Blogtrax

Sarah had a link to this blog, which is one of a type - a travel blog. Profgirrl also described her japan visit recently and also blogged whileshe was away, giving us news. Anya also kept in touch when she was at a conference, as did Guy.

The bloggers give us a sense of their new experiences in relation to the space they are in, even though in fact they report to us from within the same cyberspace. As far as we are concerned, they could be anywhere - they are not in our space at any rate. yet we still get a sense of their changed location through their blogs. So much blogging is like journalism and this is one of those similarities - people bringing news from all over the world.

Sarah also linked to this blog which gives a really interesting description of how educators could use Flickr.

But check out THIS as well - a piece of software using communities of practice theory to generate learning on the web.Moodle calls itself a ‘learning management system’ and could be a money making thing that I don’t much like. Band and Wagon come to mind..
I likethe Flickr idea alongwith mobile phones and tagging though. Would suit adult learners in particular I think. I also liked this educational project, (using Flat Stanley ) which I saw sometime ago and wrote about on DrJoolz .

I have just discovered that you can do a search, using Google, to find posts on Blogger blogs. I suppose everyone else knew this AGES ago, but I have only just found out. Look here.

By typing ‘Flickr’ in the Google box when on DrJooz, it threw me all the posts where I mention Flickr. Cool.

Finally while we are on the topic of Flickr, thanks to Anya for telling about the ComicLife tags on Flickr and giving us another educational use of Flickr. Another example of people learning together about visuals, multi modalities and this time also, narrative.Fantastic stuff. Am going to HAVE to get the software from Apple. See these other examples.

Have not posted here in a while. I go for a while with lots of thoughts about process and then .. NUFFINK.

But I think it is interesting that I have found quite a few blogs recently that I really like and that they are all doing different things.

There is the Riverbend blog which is doing something Very Important in documenting social and political history in Iraq for us. It is keenly, a woman’s view, a young woman’s view and clear in its declaration of partiality of point of view.

Then there is this one, Postsecret, which is very unusual, and puts up the points of view of others. And in so doing, shows us something of the Blog Keeper, who is like a keepr of secrets, as well as a declarer ofs ecrets. S/he is like a ventriloquist, speaking the words of others. By gathering them into one place though, s/he is like a curator; putting the artefacts in a glass cabinet, as Kate would say. This blog totally invests in the Public/Private affordances of the Internet. A very clever idea which plays with the word ‘Secret’ in a post modern way; the pun in post referring to: Postcard; posting on the blog; post meaning ‘after’, as in ‘not any more’; and toying with postmodernism. An intellectual game. What if the secrets are not true? Does not matter of course, since the site is about intrigue; it is about wondering about truth; it is about uncertainties. I like it a lot in its ideas but also as it has lts of VISUALS.

And then there is the lovely, but unkempt woman, Vitriola Webb’s ite. She lives in Portugal with her family but is from the UK. Her blog is one that like many I enjoy, in that it comes across as very gendered, very feisty, very full of life and social commentary. She puts her life on the line for us and takes big risks. She talks about her kids and ‘does identity’ very strongly through what she tells us about handling incidents in the big wide world with her kids. She defies that miserable mumsy image. And her blog is full of visuals that excite me. They excite me as they are drawings; they do not rely on digital cameras and they have a very high impact because of the way they invest strongly in naievete of shape and colour. But itis false naivete; for while the shapes and colours are simple, they are keen clever images which work so well with her words. Econmic and clever with phrasing she is. This is a real fave for me.

Then there is the wonderful parodying site Big Blogger 2005. Actually a clever idea, to bring together a variety of Bloggerswh are authors of one blog and we get to interact because we can vote one blogger out of the cyber house, per week. The blog, apart from the clever joke, does not work for me all that well. It shows me how important it is that a blog has to have a clear character of its own in order to really work.

Then there is the thing about Frankenstein. I don’t like it at all. I don’t like the book or the film much anyway but I am not sure I see the artistic merit in turning a book into a blog … it loses its structure which actually is important to the book having its impact.

All these blogs are very different from each other but are all using the form really interestingly.

And I have not mentioned Bitch PhD, Profgirrrl or i-Anya. They are all blogging academics who to various degrees reflect on personal and academiv aspects of their lives and are again very clear in communicating gendered identities. And for me that is part of a very strong allure as I think women are MARVELLOUS.

I am not sure about this next point, but I’l put it anyway as this is a blog for my musings and and not a fully considered paper.. but I think that Torill’s blog,Jill Walker’s and Sarah’s tend to concentrate very hard on gathering together links and references for others to use. They tend not to put the personal in so much … this is less true about Sarah, (who has recently blogged about moving appartments) I think they all tend to keep to the academic point more and that they use their blogs as places to keep interesting stuff and show stuff to people rather than showing themselves as much. Not sure though. I guess it is all a question of degree, of relativity. This blog is more like that, while DrJoolz is more gendered, more self revelatory and tied into My Life.

Anyway this allneeds some more careful thinking and I reckon I will draw up a little taxonomy at some point but being more careful and picking out features in a systenmatic way .. sorry to anyone who does not like what I am thinking so far … but do let me know your views.

I was interested to have a link to this blog left in a comment to my last post here on Blogtrax. left, in fact, by someone who is using blogs with her Y9 class, using it for self assessment and peer assessment.I’ll be interested to follow this project. The magpie blog is a kind of metablog I think, following a dissertation, but also has personal stuff on it.

