tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8556939892549020996.post8797513636197705570..comments2023-07-01T05:44:48.943-07:00Comments on New Findings: My name is Bleetzork Ziddlebutt: conversations, the web, and teachingNathan Reinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10492016896547618363noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8556939892549020996.post-56790880423756689732007-08-15T05:49:00.000-07:002007-08-15T05:49:00.000-07:00Oh, and one more thought. You write, "I'd much rat...Oh, and one more thought. You write, "I'd much rather fool with the design of a course website than actually think about what that website's supposed to do for the students." As I argued in a recent post on my blog, however, design is not necessarily a superficial consideration, nor (and this is the important point) are design considerations necessarily something different from considerations of teaching and learning effectiveness. As Donald Norman argues, inviting designs can in fact help one think better, and are themselves the record of thoughtful, creative engagement with the physical and conceptual universe.Gardnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13298202257401928048noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8556939892549020996.post-29578693120316299552007-08-15T05:45:00.000-07:002007-08-15T05:45:00.000-07:00An interesting post in many ways, though there's a...An interesting post in many ways, though there's an edge to it that I find a little disturbing. That said, I hope these comments, particularly that one from Jim (heartfelt, detailed, and full)demonstrate how easy it is to draw folks into a conversation in this medium.<BR/><BR/>I can't add much to what Jim has said. I will say that the highly personal and elliptical quality you point to is certainly there, but it is not so uniformly the case as you suggest, or else there would be no way for anyone ever to join the conversation. I did not have a pre-existing social relationship with Alan Levine, for example; I met him after reading, linking to, and commenting on his blog for over a year. <BR/><BR/>Also, for me it's important that what I'll call the "business as usual" of the academy is usefully complicated and enriched in this medium. Right, Alan's post on Faculty Academy was not an article on learning outcomes or a list of teaching tips or whatever. You can find plenty of those elsewhere in the blogosphere, often from Alan himself. And if you really want to dig down into Faculty Academy 2007 and draw your own conclusions, those materials are open to you at www.facultyacademy.org. What Alan *did* write was an outpouring of gratitude and a journal of inspiration. What the academy in many cases fails to recognize is that such outpourings are the glue that holds our communities of learning together. Such testimonials are deeply encouraging to those of us who were mentioned, sure, but in my view they also point to the way to a heartier and more comprehensive engagement in our lives and common work. They're not a substitute for other forms of discourse, but an essential contribution to the whole. It's what I call collegiality.<BR/><BR/>I think I've figured out why I found your post to have an unpleasant edge. You conclude with the claim, or at least the strong implication, that those of us in this little community would rather gush about tech than buckle down to the hard work of crafting useful educational resources, because gushing about tech is easier. It's hard not to view that as an attack, and an uninformed one as well. I invite you to look at any of the course materials I've had a hand in creating and comment specifically on what you find there. Then we can have a better conversation.<BR/><BR/>And why have I not followed you on Twitter? Because I get a fair amount of "Twitter spam," and I haven't gone in lately to figure out who's legit and who's just collecting "followers." No offense meant.Gardnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13298202257401928048noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8556939892549020996.post-39706440047628088472007-08-13T03:35:00.000-07:002007-08-13T03:35:00.000-07:00i like this reflections very much. (can't say much...i like this reflections very much. <BR/><BR/>(can't say much about now, though, because of time. will link to this in my blog and try to really think about all this later.)Martin Lindnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09555220897375166762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8556939892549020996.post-89908587814460014412007-08-11T22:53:00.000-07:002007-08-11T22:53:00.000-07:00Nathan,Reverend Jim here (the real one mind you) a...Nathan,<BR/><BR/>Reverend Jim here (the real one mind you) and I have to say that this post was an important read for me in that it frames realities that I myself am coming to terms with through yet another lens.<BR/><BR/>What took me a while to realize (and Gardner Campbell framed it well the other day) is that you find people at the other end of blog, not necessarily scholarship –though the two are no exclusive. I definitely believe there is a place for scholarship in the Web 2.0 environments (and I'll list I few I have worked on at the end of the post), but often times someone’s blog (rather than a blog acting as a course site, conference portal, or website) is a personal thing that traces a totally different logic than a journal article or a book chapter. That, for me, has been the greatest pleasure of blogging- escaping the product-centered notion of academia by framing one's ideas in the immediate as both an archive and a preliminary sounding board. <BR/><BR/>You can get away with this in the blogosphere because your often writing for ten or fifteen people at the most, and that has always been ten or fifteen people more than I had ever written for previously. The blog, for me, has really been the single most pleasurable and important tools in the process of making connections with people like Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman, Laura Blankenship, etc. All of these people are now real to me because of the work we have shared, and it may seem fragmented to many folks, but it always already implies an ongoing conversation that you have to stick around for a while to fully comprehend. Now, I guess the only reason you would stay around is if you thought you had something to gain by