blog in progress

welcome to my semester project

This blog is titled “blog in progress” for a number of reasons. When it started, it was a presentation aid. It was “in progress” as classmates read and reacted to it but also because it was not complete. No blogs are, which is what I like about them. In my opinion, they reflect the writing process more accurately than essay writing does where, although you may go through multiple drafts, the product stands as “polished and finished,” a cohesive work. I like that blogs aren’t cohesive, that through the links and multiple pages, readers can choose how they will navigate the material. I wanted to replicate the process of writing and reading blogs with this project. I hoped to explore the composition of blogs, the rhetorical nature of blogs as well as the impact they continue to have on writing.

You can navigate in whatever way you choose. The entries are connective and self-contained as are the pages. The posts you see below are blog entries meant to represent the kind of blogging I and other bloggers typically do. I wanted to both discuss and participate in the genre simultaneously.

On the sidebar, you will find links to various pages concerning in-depth discussion and analysis of blogging. The blog is my semester project. I hope you enjoy it.

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more about copyright and intellectual property

Here’s another news snippet, this one from today’s Google Alert for intellectual property and copyright: Newsday.com: Just Google ‘thou shalt not steal’.

I really disagree with much of this excerpt:

“Most writers don’t leave much money when they die, but many of them leave copyrights. My father was a writer, and his estate primarily consists of copyrights that yield enough income to support my 87-year-old mother.

Copyright is generally limited to the life of the writer plus 70 years. After that, the work goes into the public domain and is available to everyone. The Copyright Statute also includes a “fair use” clause, so that a few lines or phrases of a writer’s work can be used as illustration by someone else. The amount of words that constitute fair use varies according to court case. At present, it is 400 words.

Enter Google, the hip, incredibly profitable corporation whose motto is “Do No Evil.” Google doesn’t like the copyright laws as they have existed for centuries. Google wants the rights to store all the books in the world in its Google Library program, and the company doesn’t want to pay for that right.”

a few thoughts here:

Notice how the author uses the mother to invoke some sort of empathy?

Life plus seventy is not exactly a limited period of time – it’s not like works are protected for five minutes and then, hey, everyone gets to access them – life plus seventy functionally puts all works created behind the copyright wall for the life of intended readers and their kids and maybe their grandkids. Yep, that’s limited and available to everyone.

Last, but not least, copyright for centuries? I am not a lawyer, and all of my copyright knowledge comes from reading Title 17, Lessig, Litma, Vaidhyanathan, and news articles and accounts of domestic and international IP law and policy. And I do know that, though copyright has indeed been around for centuries, this life plus seventy thing is pretty darn recent (thanks, Disney) – and also, the United States itself was a pirate nation reprinting unauthorized versions of international texts for quite some time. We are relative newbies to this whole protectionist approach to copyright, actually, but we have taken to it, now that we know we can make money at it. That’s American ingenuity for you.

I think the author does have some valid points, and I am somewhat with her on her conclusion. I read something recently maybe in Lessig that talked about when the law and the common beliefs of average citizens are at odds, there is a crisis. And we seem to be there with copyright and online materials. The law says it’s illegal, Average Joe thinks it’s legal, and Google argues that even if it isn’t legal it should be. Disconnect. Problems. I also, though, would like to know how Google would react if some corporate entity wanted to take their intellectual property, archive it, and make it available online, all without compensating them – and then claim that the effort assists Google.

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blogging can get you in trouble

There’s been quite an interesting discussion going on on the techrhet listserv concerning this article . Since I am planning my Internship Course (still) and the bulk of the writing students will do is on blogs they create, with pseudonyms, this has intrigued me on many levels.

It is important for all of us who blog publicly to remember how public we’re making our “selves”. And that we’re responsible for what we say.

Hmmm…there are some really interesting implications here for authorship, responsibility, etc.

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blogs as American as apple pie and puritans

In her book on blogs, Viviane Serfaty argues that blogging is a particularly American form, grown forth from the Puritan ideal of spiritual work as self-reflection through writing in a diary. The different forms and goals and cultural meanings of diaries that she points out are really illuminating for our current understandings of blogs, I find, and I suspect that this Norwegian history might also help us understand how social writing works.

Perhaps we really should be thinking more about the ideals of writing and reading in different cultures. If other cultures are built on an age-old suspicion that the people being able to write is really rather a dangerous idea then what does that mean for our current support and respect for – or lack of support and respect for – people writing back online?

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writing has consequences

Alex Reid’s blog post on digital digs brings up some interesting points about blogging in writing classrooms. Here is some of what he says:

“Generally speaking, I think the sentiment is to encourage public blogs. I am not entirely sure what a “private” blog would mean. On Typepad, private means they do not list your blog in their recently updated list. However, it doesn’t mean that a blog is password-protected or anything like that. I suppose one could create a password-protected blog, but what would be the point? One might as well use WebCT or some other CMS.

