Blogs

Okay, I've been thinking about this for months now, so I might as well blog about it. Here's my question: Does anyone teaching business writing and/or technical writing assign The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual? Based on what I know, my guess would be that either very few teachers assign it, or no one does. (If I'm wrong, please tell me; please set me straight.) So who cares, you might ask. Why are you sweatin' it, Clancy?

For me, it's about the disconnect between the way writing is taught and the way writing is, especially when it comes to business and technical writing. The Cluetrain Manifesto has been called "the most important book about communication written in the last 30 years." Many bloggers and other webby cognoscenti divide the world into pre-Cluetrain and post-Cluetrain. I'm not trying to say that Cluetrain should be treated as some sort of tech comm Bible or anything, but clearly it's a very important book worth at least reading and discussing in business and technical writing classes. I know it's not written by academic rhetoricians, but I think it ought to be assigned. I've been thinking about writing a review of it and sending it to the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. (Of course, if someone has already reviewed it for that journal, I'm going to feel like a real heel...a pleasantly surprised heel, though.) Consider some of the "95 Theses":

I have a hat, but I have no head. :-(

A group of foreign policy specialists (mostly academics, some of whose names I recognize, including Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber and Wendy Brown) have issued a collective statement critiquing the Bush Administration's foreign policy:

We, a nonpartisan group of foreign affairs specialists, have joined together to call urgently for a change of course in American foreign and national security policy. We judge that the current American policy centered around the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period, one which harms the cause of the struggle against extreme Islamist terrorists. One result has been a great distortion in the terms of public debate on foreign and national security policy—an emphasis on speculation instead of facts, on mythology instead of calculation, and on misplaced moralizing over considerations of national interest. [1] We write to challenge some of these distortions.

Read the whole thing. Much of the critique is similar to what Kerry's been discussing in the debates: lack of prewar planning, going to war without proof that Saddam Hussein had WMD, etc., but the letter goes into a little more detail about conditions in Iraq now and the U.S.'s international reputation.

Today the director of the Center for Writing asked me to give a brief talk on weblogs in writing pedagogy as part of a panel presentation in the Teaching With Writing series. I agreed, of course, but with several questions about the proper approach to take. The talk is only about 10 minutes, and they want me to offer practical ways the instructors in the audience can integrate blogging into their writing courses (or other courses that incorporate writing), which is of course an understandable request, but here's what frustrates me: So often these workshops only scratch the surface. It ends up being a 90-minute discussion of what a weblog is. I'd rather talk about the many issues involved in teaching with weblogs, some of which have been addressed in impressive detail on the Blogging SIG list, including:

• Having students keep individual blogs v. one community blog for the class, or several small-group blogs: advantages and disadvantages of each
• Privacy for the students (if real names are used, people can find the students via Google)
• Requiring weblog posts, or offering the option of keeping a print journal instead
• The possible feeling on the part of the instructor of being "exposed" if students complain about the class on the blog
• Outside participation: the fact that anyone outside the class can read the blog and leave comments (and they do)
• Assessing weblog posts
• Creating weblog post prompts (and the question of whether there should be prompts, or if the students should have the option to deviate from the prompt topic to a topic of his or her choice)
• Avoiding "forced blogging"
• Integrating the weblog into class discussion

Sigh. There's no way I'll be able to cover all of that. It's too bad there can't be workshops for intermediate to advanced techies with some experience using the particular technology on which the workshop centers. I'm one of those people who goes to every workshop I possibly can -- offered through the Center for Writing, my department, or the Center for Teaching and Learning Services, especially the workshops on instructional technology, but others too, and the ones on technology are always the same: the most basic preliminary definition and exploration of a new technology. I leave not knowing anything I didn't already know. I realize it's necessary to make sure no one is lost or confused, and there's not enough time to get into major issues, but I'd still like to see it happen. So, any suggestions for me as I prepare this talk? If you were composing such a talk, what would you cover? If you're new to blogging as it intersects with writing pedagogy, what do you want to know? If it's old hat to you, what would you have appreciated hearing as a newbie?

:jawdrop: Wonkette describes Bush as "in semi-hysterics." Indeed! Jeebus, let Charles Gibson talk, why dontcha? Bush is falling apart; it hurts to watch. In comparison, Kerry is making me want to stand up and cheer.

UPDATE: Yes! I'm so glad Gibson picked the question about the environment. The environment has seemed conspicuously absent from the election rhetoric.

I watched the debate, of course, and am now watching the postgame show, eagerly anticipating NBC's interview of two of the most prominent political bloggers (if it's anyone other than Atrios and Glenn Reynolds, I'll be surprised. Okay, I'm surprised. As I type, they announced that it's Power Line Blog and Wonkette, which are both loading very slowly right now.). I expect that Tom Brokaw will at some point explain what a blog is (check), and hopefully he'll allude to that "political jihad" metaphor (guess not). I'm wondering: Is this the tipping point? Is this report going to cause an influx of new blogs or a spike in blog reading? Has blogging been blown wide open?

In other news, see Josh Marshall's pre-debate post, Wonkette's running commentary, and the VP debate drinking game.

I'm fully aware of the extent to which I'm showing my geekiness here, but lately I've been noticing that Wikipedia doesn't have many entries on qualitative research methods. If I were teaching a graduate course in research methods, I'd assign 1000-2000 word articles on the following topics -- and more as I think of them -- to be written for submission to Wikipedia (this assignment could be collaborative):

• Rhetorical analysis
• Grounded theory
• Textual analysis
• Content analysis (right now there's only a stub on it)
• Ethnomethodology (to augment what's there)
• Research design
• Naturalistic research
• Qualitative (this could use more information, IMO. See also Quantitative)
• Descriptive statistics, if someone were inclined to add to that
• Feminist research
• Genre analysis
• Research ethics
• Survey research
• Interview (just to add material on interviewing as a research method)

For the past few weeks, I've been following Clay's book reviews with interest, as he's rereading texts on methods in preparation for his Spring 2005 research methods class. I hope he'll consider having his students write articles for Wikipedia. Besides being helpful for the students, it would put information and knowledge into the commons and benefit others.

Edited to link to Clay's course description and to add that Wikipedia does have decent entries on case study and ethnography.

I finally finished coding my prelims into HTML, so they're available if you want to look at them. I confess, I haven't been in a big rush to do it. I don't think I've recovered from them yet; I'm not ready to look back on the whole experience and laugh, that's for sure.