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.

Digital Publics and Participatory Education

Last week, an article that I worked on earlier this year saw publication with the open access journal Digital Culture and Education.

Back in January or thereabouts, Christa Teston and I were talking about different collaboration opportunities, and I suggested that we prepare a manuscript for a special issue of the journal. We put together a plan to explore the complex of blogging, backchannel communication, and Google Reader as a way to open up classrooms to broader public participation, drawing primarily from experiences in my Fall 2009 senior seminar at BSU.

Following Schön (1983), we took a reflective practice approach, inviting three participants as coauthors. Garrett Cox was an undergraduate in the model course, and he contributed a participatory perspective from inside the curriculum. Bolutife Olorunda was a student participant from the edges of the curriculum, and his perspective details his experience as a self-directed participant motivated by interests in the core subject matter. Finally, Noah Dunker, an Information Security professional from Kansas City, MO, contributed a participatory perspective from well outside the curriculum, as a public participant in the course, unaffiliated with BSU.

While the manuscript wasn't a good fit for the special issue, it was reviewed positively, and invited for inclusion in the next issue. In the article, we make an argument about operationalizing collaborative knowledge work within a specific curriculum and pedagogical approach—enacting a form of participatory education in digital publics.

In the process, we also detail a fairly novel approach to guided discovery (Clark & Mayer, 2003) and student blogging as a literate practice. Finally, we suggest practical methods of incorporating feeds—via Google Reader's "Bundle" feature—as a primary source within a given curriculum.

The abstract for the article is below, and the full piece can be found at Digital Culture and Education.

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This article—a collaborative exploration between instructors, students, and members of the broader, digital classroom community—explores how the strategic incorporation of sociotechnical networks and digital technologies facilitates literate practices that extend the classroom in productive ways. The article builds toward coauthors’ reflective practices (Schön, 1983), or “participatory perspectives”, had during an undergraduate English Studies course at a mid-sized, public, American university. Specifically, participants argue that these literate practices afforded not just information sharing, but the opening up of a traditional classroom to include broader digital publics and collaborative knowledge work (Spinuzzi, 2006). Toward this end, we ground literate practice in scholarship that attends to public writing in online spaces, and theoretically frame our argument using Jenkins et al.’s (2006) principles of participatory education. We then detail the specific curricular approach deliberately designed to create digitally connected publics and end with generalizable significance of coauthors’ participatory perspectives.

:: repurposed ::

:: repurposed ::

:: repurposed :: is a blog exploring rhetorics, places, and publics from a group of researchers at Ball State University. It goes live tomorrow, though a preview version with a few posts are currently available. There are still some design issues to sort out, and some final preparations related to content.

While many of the contributions to the site will be from students in my senior seminar, the driving idea and impetus is the production of a sustainable and meaningful space for the ongoing discussion of the complex relationships between language, placemaking, and publics. Over the next few weeks, we expect to consistently have between 15 and 20 posts each week, and we are soliciting occasional guest posts from a variety of disciplinary and professional domains. We see this as a post-disciplinary endeavor, one which is ultimately focused on better understanding how we make meaning in and through our public places.

To that end, the site will consider wayfinding activities, architecture, mapping, ubiquitous computing and context-aware environments, the social production of place and the social construction of place, alleys and interstices, landmarks, edges, paths, and nodes, public discourse, walking, bikes, skateboards, autos, and the many ways that human beings repurpose their environments--discursively, materially, affectively--in order to make meaning.

Please consider adding :: repurposed :: to your feed reader or bookmarks. If you're interested in contributing--once or occasionally--on any aspect of rhetorics, places, and/or publics, please don't hesitate to contact me.

The Sartorialist

If you've been reading this blog for any reasonable length of time, you're already no doubt aware that when it comes to certain things I can be slow on the uptake.

For example, only recently have I discovered The Sartorialist, certainly not a secret to the blogosphere. In fact, my discovery engine for such things being what it is, the find was purely serendipitous; apparently The Sartorialist is fond of shooting photos of stylish everyday cyclists, and my introduction to the blog was via Cyclelicious.

One day a couple of months ago I finally wandered over to the site, gave it a quick look, and added it to Reader. Since then, my jaw has dropped no less than 10 or 12 times. It's not as if I'm someone versed in the nuances of personal style or the vicissitudes of elegance and fashion. I'm clearly not. Nor am I even all that interested in the clothing and presentation which are integral to each post, yet I acknowledge their collective import.

What makes this blog stunning is it's (apparent) virtuoso simplicity:

On the Street....Left Bank, Paris

On the Street....Cheap & Chic, Milano

On the Street....Rue du Marche St. Honore, Paris

On the Street....One More Time, Milano

On the Street....Milan Now, Milan

Instead of fashion photography, I see expertly composed images of interesting people in interesting places. I see broader publics, architecture, city life. And I see post after post of perfect light. In my limited experience as a photographer, nothing could be more important. In nearly every post, the most important details are surfaced. As I noted above, it's only an apparent simplicity.

This is an amazing blog, one that I wish I had been following long ago.