jill/txt

In my talk on Network Literacy last week, I said that many students won’t know what to write in that empty white box they see when they log on to Blogger.com or whatever system they’re supposed to be blogging on. To learn how to blog, most students will need some specific assignments. Once you’ve done some blogging and have experienced ways it can be done, it’s much easier to find that you actually want to blog something and come up with your own ideas for blog posts.

Jamie asked for some examples of such assignments, and digging around in my teaching and blogging category, the list I started became so long I thought it should be its own blog post.

• First class: have them set up their blogs and write a brief post about what they hope to get out of the course - or any of those other kinds of first-class-things. (Blogger.com is easy enough that setting up a blog realistically only takes them a few minutes; if you use another system you may have to set up their blogs beforehand - making everyone install MovableType from scratch in their first class in 2003 was a disaster. Installing a blog for each of 60 students using MovableType in 2004 took ten hours. Therefore Blogger.com. There are of course many other options.)
• Read other students’ blogs and leave comments on at least two of them.
• The teacher explains what trackbacks are and shows how bloggers link to each other. Talk about weblog conversations - the visualisation of a blog conversation in this story tends to make sense to students. Make sure trackbacks are enabled, and then ask them to write a post in their own blog that responds to a post in a co-student’s blog - and that they link to that post. Talk about how this works - what’s the difference between a discussion in comments and between blogs?
• Last ten minutes of class: Summarise the most important things you learnt this class in your blog.
• Redesign your blog. (If learning HTML/CSS, and/or if thinking about identity online, self-representation etc
• Write a blog post explaining why you redesigned your blog as you did. Link to sites that inspired you.
• Discuss traditional academic citation techniques and look at examples of different ways in which bloggers cite their sources through links. Use /and/or redesign the blockquote feature in a blog post where you use a quote from another website and link to your source.
• Write a how-to guide for your co-students - my students did this on their own in the process of learning web design (e.g. a colour-blind student explained how to design for colour-blind people, a topic I hadn’t thought of discussing) but this is something the teacher could give as an assignment.
• Have students write reviews of other blogs (though be aware of ethical issues)
• Have a look at some of Jenny Weight’s ideas
• Do small group tasks and instead of (or as well as) doing the full class open discussion afterwards, have students write individual blog posts answering the small group assignment towards the end of the class. Many will actually finish a blog post at home if they’ve started on it in class, but hardly any will write it at home if they’ve not already started it - well, unless it’s compulsory and being graded. Here’s an example
• A total failure was having students look at confessional, diary-style blogs, discuss characteristics of the style and write a blog post in that style. They did great on that assignment, but then proceeded to use that style in all future blog posts…. uh oh…

Do you have any additions?

Remember how Blogdex used to tell you which blogs you might like that you didn’t already link to, based on the blogs that you did link to? Well, Blogdex seems to have last been updated in 2004, and Technorati’s completely taken over as the main blog portal, but they won’t tell me who I might like that I don’t already know about.

I mean, yes, of course I follow backlinks to bloggers who’ve linked here, well, when I have time, anyway. That’s often interesting. But I must be missing out on so much more.

And this morning I’m in much more of a “go explore the blogosphere” mood than I am in a “do the things on my to-do list” mood. It’s my research day after all.

To-do list here I come.

• edit wireless memo
• description for K.
• ideas for H.
• links for B.
• work on wrapping up project E.
• wash the stairs

I got a new MacBook! Hooray!! But it makes this noise. Sort of a high-pitched hissy whiny noise. Not very loud, but loud enough that it’s annoying in a quiet room. So I google “macbook noise” and find a blog post at Red Sweater Blog which lists the 500 most recent google searches that led to that blog. A depressing number of them are searches for macbook noise.

Apart from that, I love it. WoW is smooth as silk, it transferred all my data seamlessly, and I can take silly photos with the built in camera. Yay!

But the larger point here is that education is coercion, that most students would rather be working and getting paid for it, or be with their families, or getting high, or eating pizza, or doing laundry, or fucking, or fishing, or whatever it is that undergraduates do, than sitting in a classroom either listening to a deathly dull lecture by an egghead or alternatively running around the classroom doing group exercises and tossing plastic balls and drawing on craft paper. (Slaves of Academe)

(This post may, in time, become an actual post with content other than this quote. Or it may not.)

