Class Chronicles: February 2nd, Day Five

 Class was started with Anne quoting aybala50's post about the hard-to-categorize nature of blogs. Anne asked aybala50 to elaborate, leading to general agreement of Jo(e)'s idea of a blog as a medium to various genres, and not a genre within itself. 

We are now done with generalizing about blogging, and we will begin to move into specific blogs. For Thursday, we will be reading as much as we can bear from Hannah's blog and Anne's blog. Then, we will see a transition from the personal blog to the academic blog.

Question posed at this point: What kind of reading does a blog invite?

We were asked to think about the reading experience of reading from a computer vs. reading a print source. 

Then, we switched to our ritual name game. I suggested the picnic game which was met with mild approval, but we went with it anyway. Personally, I think I now know names alot better from the sheer repetition combined with the systematic approach (as compared to the sort of random web-connection thing we did last week). 

TPB1988 and sweetp (feel free to correct me if I spell anyone's name wrong) were compelled to talk about their experience with writing class summaries. We then briefly discussed which format people liked better between the long-text version and the old, clicky version. I couldn't tell if there was a majority favoring either version. Anne also made a quick point about the value of images and distinctive avatars in our collective blog. 

nk0825, in a response to Molly's post, read and elaborated on her point that people seem to fear virtual interaction evolving to a phase in which physical human contact is nonessential. 

A few more posts of classmates were summarized and the corresponding poster was asked to elaborate and/or defend said post.

A recap of Thursday was than inserted.

Anne brought up the notion of blogs relating to the closed club of writing in the web (similar to jrf's [the freshwoman, who was bringing Jam to the picnic] post).

McNeal's article was reviewed as well as Shepard's and Millard's article. 

I asked about "Kairos" and a mini-discussion about the meaning of the word followed.

The real discussion began when we broke into 6 groups probably of 3 three people each. A series of questions were posed and each group decided which question it wanted to talk about within the group. Groups could discuss the same questions. We then regrouped from our groups and talked about what was discussed within those groups.

Some of the questions posed were:

Who owns the internet?

How does censorship operate on the internet?

Where do people who aren't drawn to the internet fit in to this discussion about it?

For the following class we were asked to think about high schools and blogging and the change of intellectual work within and throughout the context of the internet.