Here's an article that appeared in the New York Times today about professors who are using blogs, social networking sites and the like in an attempt to "humanize" themselves for their students. Some also see this as a response to websites like Ratemyprofessor.com. The article's interesting, but doesn't really discuss what these sorts of issues mean for graduate student instructors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/fashion/20professor.html?pagewanted=1&...

As I understand it, one of the great triumphs of the software industry was to let users create their own communities - where they often found and corrected bugs and other technical issues before the company did. As a result, the user had a hand in defining the product and its use.

I find that a similar thing has developed with my class blog. I assigned a number of blog posts about the class reading. These posts were due before class and were meant to provide material for class discussion as well as compel students to actually do the reading.

The founder of PostSecret is coming to campus November 1. In my RHE 309K, we talked about PostSecret quite a lot. As a community art project, it interestingly updates 60s and 70s mail art. I'm also interested in how it uses a blog as a public art space, and how it constructs its public.

Hello world! And thank you to Blogging Pedagogy for the chance to participate in their community. I'm looking forward to... well, looking around.

Google Books has introduced a new feature that allows users to embed clips from books that are out of copyright directly into their webpages. All you have to do is click on the box graphic in the toolbar above the book, then highlight the area you want to embed. When you are done, a popup window with the embed code will appear.

This could be an interesting feature to use for class blogging—if you want your students to discuss a portion of a text, you can embed it directly to the blog for them to view. I’m sure people will think up lots of other uses for the feature as they become more accustomed to it.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is sponsoring a Digital Media and Learning Competition, and I'm thinking that Blogging Pedagogy should apply for some monies. There is $2 million available, and there are two types of Awards: Innovation and Knowledge-Networking. I'm thinking that BP could apply for a Knowledge-Networking award. Here is a description of what they're looking for:

The field of digital media and learning has already produced a number of brilliant ideas that deserve wider dissemination, circulation, discussion, translation, application, articulation, and customization. Not every inventor/developer is a good knowledge-networker. Knowledge-networking takes good ideas and circulates them widely, taking full advantage of the Web's potential for collaborative thinking. It enables communication in which many can contribute, shape, and share.

If you use blogs in your courses (as I do--for reading responses), here's something to think about:
Blog Overload.

Thanks to Jim Aune at the Blogora for posting Iranian President Ahmadinejad's blog.

We saw this a lot during the 2004 U.S. Presidential campaign too - politicians blogging and "communicating with the people." During the campaign, my students looked at political blogs like Daily Kos and Little Green Footballs, but they also looked at blogs on www.georgewbush.com and www.johnkerry.com. It's interesting to read through these and speculate about who's actually authoring the posts, who the audience is, and whether it's a way to do an end around on the Press.

Some changes are on the way for Blogging Pedagogy. We've upgraded to Drupal 4.7, which means some new functions. It also means that we will soon have a new look (which, in my opinion, is long overdue).

Here are a couple of things you might notice right away

1) Regular visitors to the site may have noticed the "Tags" section on the left-hand side of the page. In the past, people posting to the site chose from a list of categories that best described their post. With our new "free tagging" function, bloggers can type in any "tag" they'd like. Tags are keywords that describe a post, and any number of tags can be entered by a blogger (separated by commas). You can use a tag someone has already used, or you can invent your own. The Tags section to the left is known as "tag cloud." Larger text indicates that a lot of posts fall into that category (notice the largest tag is "general pedagogy" - it seems that most people have stayed with this tag since it used to be the default), smaller text means that fewer posts use that tag. You'll notice that I've tagged this entry with "blogging" (a tag that has been used previously) and "administrative" (a tag that I just created).

Thanks to my good friend The Sheriff for sending me this article about how Wal-Mart is incorporating bloggers into its PR machine.

Wal-Mart is providing bloggers with talking points and inviting them to headquarters. In return, bloggers are defending Wal-Mart against various attacks regarding its business practices:

Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters.

One issue that the article raises is whether blogger's are under the ethical obligation to reveal the source of their talking points. This could be a really interesting way to talk about source documentation with students in terms of ethics rather than plagarism.