Back when blogs were new Tom Matrullo called blogs loci amoeni: safe, idyllic, enclosed gardens where heros of literature would recover and wax lyrical. Today a post at New Game Plus reminded me of this:

I didn’t realize until reading this that I began speaking about feminism and video games online because my blog created a space where I wasn’t vulnerable. Here, I’m not going to have a dozen angry posters calling a PC feminazi or telling me I’m overreacting for discussing video games and feminism as I might for bringing it up on a message board or IRC channel. This is another point in the case for more online communities for geeky women. (New Game Plus)

Certainly there can be flame wars in the comment fields of blogs, but, you know, the simple power to decide what goes on the front page, and even to delete comments, belongs to the blogger and that is important. It reminds me of T.L. Taylor’s note on womens’ pleasure in exploring online games:

While men and women alike can enjoy traversing these spaces, women are afforded an experience they are likely not to have had offline. While both the landscape and its creatures might threaten the explorer, in the game space this threat is not based upon gender. Unlike the offline world in which gender often plays a significant role in not only the perception of safety but its actuality, in Everquest women may travel knowing they are no more threatened by the creatures of the world than their male counterparts are. While this may seem an odd reassurance, it is far from minor. (Play Between Worlds, page 98)

Now a woman expressing opinions about feminism is not safe in most online spaces - as anyone who has tried knows, there are unlimited numbers of anonymous commenters waiting to pull out all the tiredest lines about sex and women and feminazis and so on - but you can ban them from your blog. You can’t ban the bullying boys from fourth grade (though you band up with the other girls to ignore and try to avoid them), you can’t ban the boys who talk over you in seminars or the men who don’t hear your comments in meetings, you can’t install a spam filter to stop being afraid when you walk home at night. You can ban them from your blog.

Blogs are brilliant.

A couple of years ago, the Iberian slugs appeared, crawling slimily into our gardens. Murder slugs, brown slugs, Iberian slugs; they have many names. Nothing will stop them. In Iberia they might have had a place in the ecosystem, but in Norway they destroy gardens. Oh yes, put out a saucer of beer and a few will crawl into it and die, or they say that lining up that salt that sheep love to lick can create an inpenetrable boundary for slugs, though it might trouble your plants. It’s spring and I’m making plans and planting seeds, and I remembered a list I jotted down last year from some newspaper article somewhere. The lists of flowers are so beautiful.

Brown slugs love:

• stemorsblomst - violets
• tagetes - marigolds
• løvetann - dandelions
• hvite margeritter - daisies
• asters - aster
• lupiner - lupins
• jordbær - strawberries
• salat - lettuce
• kål - cabbage

and they hate

• roser - roses
• fuksia - fuchsia
• begonia - begonia
• blomkarse - nasturtiums
• løvemunn - snapdragon
• rhodedendron
• valmuer - poppies
• And from personal experience, I’ll add lavendar, rosemary, peppermint and other strong flavours

I won’t plant those marigold seeds, then. And no daisies this year. With luck, they’ll eat the dandelions. I already have roses and rhodedendron and I’ve planted nasturtiums and poppies. Might get some snapdragons too. Just the name is reason enough.

The beer works. I put a little out last night and this morning there must have been 40 little half-grown brown slugs lying dead drunk (literally) around the saucer. Of course there are still hundreds and hundreds left.

Oh dear. I think I just deleted some genuine comments by mistake when I was doing my daily de-spamming. Sorry…

I really must get a better spam filter installed. The default in WordPress isn’t good enough - it needs me to go through dozens of spams a day manually.

My keynote in Hawaii this evening (I can’t help say that, I mean, really it’s online, but the server’s in Hawaii and I’d love to be there too…) is about learning, blogging and web 2.0. I’m going to start by showing a powerpoint sketching a line from the memex onwards, and talking about how these developments in hypertext all focused on the individual user, and then I’m going to shift over to web pages to talk about what’s different today and how we should be using the social aspects of the web in our teaching - our students already are.
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One of my guildmates, Charlotte Hagström, is researching naming in World of Warcraft. If you play World of Warcraft, it’d be great if you’d help her out - this is from her website:

Names in World of Warcraft: Informants needed!
I am working on an article about names and naming in World of Warcraft. I am interested in all aspects of this topic and need your help. How did you come up with the name(s) of your character(s)? Are there any particular reasons for your choice? Did you for example choose a name you found especially suitable for the character’s race or class? Or is it somehow connected to your own name, your interests or to popular culture, literature, sport, music? Is it a “real” name or a name you have invented yourself? Does the name mean anything? What do you think about other players’ names for their characters? About guild-names and NPC-names? Are names essential to your experience of the game?

If you want to share your thoughts on this, please contact me either by e-mailing charlotte.hagstrom@etn.lu.se or by writing to Charlotte Hagström, Dept. of European Ethnology, Finngatan 8, S-223 62 Lund, Sweden.

You can be anonymous but I would appreciate to know your age, gender and nationality. I will not write the name(s) of your character(s) unless you permit me to do so.

