Tag: blogs

Business Blogs

/ dmueller

Blogging for small businesses was the topic of a talk I attended last evening
at Turning Stone near Verona, NY.  I was invited by
A., joined
her and M. at a table
near the middle.  The yellow table–yellow name tags, too.  Part of a
Society for Technical Communication. Yvonne Divita, self-employed
print-on-demand publisher and women’s marketing guru, gave the talk: "Blogging:
Is it a verb or a noun? Yes!"  The event was well attended, maybe fifty
people or so. 

The basic premise of the talk was that blogging would be useful for small
businesses.  The small-business owner should consider the possibilities of
a weblog as a replacement for a static web site that generates relatively few
visits because few people link to it.  Sub-pitch:  turn the
blogosphere’s interest-clustering into for-profit marketing.  Although the
other incentives were brought up, the ruse was heavy on giving page rank a boost
more than on opening up a different kind of relationship with customers and
other business owners.

Continue reading →

A Writing Teacher

/ dmueller

Like so many others, I’m saddened to learn that John Lovas died
yesterday.  John was a dedicated teacher and faculty member at Deanza
Community College; he is well-known in the field as a champion of the teaching
of writing in two-year colleges, as a recent chair of the CCCC in Denver in
2000, as a reasoned, thoughtful, and patient colleague.  Far more personal
for me: John’s frequent comments and encouragement here in this weblog.  In
fact, as I just looked back at some of my early entries to find when I

first came to know John, I found that he was my second commenter–the first
who I didn’t know (and I’d been blogging just one week).  A spark! From
him, in that exchange on seating arrangements, I learned the "to each, one move"
rule and stopped putting desks back into ordered rows once and for all.  He
was steady with similar insights, and in time, I came to regard him as a friend
and a mentor even though I hadn’t ever met him in person.  I finally did
meet John in San Francisco during the CCCC in March. I’ll miss his being t/here.

Since early May, his own
weblog had grown unusually
quiet; his entries clued us to some change, but I had no idea he’d been
diagnosed with cancer. 
Clearly this entry isn’t half the panegyric I think his memory is due.
Other’s are posting at the

festschrift site and at
their
blogs.

Retromediation and Novelty

/ dmueller / 9 Comments

Cross-posted to
Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Frankly, as I read "Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for
Teaching with Weblogs," by Brooks, Nichols and Priebe, all of NDSU,
I wondered about the consequences of framing
weblogs as remediations of older forms–the journal, the notebook and the
filter.  What results from a setup of weblogs that calibrates their
potential in terms of paper-based corollaries?  It’s difficult to know
exactly how this was framed beyond the evidence we find in
the article
(the framework, the research narrative, the questionnaire, the data-sets, the
conclusion) and in the related links (the

weblogs themselves,
a
syllabus,

a reading list,

adjacent

assignments) so I’m reluctant to respond to the essay with firmly resolved
skepticism, especially considering that it reflects some of the earliest uses of
blogs to teach writing. Yet through this limited lens, I have doubts about
why we need to liken blogs to paper
counterparts.  What’s gained?  Is it a way to legitimate composition
pedagogy adventurously (inventively, imaginatively!) straying from
long-recognized forms, forms often occupying the lion’s share of weight in the
event-oriented syllabus or program-wide curricular design?  Is it a way to
call up, for students, a sense of the familiar?  Although it is, perhaps to
a lesser degree than resonates in this article, necessary at times to present
students with a grounding in the familiar, when Brooks et. al. tell us, "we
wanted to balance the novelty of the activity with a grounding in familiar
literate practices," my initial thought is that a high stakes
flattening/deadening/adequation is inevitably brought about.  And this, I
think, must bear on motivation, if only subtly, tacitly.

What do I suggest instead?  Well, it
depends on the broader aims of the course. For collective course blogs, I’m less
and less inclined to model exemplary entries for the whole class, and rather
than talking about what blogs enable by connecting them to the written forms
they (more or less) resemble, I
prefer to introduce blogs to students in terms of their impact on how we
think (sure, paper variations impact
thought, too), develop and write with/about ideas and so on (more to this, but
I’ll let it rest here).

