Blogging

Here's my submission for Computers & Writing 2005, which is part of a panel on authorship-intellectual property-collaboration-open source, tap tap: and all that jazz! :)

Recent critiques of authorship have yielded the following insights. First, authors do not exist outside a social and historical context; social and material conditions enable and constrain authorship. Authors are, historically speaking, usually men, usually white, and usually economically privileged enough to afford the leisure time it takes to write. Second, a text is not the product of a sole author. Barthes argues that texts consist of "multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation." The field of composition has moved from the understanding
of authorship as a solitary act resulting in a product owned by an individual to an understanding of authorship as a weaving together of other texts the writer has read and voices he or she has heard in conversation. Lunsford (1999) takes up these critiques of authorship and calls for new ways of thinking "a view of agency as residing in what
Susan West defines as the "unfolding action of a discourse; in the knowing and telling of the attentive rhetor/responder rather than in static original ideas" (as cited in Lunsford, 1999, p. 185-186). Lunsford argues for "owning up" rather than owning, agency in
"answerability," and a view of self as always in relation to others.

This presenter will bring these ideas to bear on weblogging communities and practices. Weblogs emerged pari passu with the rise of open source and publicly licensed software, the backlash against the tightening of copyright restrictions in the 1990s, and the popularity of peer-to-peer networks. This influence can be seen in the widespread use of Creative Commons licenses on weblogs and in the rhetorical practices of weblogging, which take place in a network and for an audience who is invited to respond. Weblogging communities value accountability, exchange in the form of comments or trackbacks, and authority as situated in the connections one makes among discourses and the selecting and interpreting of content.

Today I've been struggling with what readings to assign to the class I'm guest lecturing in a week from tomorrow. I haven't been working on this all day, actually; the weather was gorgeous, so I went rollerblading on the trails in Como Park for a while, after which I felt remarkably serene. Anyway, I had originally intended to have the students read the pedagogy articles in Into the Blogosphere and Michael Angeles' presentation notes. Then I realized that I'd be assigning them about 100 pages of reading, so I decided to use the KISS approach and just have them read a few short articles and look at a few weblogs. Many of them haven't heard of weblogs anyway, so they might have been lost had I assigned the Angeles and ITB pieces. Here's what I'm having them read:

Jill Walker, Definition of Weblog

Jill Walker, notes for “Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network”

Meg Hourihan, What We're Doing When We Blog

Then I'm asking them to look at Kairosnews, Chez Miscarriage, and this semester's Rhetoric 1101 weblog.

I hope they'll appreciate this basic overview of weblogs. I'll draw upon the Angeles and ITB articles for what I'll talk about, but I definitely want to put them in small groups and have them brainstorm some ways they might use weblogs in education and training; perhaps they can synthesize possible application of weblogs with the material they've already covered in the class.

I'm still preparing for Friday's presentation, and starting to stress about it, as I have several other deadlines this week. Clay's marvelous suggestion to put all projects in a spreadsheet is working wonders for me; I am a machine right now, knockin' it all out. Eh, not exactly, but I know I need to be making progress on this presentation, so here are some items I'm planning on including in the takeaway. I'm planning on doing ~100-word annotations of them, but one step at a time. These are some of the pieces on teaching with weblogs and wikis that have stood out in my mind over the last couple of years. In no particular order:

Weblogs

Falling out of love ... by premmell at Kairosnews

Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom by Charles Lowe and Terra Williams

Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs by Kevin Brooks, Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe

A Course About Weblogs

(this) Space by Austin Lingerfelt

When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction by Steven D. Krause

Wikis

Wiki by Matt Barton

Embrace the Wiki Way! by Matt Barton

My Brilliant Failure: Wikis in Classrooms by Heather James

Posts on Kairosnews about Wikis

TeachingWiki

And, just for my own edification, a crash course on Writing Across the Curriculum:

Purdue's WAC handout

WAC links

I think the information on WAC will help me to create better "If your objective is ______, weblogs and/or wikis can help fulfill it by doing _____" statements. Any other thoughts? Your comments on my last post about this were very helpful!

On November 1, I'm to give a talk on weblogs at Metropolitan State University for a course on learning technologies. Unlike the weblogs and writing pedagogy talk, this one will have more of a focus on instructional design. The course centers on learning technologies in education and training that could take place in a corporate setting or a school. The instructor would like my talk to be a general introduction to weblogs and to cover ways they could be used for learning in each of these settings. She also wants me to offer tips on how to evaluate the effectiveness of weblogs. It's proving difficult! This discussion on Kairosnews is helping, and I want to do something with weblogs and WebQuests. In addition, I think Michael Angeles' work could be helpful. Do any of you have suggestions? I'd be grateful for them, as I'm somewhat out of my element here.

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?

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.

A couple of friends and I are putting together a panel on technology and new models of authorship and intellectual property for Computers and Writing 2005. The deadline is October 28, but one person on the panel emailed us suggesting we get started with the panel and added, "I know Clancy likes to get started early." :D This is my reputation now? All because I'm paranoid that my proposals for CCCC won't get accepted, so I always try to goad people into getting a draft ready by the coaching deadline? Okay, I guess I do like to get an early start. Here's the nascent idea -- a feminist analysis of weblog authorship -- which has been floating around in my mind off-and-on for a few months now. Because of said nascence, I'll do much meandering before I get to the point, if I even have one yet.

In "Rhetoric, feminism, and the politics of textual ownership," Andrea Lunsford critiques the solitary, originary, proprietary model of authorship and warns readers of the implications of the appropriation of authorship by corporate entities such as Disney and Microsoft (for a preliminary exploration of these ideas, see her 1997 keynote at Feminisms and Rhetorics). The article first appeared in College English in 1999, and much of it is a review of debates within postmodern theory about authorship and recent changes in U.S. copyright legislation. Postmodern/poststructuralist and feminist theorists, most notably Barthes and Foucault, have de-reified the Authorial Genius, showing him to be an historical construction and yielding two significant insights:

1. Authors do not exist outside a social and historical context; social and material conditions enable and constrain authorship. "Men of letters" are, historically speaking, usually men, usually white, and usually economically privileged enough to afford the leisure time it takes to write.
2. A text is not the product of a sole author. As Barthes writes, "a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation." The act of composition is exposed as a weaving together of other texts the writer has read and voices he or she has heard in conversation.

Lunsford juxtaposes these theoretical claims with large-scale efforts on the part of corporations to assume the role of author and hyperprotect content, e.g. Mickey Mouse and the Windows source code, and she rightly insists that in practice, the author is alive and well, so well that fair use (including for educational purposes) and the sharing of knowledge are threatened. This review is intended as a wake-up call for scholars in rhetoric and composition; five years ago, these issues were not discussed as often as they are now. (I'd still argue that intellectual property debates aren't as high a priority as they should be on the discipline's scholarly agenda; what do others think? Colleagues sometimes say to me, "I still don't understand why I should care about intellectual property." How can the stakes be better communicated? Does one have to have a direct encounter with "permission culture" before he or she fully understands?)

Some of you might have already seen it, but in case not, here's the course weblog for my Rhetoric 1101 class this semester. As you can see, it's a pretty free-form, open writing space. I distribute weekly topics, but the students don't necessarily have to write on those topics if they want to raise other issues instead. If you'd like to comment there, please don't hesitate to do so.