I’m also creating a handout to go into the packet, so I’m compiling some blogs that I’m finding interesting. I really wish I had all the free time in the world (who doesn’t wish this?) so that I could read blogs everyday. There is so much interesting conversation going on and I’m missing a lot of it because I don’t have time to read 30 blogs a day (most days I feel as thought I don’t have time to read more than 10, if that). Last fall I did read 30 a day, but now I just don’t have the time.

So, on this handout I’m going to list the blogs that I think are pretty good or interesting to go to. Some I’d like to highlight there, as well as here, include:

The Ongoing Conversation: OSU Writing 222 with Sara Jameson

Weblogg-Ed: The Read/Write Web in the Classroom

Kairosnews: A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy

Culturecat: Rhetoric and Feminism

Blogging Pedagogy (U of Texas)

jill/txt

OSU Center for Writing and Learning Online Portal

Thinking with My Fingers: Torill Mortensen

The Valve: A Literary Organ

Community College English

So, I’ve added a few links to my sidebar because of this, but I think these are the ones I’ll include in the handout, if not a few others as well (or, depending on space, I might not include a few). This post took me forevah because I kept getting distracted by so many other blogs to read. In fact, I think I made three or four posts that are newere than this one before publishing this post.

Wow! I love blogs!

Blogging My Research: Using My OSUWrite Blog for Research (temporarily titled)
Michael Faris

Last fall in English 595 (Language, Culture, and Technology), our instructor, Lisa Ede, had assigned a seminar project: We could choose any topic to research and write about, as long as it involved the intersection of language, culture, and technology. As the quarter progressed, I expressed a great deal of interest in blogs and enjoyed using the class’s blog, which Lisa was piloting for OSUWrite.

Because of my interest in blogs, Lisa suggested that I pilot the use of individual student blogs for OSUWrite. With the help of Jon Dorbolo and Mark Dinsmore, I set up a blog on my OSU webspace, titling it A Collage of Citations. I began to research the use of knowledge blogs, k-logs for short, which are used to keep track of research. I found that students and faculty in various disciplines, including rhetoric, visual psychology, feminism, and bicycle engineering, were using k-logs to store and discuss research.

Traditionally, students use notebooks, journals, or note cards to keep their research. My blog, as well as those that I looked into, usually incorporated bits and pieces of all three of these styles of research. I often found myself writing a blog post by putting quotes and pages from sources, as well as the citation, that I found interesting, much like I would have with notecards.

I also wrote about my thoughts regarding certain books, articles, and websites I read, which made some posts more like keeping a journal about my research. What made using my blog more advantageous than keeping either a journal or note cards was the ability to create categories. By attaching a category (or multiple categories) to each blog post, I was able to later sort my posts by categories, and read each blog post I had written under a certain category (e.g., “Voice“).

In addition to a place to keep my research, my blog became a very handy place to prewrite, or brainstorm ideas before I had to write my final paper. I noticed, however, a shift in the way I wrote my brainstorming, which I wrote about on my blog:

When I normally do research and then do brainstorming/freewriting/prewriting for a paper, I have a sole audience in mind: me. However, my last entry was a brainstorming/prewriting activity that was geared not just toward an audience of me, but to a larger audience. I felt like I was no longer writing to just formulate my own ideas, but to explain my ideas to an audience (real or imagined). So, my prewriting journaling activities have changed in that my audience has changed, and that I’m cognizant of it as I write. So, then, my freewriting’s purpose changed from exploration to exploration/explanation….

Indeed, I had found that my audience had changed. I was able to get feedback on my ideas, as well as suggestions for other sources. These came not only from my instructor for the course, but from others as well. I received feedback from friends who checked out my blog and others who came across it from google searches. In fact, two professors at other universities commented on my blog after finding it on google. The ability to receive comments, and hold discussions through those comments, helped me formulate ideas and think more in-depth on my topic, as well as learn of new sources to check out. Because of my blog, my research changed from a very private activity to a social one.

When writing my paper at the end of the term, I found that the use of the blog was very helpful. I didn’t have to worry about losing something, not being able to find a source, or losing all my research if I lost a notebook or computer file. If I had an electronic source, I had linked to it. If I couldn’t remember the author of an article or something he or she said, I could use the “search“ feature of my blog. I found my thoughts and research were much more organized and more easily accessible than I was used to. The blog had become a way for me to organize myself more efficiently.

At the end of fall term, once I had written my paper on k-logs, I began to reflect upon my process of using my blog, and I noticed that more often than not, I just put quotes, paraphrases, and summaries from sources on my blog, as well as links. I hadn’t ventured too far into writing about what I thought about these sources. Once the term was over, I blogged:

…shouldn’t I be reflecting my thoughts, my personality, onto this weblog? Shouldn’t posts not only contain information from others, but also my reflections upon that? I did do this on some posts, but rarely. I could have been more brave and put out my immediate thoughts related to what I was blogging about. So, from now on, I’m going to try to make this a bit more personal of a research log, to try to value my personal and immediate reactions to my research (and widen what I view as research as well, since I’m now going to use this blog to research for my thesis, whatever exactly that may be).

I have since tried using my blog as not only a place to store others’ ideas, but also as a place to formulate my own. I have begun to use the blog as a place to brainstorm more, make conjectures, and explore ideas more fully than I had before. I’ve started using it for other coursework and have started some brainstorming for thesis ideas on it.

As I think about the potential of student use of blogs in the classroom, I consider what was advantageous about my blog: The format of the blog helped me organize my notes and brainstorming, and the public forum allowed for responses from others, as well as discussion. I wonder what a classroom of twenty or more students, each with an individual student blog, blogging their ideas and research and commenting to each others’ blogs, would look like, and I’m thrilled about the possibilities.

However, now I’m beginning to re-think how I use this. I think some posts that are notecards are fine, but shouldn’t I be reflecting my thoughts, my personality, onto this weblog? Shouldn’t posts not only contain information from others, but also my reflections upon that? I did do this on some posts, but rarely. I could have been more brave and put out my immediate thoughts related to what I was blogging about. So, from now on, I’m going to try to make this a bit more personal of a research log, to try to value my personal and immediate reactions to my research (and widen what I view as research as well, since I’m now going to use this blog to research for my thesis, whatever exactly that may be).

Blood folllows the history of blogging and notices how blogging software adapts to bloggers needs and makes blogging easier. She notes that as a practice becomes more popular, blogging software tends to develop tools to make that practice easier to do (e.g., permalinks, trackbacks).

This might be useful to refer to on permalinks and trackbacks, if I use those in my paper.

This article introduces blogs, gives some background on blogs, and previews a series of articles in this issue of Communications of the ACM, which Rosenbloom edited.

“The research disciplines are especially well covered, from multimedia networking standards to bicycle engineering, from processor thermal design guidelines to seismic design in architecture” (32).

http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm045.asp?bhcp=1

that Lisa Ede sent me – it’s linked on the sidebar.

This was a really good analysis of blogs as a genre. I don’t have anything to add, other than to post this to remind myself to look at it later when writing my paper, in case I want to draw on it (which I probably will). Perhaps my relunctance to write more on this essay comes from sitting in front of my iBook for six hours.