Network Captives

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

I admire Jeff R. and
Will R., read their
blogs like clockwork; their exchange(s) over the last 24 hours have been worth
following, if you haven’t been keeping up.  I’m here giving nods to the
naming contentions as we slide between the print paradigm and electracy’s
futures.  In that slide, some folks pack heavy, others pack light.  I
suppose there’s a way of taking up the rift that contends, as Jeff often reminds
me, the new media/digital turn doesn’t need the lingo of literacy (or
even the name).  As necessary and tricky as it is to re-vocabularize
rhetorical agilities in a digital age, I wonder what–if anything
substantial–is at stake.  It is, of course, about more than the
terminology; it’s about what we do and what what we do does.  Jeff’s

assessment of the high stakes are fair, clear:

In composition, I don’t think we are anywhere near tackling this issue
because it will undermine and reconfigure many of the truths we have accepted
and hold so dearly. If we are to recognize that literacy no longer exists,
what will become of composition studies which bases its identity on the ways
writing empowers individuals to be productive members of society (see Brandt,
Rose)? What will happen to topic sentences and Writing Centers, professional
writing, or the first year textbook? Serious damage.

I can imagine this angle–in retrospect–shedding light on the grand
transformation from orality to literacy.  Switch in and out a few
indications of oral traditions giving way to Guttenberg’s giant, and, perhaps
from some perspectives, you have "serious damage" or at least wreckage,
abandoned traditions, even widespread human cognitive re-patterning. 
Forgive me for jabbing in the dark here (since I’m not well studied on Ong, for
one), but one must preclude the other.  True?  Why must electracy
unravel literacy as literacy unraveled orality?  Is it because electracy is
meanwhile enfolding a textualism of all, braiding realities and programs
and tunes…"I don’t know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she’ll…."  Maybe
I haven’t read closely enough; maybe effacement is inherent in these
revolutions.

[Long hesitation…reading list has grown by twenty or so titles (Ulmer,
Graff)…having Friday fun…blog decorum…where’s that coming from?]

I set out to make notes on Will’s
mention of
collaboration.  My first thought is, Yes!, we are on collaborative
ground with weblogs and wikis.  Open texts, and so on, just as Jeff sets
them up as places where "writers and readers tap into, alter, appropriate,
confiscate, download, share, etc."  But then I keep thinking these few
thoughts about what I haven’t seen blogs do:  1. Blog entries are rarely
revised.  2.  Blog entries are rarely written collaboratively, perhaps
because most blogware doesn’t configure easily for partnering or group
authorship.

The tapping and commenting and fisking–linked, interested, etc.–seem more
prevalent than the sort of sharing and appropriating, which is to suggest that
blogging as spontaneous media doesn’t prefer to wait.  Entries are often
buried in a matter of days, comments with them, and the temporality machine
rolls, calendars overturn.  I get the feeling that blogs play the moment,
invite the rush; whereas collaborative efforts can be slow and laborious, blogs
thrive on freshness, vigor, never expiring. 

This is a jumble of (unfair, perhaps) assumptions.  I’ve been
thinking lately about the expenses of collaboration, the problem of
over-collaboration, of turning always to meetings about meetings, of everyone (including the ambivalent and disenchanted)
having a say and of feeling like that just takes toooo loooong for some matters. 
In part, I’m feeling jaded by the call for collaboration because I’m seeing it
done in a way that turns to wheel-spinning, indecisiveness, and gross, endless
shifts of leadership and agency to the (idle, vacationing, phone-message
ignoring) network.

Reason #153: Blogging is Safer than Grill Repair

/ dmueller

First signs of spring include firing up the grill and contemplating an oil
change and point by point inspection of the lawn mower.  I did both today,
firing and contemplating.  The firing was inspired when D. returned from
the market with bratwurst; the contemplating was brought on by the incredibly
rapid growth of purple-flowered weed sprigs overtaking the lawn.  Creeping
bellflowers?  Hell, I don’t know what.  But they’re tall and pleading
to be cut soon.  