it, and for me I knew that the folks you listed (and a number of others) were trying to re-think the boundaries of social networking tools and small pieces loosely joined in the classroom. Given that is my job, I needed to read them closely and regularly to see who they were referencing, what was of interest, and how they approached all the shiny tools being released almost daily. <BR/><BR/>What I found is that the tools were irrelevant, the conceptual ideas push all of the people you mention here towards EDUGLU- and ideal that is focused around an RSS rich environment that allows students, professors, and others to publish, immediately follow, trackback, comment, or link to the ideas of others as they were being published in a more cohesive and dynamic manner. How do we hook a class, or even a university up to such a system, in order to see how sharing ideas both in person and through a distributed network impacts teaching and learning for that particular campus. What might that tell us about a campus if we can share internally and externally? What does this suggest about education more generally in an age were the tools are becoming increasingly simple to flex and bend to do your bidding?<BR/><BR/>Speaking for myself, I have made a conscious effort to make my blog anything but scholarly. In fact, I am probably the biggest tool chaser and fanboy of all the folks you mentioned, for I am pretty much sold on WordPress as a tool that can (at least right now) approximate a flexible, distributed learning environment that will provide students with a rich archive of their work over the course of four years (along with the conversations, comments, trackbacks, etc.) if not a lifetime. This is somewhat ideal for it depends on a more general faculty participation, yet in all fairness we are living in technological moment currently that fuels a bit of the dreaming -especially if you’re not in the home mortgage industry. <BR/><BR/>Yet, all of this depends upon the very issues you raise so well in your post: is Web 2.0 for some edtech bloggers/twitterites/etc. just a social club of insiders having fun and being anything but scholarly? I think that might be a first impression if you enter twitter when the fake reverends are on the prowl, but so much of that fun is really turning the soil to examine questions of richness. Like any class or seminar, you have a social dynamic that can in many ways dictate the tenor and ultimate quality of course. Folks like Alan have been undeniable mavericks in pushing the social limits of these tools in order to see how we relate to them -how we can share through them and discuss issues ranging anywhere from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Carpenter's The Thing. <BR/><BR/>If you think about these tools in a more course specific space, then the scholarly and academic value of blogs, wikis, CMSs, etc is more than evident for me. <BR/><BR/>Here are some examples (all of which are open and freely available): :<BR/><BR/>1) Marjorie Och, an Art History professor at UMW, worked with a small seminar on the history of Venice in relationship to the fine arts. Each of her students had to produce a research paper, and she decide to have them build their research into a class exhibit/journal using a blog and wiki combination. It is an interesting project because it does the very thing you seem to be struggling with about these tools more generally-it traces the messiness of teaching, learning, and scholarship-while at the same time ultimately framing a "finished" experience for anyone interested in gaining more detailed understanding of a very focused selection of artists and artworks (sounds like undergraduate scholarship to me!) http://venice.maoch.org<BR/><BR/>2) Claudia Emerson is a creative writing professor who has really done unbelievably creative scholarly projects with her class. Here is one: she had students spend the first six weeks of the semester reading the most recent volumes of the established core of literary journals in the US. After six weeks of close readings and analysis, we worked together to have her students create their own literary journal and publish them by week 14 -and they did with some amazing results. in fact, the students had their own ideas about scholarship, peer review, and collaboration. Check out the <A HREF="http://noncejournal.elsweb.org" REL="nofollow">The Nonce Journal</A> - more than just a blog!<BR/><BR/>3) I don’t want to steal his thunder, and he is ever so humble about the unbelievable work he does in the classroom, but if you get a chance peek around ELS Blogs for some of Gardner Campbell's Film Text and Culture classes or his most recent New Media Studies class you won’t be disappointed (look for the feed pages!). <A HREF="http://blogs.elsweb.org" REL="nofollow">ELS Blogs</A><BR/><BR/>I have a host of additional examples for teaching and learning which I often conflate with scholarship -the only difference that one may harp upon is that the term scholarship is so often framed as a solitary effort of laboring in libraries and pouring over manuscripts. And while I don't think this reality has vanished entirely- the very tools we are currently using to communicate right now have changed that equation to some large degree. And I think this may often suggest a dearth of seriousness and rigor when in fact the play has unearthed a whole lot of both.<BR/><BR/>As for friending you on twitter, I'm notoriously easy. And as to the claim of my celebrity in the edtech circles -it has been grossly exaggerated.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8556939892549020996.post-55868518894834521252007-08-11T20:07:00.000-07:002007-08-11T20:07:00.000-07:00That's a fine discussion, and you should return to...That's a fine discussion, and you should return to it, if possible.<BR/>Lots of levels to it:<BR/>...the unevenness of following and being followed<BR/>...the psychological drop felt in publishing yet not getting writing in return - being read, but not written back to<BR/>...our tendency to focus on preexisting or parallel social networks<BR/>...making the leap from local to global in writing (who's reading this?)<BR/>...what happens when we accrete multiple social network functions<BR/><BR/>I think you're onto something about Web 2.0 as archiving function, too.Bryan Alexanderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05937099144329508708noreply@blogger.com