Some have raised the issue of FERPA (the federal law that, among other things, establishes a degree of confidentiality between faculty and students). Because of FERPA, a professor cannot discuss a student’s grades or work with a parent (without written permission from the student) and cannot leave graded material in a public place (e.g. outside an office door) for a student to pick up. However, FERPA doesn’t protect students from making in-class presentations or sharing their writing in a workshop or participating in an online discussion in Web CT. It would protect them from having such work graded publicly, but sharing work in public is not prohibited by FERPA (which would make the law fairly idiotic, wouldn’t it?)

More interesting is the issue of copyright. A student’s post to a blog or WebCT is copyright protected. I would presume that the student retains all rights to whatever they publish. However, if I have a blog that I pay for and I require my students to post there, who owns the posts when the course ends? I assume they do, but I assume I have the right to delete messages. Ultimately the issue is a minor one as there is little commerical interest involved.

In any case, I am in agreement with the majority on the list. For me, the educational value of blogging, particularly for aspiring professional writers, is its status as public writing. One of the primary purposes of writing is to engage in a conversation with the world. Even if few read it, imagining an audience has a significant effect on writing…or at least it should!

I’ve had students blogging for a couple years now. Blogging collectively on a course website and blogging individually on free sites like Blogger. Their Blogger sites can be fairly anonymous and usually I allow them to write on whatever they want as long as they post regularly. The purpose is simply for them to have the experience of blogging like the rest of us. On the course website they are identified by name and so there is more accountability.

I suppose a student might complain about sharing their work online. I have had colleagues who were reluctant to put their syllabi online out of fear someone would steal their work. I’ve had students who didn’t want to workshop their drafts because they suspected their peers might take their ideas. These are isolated cases, but I would tell them the same thing. The purpose of writing is to produce and communicate knowledge. Yes, there is a risk of theft and other risks as well, other consequences and judgments (see my recent post on academic blogging). That’s part of the deal. That’s what makes rhetoric interesting and important.

Writing has consequences.”

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google space, anyone?

You really can’t get away from your emails. This is both kinda cool and at the same time, scary. Google is everywhere.

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publishing blogs, making it count

There is apparently a book available in the UK called 2005 Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere. To quote from the blurb on the amazon.uk web site:

Famous bloggers like Belle du Jour and the Baghdad Blogger have already secured lucrative book deals thanks to the quality and vibrancy of their writing. But there are literally tens of thousands of bloggers who have not yet made the move to print. “2005: Blogged” provides a complete round up of the way the blogging community covered the major events of the year.

I see Steven Krause noticed this, too and has suggested the following: “what if there was a way to put together a journal– maybe print, maybe electronic– that was kind of a selection of different blogger’s entries, perhaps arranged around a topic? This publication could reproduce those blog entries and even encourage the original writers an opportunity to go into more detail in the form of an “article” or “chapter” of some kind.

Too crazy?”

I don’t think that’s crazy. I think it’s awesome but I’m not so sure it would work.

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hello, google brown

would you ever really consider naming your kid for Google?

Naming’s rough, I know – so hard to find something different without being too weird, while trying to not tap into the collective unconsciousness that results in all of our kids being called Mikayla and Skyler, Hannah and Aidan.

But seriously, now, Google? Heh. Google Brown. Can you imagine? I don’t think a kid with that name would survive gradeschool, but perhaps Sweden is a much kinder, gentler place to be a tot.

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is being ungooglable the next “big thing” ?

Very interesting post in Wired News about being “ungooglable.” Wonder what my students will think of all this google.

Also, Michael Joyce’s web page, announces “Michael Joyce is no longer maintaining a public web presence.” Of course, he goes on to provide a bunch of links and even a CV that includes an email address, an office address, and an office phone number. In other words, Joyce’s “lack” of a web presence is significantly greater than the web presence of most of people I know.

Personally, I don’t mind when people find me via a Google search. I don’t see what the problem is. I do understand the privacy issues and I agree that there are some things about me that I don’t want to be out there for one and all to see, but go ahead and read my blogs, look at my class pages, etc. I get inspired from others, why would I also not participate in the shared community?

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before you begin

I’ve been trying to get the links to open in new windows, but when I tested them, they opened in the same window, so you might want to have two windows open, one as a permanent reference to blog in progress and another one that you navigate back and forth from the blog to the links. Otherwise, you’ll become friendly with the back button, which can get frustruating. You can hit CTRL N to create a new window and then type in the url:http://inprogress.edublogs.org and you’ll have two windows.

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