It’s a mindset!

Denise Horn at University of Venus on Inside Higher Ed has a very interesting post about her unread (or seldom read) book and her widely read blog and how the book goes on her CV but her blog can’t.

Denise wrote:

I hope this will not be the case for long. I am beginning to see more academics create their own blogs as a means of working out the intricacies of unformed thoughts, for commenting on current events, or, like my posts, for reflecting on the state of the profession and our place in it. Many of us are young professors, but not all of us. The point is that more of us can see the value of reaching a larger audience and the immediacy of the response the internet allows. You don’t always get the most constructive responses, of course, but knowing that someone has read your work and considered your ideas can be satisfying.

I could really relate.  I have included my blog in my file for the faculty evaluation process for the last two years.  I am not trying to say it is scholarship as in professional pieces published in peer-reviewed journals bu rather as an example of informal learning that I firmly believe is important for all of us who teach.  It is, to me, indicative of a mindset that acknowledges that there is lots more I can learn.  This year, my committee requested that I remove mention of my blog from my file.

Part of me wants to keep the blog in because blogging and reading blogs is a big part of the learning and thinking I do.  I definitely get more out of it than I do out of the coursework I have taken since I have been on the faculty here.  But the other part of me knows that I have to play the game according to their rules. I don’t like that feeling at all.

I can see that the blog is not going to fulfill my publishing requirements for tenure.  I am not trying to pass it off as that.  What I am trying to do is demonstrate that I strongly believe in lifelong learning and conversation about issues in the field of education.  Blogging is indicative of a mindset that I value — even if no one else on campus seems to.

Why do we do this?

Why do we blog?  I am going to be setting the new fellows of the High Plains Writing Project up on the HPWP blog, and I decided to post some ideas about why we blog to give them something to start thinking about.

Blogging is a pretty strange concept for most of the teachers I work with.  I would like to change that, but I am not sure how.   Maybe the  post will help!

Online teaching and blogging

Once again, Joshua Kim has written a post (in 26 minutes, I might add!) that makes me think.  He talks about how he thinks his online teaching experience has helped him to be a more efficient blogger.  He says:

The best preparation I received for blogging was teaching online. One of the most important elements for running a successful online course involves presence. The instructor must be “present” in the course discussion boards and blogs. Teaching online gave me tons of practice in writing rapid, hopefully thought provoking, discussion and blog posts around the curriculum and the student’s work.

As a blogger and someone who has taught online for several years, I couldn’t agree more.

But I think that there are a lot of online instructors who never take the time to become effective, and I doubt that they would be good bloggers, either.  So while I agree that the quick, thought-provoking response that we learn to give online students is great practice for efficient blogging (By that I mean not taking overly long to produce a post.), I am afraid not all instructors learn to do that.

So is online teaching good practice for blogging or is there something else involved?  Is there a personality-type that more easily teaches and blogs effectively?

I agree totally with him on another point, too:

On-ground and hybrid classes can also take advantage of the collaborative LMS tools such as discussion boards and blogs to provide students with opportunities to practice, and receive feedback on, short persuasive writing. The advantages teaching online should not be restricted only to online courses.

I believe that this is critical.  We need to incorporate this type of writing in all kinds of classes.  That is why I have my students blogging again this semester.  Added to the benefits of short, persuasive writing is the all-important writing for an audience.

Anyway, check out Josh’s post.  As always, it is a good read.

Switching gears

Up through Tuesday evening I was holding out hope that Moodle would be up and running in time to start the semester with it.  (We have permission to sue Moodle but they won’t let the server housing it access the internet!  Hopefully that will change soon.)  So yesterday morning I had to scuffle to figure out how I was going to handle the quizzes and answers to homework that I was going to post to Moodle.  I already had the courses basically set up on a wiki, so what I ended up doing was creating pages for the answers to be posted and another for the quizzes.  I am only going to post them for the time that students have to check their answers and take the quiz, and then I will take them down and later post the next answers and quiz.  It isn’t a perfect system, but I think it will work.

I could, of course, have used Blackboard.  I looked at it and even posted my syllabi there.  But I really don’t want to do that.  I will give Moodle a couple weeks and, if we still can’t use it then, will just continue with what is already in place. If it works that long, why not stick with it?

My students have started posting to their blogs.  You can find the list here, if you are interested.

How should a blog be used?

I was reading some random blogs today looking for inspiration for a post of my own.  I came across a blog I hadn’t seen before, T.Howe | Glosses, and a post that ended with this line:

New year’s resolution? To use this blog the way it should be used!