The Thermos Millennium gas grill is approaching its fifth birthday.  I
spend the better part of Easter Sunday, 1999, with my brother-in-law (well, he
wasn’t my bro-in-law then, but he is now) matching up sprockets, force-fitting
parts and having an altogether bad time of piecing it together.  It’s named
Millennium, but I don’t think it will last more than another year or two, and
certainly no more than three.  Just last week I replaced a couple of bolts
holding one of the gas-regulator dials on; today, it was the igniter dangling by
a wire beneath the grease-caked underbelly.  Tough to get at.  Tough
to fix.  The igniter end is basically a spark plug–a ceramic separator
creates a space for the friction-generated voltage to arc.  The arc lights
the propane.  Burnt meat.  With the igniter end dangling beneath the
grill, I wasn’t sure what to do.  So I found a spot that looked like it
might serve as a shelf to introduce the spark to the gas and propped it
there.  But I had doubts that the igniter was working, so I popped the
ignite button and absorbed one shock.  15 volts?  20?  It was
working; we were well on our way to the first brats of 2004.  Well on our
way.

The shock absorption and my reporting of it to you via EWM warrants a bit of
explaining.  More than a few academic bloggers I read (more conveniently
with the assistance of Mozilla Firefox’s Aggreg8, which I’m learning to love)
have been questioning the vexed relationship between their weblogs and their
scholarship.  I consider myself to be more of an academic fringe-straddler,
one whose life is spread out in ways that conflate academic interests with a
less neatly intellectualized workaday life.  But I, too, wish for EWM to
serve more than a writing habit of convenience, to do more than chronicle day to
day ironies, the flush and flex of life.  I like the way the blog becomes a
storehouse for contingent issues and ideas; its utility is multifarious: writing
habit, public engagement, free-to-explore think space, platform, social forum,
experimental lab, diary-journal, unruly zone for discursive play.  All
of this will be worth returning to in the years ahead.  I’m sure of it.

You’re thinking it was more than 15 volts, eh?  Well, actually, the
shock is significant because I plied through 80 pages of Obedience to
Authority today, and Stanley Milgram’s study was all about the willingness
of a subject to expose a learner to voltage-shocks,  escalating with each
incorrect answer and commanded by an authoritative experimenter. I don’t want to
leave behind the idea of agentic shift as a rhetorical event, especially as it
manifests through deference to technology in the guise of authority.  My
notes are still messy, and I’m just now chomping through the theoretically
tastiest one-third of Milgram’s book, but I am seeing connections, seeing needs
for differentiation and refinement in terms, seeing lots of ways agentic shift
can serve as a descriptive apparatus in composition and rhetoric. 
[situation is a locus of action, opposition to authority, agentic state, peer
rebellion, cybernetics, conscience and tensional system of the individual,
authority communicates itself, constancy of authority system, surveillance-panopticon
iterations *Bentham/Foucault*, Berlin’s noetic
field]. I will flesh out those visions here, just as soon as I get my notes
in order.  That, too, is what the weblog does for me.  It’s
ever-present, bringing me to the edge of the reading chair, excited and
interested because my mind feels as if it is wrapped in one of those, "I’m
blogging this" t-shirts.  The constancy of weblogging potential
while reading is invigorating.

This brings me to one other out there prospect for EWM.  In the
weeks ahead, I have slotted the return of Cross-Talk in Comp Theory and The
Braddock Essays to my reading list (when does a list grow into something too
big to call a list?).  Brush-up reads to lubricate(!) the merge into a
doctoral program in the fall. So hold me to that; hold me to the promise of
bringing notes (even brief summative jottings) from those fine essays into this
space.  I know, lubricate sounds smartass, but it reminds me of my
big brother who is an adhesives chemist working and living in Detroit.  He
called today from his cell phone while driving to Toronto where he was heading
to troubleshoot something (likely) to do with robotic arms and glue
distribution.  J. and I have a terrific relationship; today he said he
called because he had spare weekend minutes.  And I want to come back to that, also–agency in the communicative act, deference to commodified time as it correlates to telephony and telegraphy.  But not now.  The Practice is on the tube.