Blogging

Andrew Orlowski is drawing our attention to Larry Lessig's important argument against regulated spectrum, which Lessig lays out in detail in his book The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. That's all well and good, but look what Orlowski says after ranting about email spam:

Google has its own spam problems: a tiny number of webloggers and list-makers whose mindless hyperlinks degrade the value of its search results, and create the Web equivalent of TV static.

Did Orlowski have to go there? Erin Ferdinand of Utne reviews the article.

Per Rich Rice's suggestion at the Computers & Writing conference, I'm going to compile a list of the people in Computers & Writing who are keeping blogs. It'll be part of the blogroll. If you know of anyone I haven't included, please tell me!

Nice observations here from Microdoc. I should probably blog this to Kairosnews too, but it's lunchtime. :-)

Here's Charlie Lowe's presentation, "Open Source Weblog CMS's: An Alternative to Blackboard." He did the most effective thing during his presentation: He showed a screen shot of the Blackboard site for Florida State next to a screen shot of his and Terra Williams' PostNuke class page. I could really see the institutional control mechanism of the Blackboard (WebCT too) site; it was quite a contrast to Charlie and Terra's public site. Charlie pointed out that the Blackboard login page "doesn't look like the Internet." That is so right! Those course sites are really pretty artificial and not real-world Web publishing.

Terra Williams presented in this same panel, as did I, but we won't go there. Her presentation, titled "Individual Student Blogs and Class-wide Blogs: What's it Like to Teach Using Only Blogs?" was an excellent complement to Charlie's presentation. She talked about her experience teaching an online class using only blogs and what a typical day was like, reading all those student blogs. :-) Charlie made a case for why open source content management systems are better than course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT (but then again I was the choir he was preaching to), but by the end of his presentation, I was left with a lot of questions about the course--just basic course design: What were their assignments, besides keeping a blog? What were the course objectives? Stuff like that. Terra's presentation clarified the questions I had. Oh, I just realized that I've been going on about this class they taught, but you can't see it. Now you can.