Let's Talking about Blogging

From "Theories/Practices of Blogging,"
(Reconstruction Vol. 6, No. 4, 2006)

Who blogs? (Tori, Angela, Joyce, Judith, Diane, Ben)

Who reads blogs?

Why might you (if you do or don't)?

Why might you not?

Some examples:

• Tim Burke, Easily Distracted: Culture, Politics, Academic and Other Shiny Objects

• Anne Dalke, Stranger in a Strange Land: Grokking in Central America

• Paul Grobstein, Fellow Traveling with Richard Rorty

• Kate Thomas, Syllabub: Words on Food

Some theory:

Laura Blankenship

• Blogging Science: the Spin and What We Can Do About It

• ETC@BMC

• Why Science Blogging Matters
  
  
• Emergence and Blogging
  • The blog appears to be a form of virtual coffee house, salon or club...popular in the eighteenth century as places for likeminded folk to gather in a general sense of being part of the enlightenment....We have our own enlightenment now, fuelled by the development of the internet.

• Geeky Mom: Fearlessly blogging the intersections of technology, education, and life.

Writing as Jo(e) : Blogging as an Emerging Genre

• interactive and instantaneous
• a text with multiple voices...anyone can post
• replacing the free exchange of ideas that writers could once do in books
• comments
  • technology broadens and makes communication and information more superficial
  • it doesn't have to be superficial..slow down, consider what you're saying
  • Right now i just work through stuff that is on my mind. I don't even worry about audience too much.
  • my blogging is that reflexive teaching journal that I always told myself I should be keeping, the kind that acknowledges the whole of the teaching self and not just one's walk-on as a classroom performer.
  • it's nice...that one can have the option of having a fairly professional blog...but it's also nice to have a random place to write down the STUFF that is cluttering one's head so the real work can start
  • Milton speaks of writing as '...that one Talent which is death to hide." I write blog posts because if I don't write...a part of me is not allowed to breathe, to live, to find voice.
  • the pleasure of blogging is that I don't have to be a perfectionist. I love the slap dash nature of blogging

Robert Boynton, Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs, Slate

• One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of... "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture....Experimenting with open-source methods of judgment...might actually revitalize academic writing.