Since I’m planning to talk about all the contextual aspects of informal, might I say feral publication online as compared to the database entries I make into BORA, I’m glad that Theo Andrew, co-author of a recent book title Institutional Repositories is explaining what an institutional repository really is. (more…)

I have a zillion things to do and was thinking of just being polite and popping by the dSpace conference I’m speaking at this morning, scooting back to the office, coming down again to do my talk and then going back to administrivia and writing

But this morning I felt like wearing my “I’m blogging this” t-shirt, and when I came in I found myself next to an American named Matt, who directs the (or a….not quite sure here…) Technology Unit at NYU and speaks Swedish and who (most importantly) was typing away into a wiki. The room was full of people, many with laptops, I had a name tag and a cup of coffee and wireless access. The conference booklet is amazing - it describes a dozen favourite pubs and even lists a vegan café I didn’t know about. There’s an invitation to a reception hosted by the city in the conference pack. Maybe I’ll go…

I’m also attending the Technology, Colleges and Community Worldwide Online Conference right now. That’s the Hawaiian conference that’s all online, and there are over 500 attendees!

Today I’m giving a short presentation on “the researcher’s perspective” on open access institutional research archives, like BORA at my university. The presentation is part of the Institutional Respository Workshop that’s being held in connection with the dSpace User Group Meeting being hosted by our university library this week.

I know they want me to talk quite specifically about my experiences putting my publications into BORA, but of course I want to talk about blogs and openness and the information scavenging we do online that doesn’t always fit with a database-model of publication. And I want to talk about the difference between my own, personalised publication archive, shaped completely by me and even with my face grinning out at you, and the impersonal results BORA give you if you search for publications by “Jill Walker”. If we find and use knowledge through our social networks, the individuality and the “face” of publication archives is probably as important an accessory to it as the body language and voice and style and dress of a presenter at a conference, or as the cover and quality of print and publisher of a book. Of course those things don’t change what the person is saying - or not exactly, Romeo and Juliet is the same whether I read it in a scruffy old paperback or a leatherbound, giltedged volume. But the context for my understanding is different.

Of course, having a repository is wonderful, and I love BORA and its staff. They’ve even helped me track down stuff about rights and dealt directly with journals on a couple of occasions to ensure that putting it online would be OK. I wish everything anyone at our university published was automatically routed to BORA, even if I suppose maybe books might have to have restricted access for a while if hte publishers are to have any interest in actually publishing them.

But I want a system where I can register stuff once and automatically fetch out info, links and contextual links for my own, personalised publication page. That’s the page I really care about.

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Before rushing off on holidays I’m thinking about two talks I’m giving right after Easter. I’ve been asked to give my perspective as a researcher on our university’s open research archive, and (most exotically) I’m one of the keynote speakers at TCC, an online conference on learning and technology in Hawaii. From home. We had the training session in the online system they use a few nights ago, and it looks really good fun. I’m going to be talking about blogging and learning and Web 2.0. Actually, if you’re interested in learning and technology, you might want to register for the conference - there are lots and lots of presentations and it looks really good. I hope I’ll have time to attend some of them in between all my local obligations.

Easter is big in Norway. Easter weekend is when Norway shuts down the most thoroughly - supermarkets and shops and businesses will be shut from Wednesday at noon through Friday, some opening for a half-day on Saturday and then definitely closing again on Sunday and Monday. School is out for the whole week between Palm Sunday (which is this weekend) and actual Easter.

Easter is traditionally spent skiing. This is the best time for skiing, really. The days are long and the sun warms you but there’s still snow in the mountains, so you can ski in a bikini if the weather’s good, and you can go for those long excursions that are impossible at Christmas when the days are so short. A lot of people will come back from their Easter holidays with a tanned face and hands. Of course, most of us don’t actually go to the mountains - we just laze about.

Me, I’m going to be offline. Or at least Not Working. Not a bit. Assuming I can wrap up all the loose ends today….

According to testimony to a Grand Jury, President Bush actually gave orders that the name of a CIA operative be leaked in order to punish her husband, who criticised the invasion of Iraq. So it’s not simply a matter of blaming the Vice-President: this is Bush himself.

It’s odd that Clinton got into so much trouble for a cigar, while Bush gets away with leaking classified information relating to the security of his country for revenge purposes, don’t you think?

PS: The Wikipedia is glorious for getting background and the full story on current news events. It also (generally) provides good links to sources. Traditional media, on the other hand, only rarely really provide background coverage - they’re meant to be thrown out or never listened to again, after all, so there’s little point. Except now they’re online there would be a point. Here’s Wikipedia’s stories on this scandal.