useful. The idea of this part of the Tuning project is to standardise student workloads per credit so it’s easier to transfer credits from one country to another and know that they’re equivalent. This PDF has detailed examples of how to do this when planning a specific course. I’m not sure whether students are ever supposed to see those planning documents, though.

Anyway, according to Tuning, a 15 credit course (in the ECTS - European Credit Transfer System, which we now use) should involve 375 hours of work for each student. That’s actually 19.5 hours a week for the 18 weeks between the first class and the portfolio being due. I’ve only reached 17 hours, but there’s plenty of opportunity for spending more time on things.

Now I really need some feedback though: If I give my students this work sheet will they laugh at me for giving them something based on what a fifth-grader is given? I mean, it’s way too detailed. But my impression is that students don’t do work outside of the classroom because they don’t really know what they’re expected to do. (Is that true?)

I think I’ll try it out next week, and we’ll see whether I keep doing it. And I’m not sure yet whether this is extra work for me or whether it will help make teaching easier for me. And am I sewing cushions under arms? Quite probably adults should be organising their own studies? Although you know, I’m not going to have their parents sign it as my daughter has me do, and I’m not going to check up on them - and I’ll encourage them to change the tasks if they feel others would be more useful to them in reaching their learning goals. Sorry, learning outcomes. For some reason, the EU standard is learning outcomes, not learning goals. I have no idea why.

In today’s class we’re going to look at the transition to print and we’ll discuss how technology and culture interact - and we’ll do some more blogging, too. Easy reading this week: just chapter two of Bolter’s Writing Space, which is about writing and technology.

I think we’ll start with the good old “Helpdesk i middelalderen” sketch - which is conveniently available on google video, youtube and various other places as well as on the NRK website.

I’ll show a brief powerpoint so we can look at pictures of incunabulas, which is always satisfying, and we’ll discuss the chapter from Writing Space as well as looking at the changes Elizabeth Eisenstein writes were engendered by print. We’ll draw on the concepts of technological determinism and alternate approaches to understanding the relationship between technology and culture in discussing this.

Finally, students will re-read page 19 of the section from Writing Space, where Bolter argues that technology and culture are so entwined that you can’t really talk about technology changing culture - they both change - and then we’ll discuss how that can be understood in relation to the different approaches to the relationship between technology and society/culture that Chandler outlined (hard and soft technological determinism, socio-cultural determinism, voluntarism, and our addition, co-construction), and that we discussed last week. Then, after a plenary discussion, they’ll blog their conclusions.

Students blogging in our Critical Approaches to Technology and Society course:

• Robin
• Hamdi
• Alex
• Cristina
• Olav
• Catello
• Morten
• Bradley
• Lene
• Øistein
• Sindre
• John
• Marius
• Iselin
• Derek
• Ole Johan
• Alessandro
• Maja