Blogging: Links in Chains of Literate Action

The 2011 Computers and Writing Conference has been widely lauded in recent days as one of the best iterations in the conference's history. I echo those sentiments: the venue was spectacular, the people—as always—were wonderful and supportive, and Ann Arbor is a lovely city.

I participated on a roundtable exploring the following: Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other. With eight participants, we limited our talks to three minutes, leaving lots of time for audience interaction. The panel was organized by Steve Krause, and one of my fellow presenters, Bradley Dilger has done a fine job of corralling some of the discussion before, during, and after the roundtable.

The general feeling was that our session engaged the backchannel in a way that few others did at this year's conference, and part of that is attributable to: 1. the nature of our topic, and 2. the format, which explicitly took emphasis away from individual presenters and attempted to foster what Scott (1967) calls "collaborative critical inquiry."

Put another way: it was a lot of fun to deliver a 3 minute talk, and then sit back and listen to the thoughts of my fellow panelists and audience participants (those co-located and distributed). Basically, I spoke for 3 minutes, then didn't say anything until the last 10 minutes or so of the session. And I learned a lot more that way.

My talk is below. I encourage you to have a look at Bradley's post—he's updating periodically to capture some of the post-roundtable reaction, including a Storify perspective on the session.