Random Thoughts

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

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“I think the model for the CMS is outdated given the new Web, and I think that’s one of the problems,” he said.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.”

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!

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?

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.

Or at least it seems to be passing my blog by!  I am not sure what is happening, but I can’t seem to write.  It isn’t anything major, I don’t think.  Just lack of focus and being busy.  And maybe a little lazy!

I am busy working on several projects at work — my summer course, a plan for an online certificate program and the final changes to the curriculum proposal that is in committee now.  It is all pretty easy and fun, but I am letting it keep me from blogging.

In a recent comment, Craig wrote about how his blog had changed as he had changed over the years.  If you are not familiar with Teacher Dude’s  Grill and BBQ, you should really check it out.  It is a combination photo album/EFL lessons/political activism/movie site.  And it is really more than that.  But that gives you an idea…

My blog is nothing like Craig’s.  In some ways I don’t have as much focus as he does.  My blog, like my mind, rambles.   But like Craig’s, I think this blog has changed as I have changed.

Four years  ago, when I was a new blogger, I was a much more hesitant person, much less sure of myself, much more reluctant to express an opinion or take a chance.  Gradually, I have learned to express opinions.  Usually no one comments — either because no one is reading or because my opinions are too silly to comment on.  But I don’t care.  I am learning to speak my mind.  I have also learned that I can take a picture and post it to my blog.  It isn’t  a   great picture usually, not like Craig’s are, but it is a photograph that means something to me.  So I am happy.

Looking at my blog, it seems to me that what I am doing here is documenting who I am and who I am becoming.  It isn’t exciting or all that interesting, but to me it is valuable.   And I guess that is why I keep coming back.

I actually missed the fourth birthday of Random Thoughts.  The first post was made January 19, 2005.  Of course, it was on Blogger, then.

I don’t think I really expected to be blogging four years into the future when I started.  I am not sure what I thought or expected, but I can’t imagine I would have thought I would keep it up!  But I have.  And I fully expect to be blogging four years from now.

The Edjurist has a post about the death of the blogosphere.  The point he makes is not that blogging is dead but that it is maturing.  He says it is currently a teenager and will soon be an adult.  He says:

I think blogging is getting more professional while much of the personal realm of blogging is going to alternative outlets like Twitter and Facebook.

While I accept that blogging is becoming more mainstream, I have trouble thinking I as a personal blogger should be moving to Facebook or Twitter.  Those will never do for me what blogging does.  But obviously I will never be a professional blogger, either.  WIll there be a place for me in the mature blogosphere?

Stephen has an interesting post about blogging.  Seems that someone thinks that blogging is a thing of the past … again. Supposedly we are all using Twitter or Facebook or something else, something less word-intensive, to publish our lives.

Stephen says:

But I think talk of one form replacing another is silly. They serve different purposes.

I agree.  I maintain this blog because I want to engage in reflection and in conversation with others.  If I want to keep up with what others are doing, I check out Twitter.  The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and they aren’t interchangeable.

I really don’t like these attempts to tell us what we should be doing.  Or to make us want to do something different because “everyone else” is doing it.  That goes against everything I believe in.

So,  I will continue blogginġ as long as it brings me satisfaction — regardless of what anyone else says.