This idea that there is a way a blog should be used intrigued me.  Am I using this blog the way it should be used?

I use this blog to record my thoughts, to try to create conversation, to ask questions.  I use it to comment on things — issues in education, technology and life — that interest me.

I have other blogs that serve other purposes, and I guess they do what they are supposed to do.  But this blog has a more nebulous purpose.  I guess that means it is fulfilling its purpose.  (Low expectations are easier to meet!)

Is there some way that a blog should be used, though?  If so, what is it?  Any ideas?

Need a hard copy of your blog?

Some time ago Justin over at The Edjustist wrote about publishing his blog as a book and using it as a publication in his efforts to get tenure.  I thought it was an interesting idea, but it takes a lot of work to copy  it all into a single document.  So today when I read the post at Free Technology for Teachers about turning your blog into a newsletter using a site called Five Filters, I was intrigued.  While I don’t think my department or my college will be even slightly impressed by the writing I have done on my blog, I still think I will include it with my faculty evaluation file in September.

To use FiveFilters and make your newsletter, all you need is the RSS feed from your blog.  Paste it into the box on the FiveFilters site, and click on “Create PDF.”  It’s that simple.  I am attaching what mine looked like, to give you an idea.

Random.Thoughts

More thinking about blogs rather than Blackboard

I missed it while I was out of town, but there was discussion of using blogs rather than Blackboard on the Chronicle.  The article reports on a meeting held at CUNY on how to improve online education.  The various speakers outlined a number of reasons for doing so, among them:

• openness
• increased ability to customize  courses
• cost
• reliability

Of course, people like the ease of use with Blackboard, the relatively easy learning curve.  Some reported that there isn’t time to set up a blog for a course.

In part, I think this goes back to the argument TeachPaperless made about hiring geeks: for professors who use blogs, they are not at all difficult to use with classes.  For example, look at silver in sf and Art3059.  (Note:  You’ll have to go back to earlier posts to see how David Silver used this blog with his classes.  It is not just his course blog but his “regular” blog.)

Jim Groom summed it all up nicely.  The article quotes him as saying:

“I think the model for the CMS is outdated given the new Web, and I think that’s one of the problems,” he said. “It can serve certain functions well, but it’s hard for proprietary CMS’s, whatever they are, to keep up with the how the Web is changing.”

Do your blogs feel abandoned?

I had to laugh when I read a tech article on the New York Times called Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest.  The “meat” of the article — if you could say there is any — is this:

Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

First of all, it is really a dumb article.  People talk about hoping to get book deals, making thousands of dollars a month as a blogger, and other ridiculous things.  Yes, it might happen for some people, but it doesn’t happen for many.  Anyone who would become a blogger just to get rich is delusional, I think!

But I am the owner of some of those abandoned blogs, and I am here to defend them and, by extension, myself.  I have some blogs that were set up for particular classes I was teaching.  Once the course ends, the blog is abandoned.  Was it because I was disillusioned?  No!  It was because I moved on to the next one.  I have other blogs that were started for a variety of short-term purposes and were abandoned after that purpose was fulfilled. I may have stopped using the blogs, but I have not stopped blogging!

I know it would be almost impossible to track who gives up on blogging and who stops using a particular blogs but moves on to others.  But it would be a lot more interesting than an article like the one the NYT had.  More real, too!

Update

I checked today to see the status of the site that had posted my piece without attribution.  I am happy to report that the site is down.  I was not convinced that anything would happen, but it did.

Thanks to Google for handling it in an appropriate manner.

Thanks to stinginthetail for the heads up.

Update:  As stinginthetail points out in the comment below, I was wrong when I said the site was down.  Only our posts have been removed.  The “blogger” is posting new pieces all the time. How many people are going to have to complain before Google does something about it?

Stealing

I received a comment today informing me that someone has posted my content to their Blogger blog without any attribution at all.  I am glad to know this has happened.  I wonder if it has happened before and how common this practice is.

My post Genre was copied on Blogger here.  In looking at the  blog, they are all stolen posts, I think.  There is no consistency of place or topic.

There is a way to report this to Google — but they try to scare you out of it by talking about how you are liable for attorney fees and such. I am reporting it tomorrow, though if there is no response to a comment I left informing “Blogga” that my material is covered by a Creative Commons license.   I am sure that there will be no response to my comment, but I feel obligated to try that first.  It is another thing I can report to Blogger/Google when I report the theft.

UPDATE: 4/23 The post is still there, of course, so I have reported this to Google.  I am not optimistic that they will do anything, judging from the experience of others, but it is worth a try.