I heard on the radio this morning about this blog, which has apparently won an award and again, this looks interesting. While this one proclaims to be :

A weblog by Tom Coates who works at BBC Radio and Music Interactive
Concerning social software, mass amateurisation, design, and future media consumption

As far as I can see he is pointing people about the web, showing us stuff and offering comments etc. Interestingly, he explains:

If you’re unfamiliar with weblogs, then probably the best way to describe them is as a launchpad to express your opinions, engage in conversations and note stuff down in public. I’ve been writing this particular weblog since November 1999, when it was very informal and only for a few friends. Today all kinds of people seem to get value from it.

So he has clearly seen his own blog develop from a more private affair to one that is conscious of audience.

My daughter has kept a web diary for YEARSand YEARS. She first set up with diaryland and I think is still with them. But she HATES the way I keep a blogs and hates the way I write in them so often and that I tell people about it. Her view is that blogs should be personal, oprivate, reflective onlife, feelings, secret thoughts etc. She is quite disconcerted by my type of blog.

Now this conflicts totally with say, Torril Mortensen, who writes with Jill Walker saying that,

Blogs exist right on this border between what’s private and what’s
public, and often we see that they disappear deep into the private
sphere and reveal far too much information about the writer. When a
blog is good, it contains a tension between the two spheres, as delicate
a balancing act as the conversation of any experienced guest of
the French salons of the 19th century.

- which I have discussed here before.

It seems that some bloggers do feel there is a right and a wrong way to blog; I like having more than one blog, because I can put different types of stuff on each one and I enjoy what each genre offers. There are types of blog and if readers believe there is only one sort, then they can misunderstand the content, get upset or disturbed by what is there. You have to know how to read something, to understand the genre, to recognise the genre, in order to properly understand. Hence, some people have said to me, ‘I read your blog. What is it? I don’t understand it?’

So there is something to understand about blogs in general, but there are lots of sorts too.

And when I spelled Torill’s name wrong, and she was discombombulated about this, then it was because I think she was wanting me to follow the same rules as she follows within her family of blogs. Blogs which are academic, which are very reflective and which carefully subscribe to blogging rules evolved amongst her group over a long period. I think that genres in the blogosphere develop likea social history; shared conventions which develop over time through practice. it is impossible to link all blogs, to read all blogs, to have a coherency across them all, so communities, affinities emerge. Interesting.

Anonymous said…
Now I am in a real dilemma. I have just replied… attempted to preview… and lost my witty response. So here goes again. But with less wit!

You do know me, but not very well. I think I know Kate, but she doesn’t know me. I am extremely grateful to you for your recent generosity. To reveal or not? I have a question/some questions first. Do you think about your audience when making your postings? Do you care about us? Do we help shape the representation of yourself that the blog is? I am interested in children’s use of sites like Bebo and Hi5 to create social identities for themselves - and am getting particularly interested in issues of control, when other children post onto friends’ sites - and how this relates to playground dynamics too.

Now you may know who I am… but my ego is appropriately wee, so you probably still don’t. I will leave you to muse.

Kate… sorry to hear about your bad day.

Bye for now

So says Clare on DrJoolz here.

Clare had posted comments on my blog every now and then, but I did not know who it was; I had in mind it may be an MA student but at first did not wonder for long. However, after a while I really wanted to know. This suggests I do care who reads and that I think about writing for a specific audience. Is this different from other writing though? I always try to think of a group of people who may read articles I write, or chapters for books (etc.) in order to help me write. This is not a special feature of blogging. But something that you can do is monitor who visits the site and people can join in. It is quite common on my blog for commenters to ytalk to each other and their text definitely is a key feature of the blog. This is the case also on Bitch PhD, or Profgirrrl and others.

Thanks to Anya forpointing out this site to me which is all about tagging.
I will be writing about this stuff in my Flickr paper.. there will be so much in that paper though that it may be TOO long for where I had orginally thought of placing it.

Anya left a comment on my post here. explaining how disappointed she was that a colleague who writes about Reality TV nevccer actually watches it and made her feel small for doing so.

It links a little with the thing I mentioned in my last Blogtrax post, about the way academics usually have a blurring of the boundaries between their academic and their ‘other’ lives; that it is sometimes diificult for them to think about where the boundaries actually are.

For the academic that Anya was talking about , there is however a clear distinction between what he is prepared to write about and what he values in his life generally. His attitude is very different to mine and it has revealed to me an assumption that Ihave, which is that researchers see the intrinsic worth in what they are researching. This is clearly not bon out by Anyaa’s observations ofher colleague and it is clear she had a similar assumption as me - hence her disappointment.

Academics who blog as part of their research are probably showing they value that activity; it feels more respectful to me to value the integrity and worth of what you are focussing on in your study. But I guess that is a feature of an ethnographic approach and not necessarily of other approaches where there is a determination to be objective, detached and to soberly assess a situation from the outside.

Motivation, for me is to become more deeply involved in something I like and think is valuable; but I guess others are motivated by a determination to improve society, to change what they are studying. (And I guess I am a bit more like that in other projects I am involved in. )

1.Originally, I started keeping a blog to see what it would be like to write something that would appear online. Having written about others and their online interactions, I wanted to know if I was right in some of my assumptions. I admired what I was looking at and wanted to do it too.
2. I find writing helps me to think through some of my ideas and I like the discipline of writing regualarly - however busy my day is with other things… I try to force myself to write daily.
3. I like the hybrid nature of the writing - it is part work and part play. As Anya said, something about boundary shifting. I think it is true that the boundaries of work/play merge for most academics and their inability to to distinguish is reflected in the blogs of many academics I think. Thanks to Anya for this insight.
4. I like the public/private tension of the space.
5. Writing helps me develop my ideas and I write them in my blog in a semi formed state; not ready for peer review as such, but open for peer commentary.
5. I like being part of an affinity space. This space is slightly uncertain as it is transitory to a degree and I am not quite sure where its boundaries are.
6. I like taking things from my meatspace experiences and rearranging them in cyberspace to look at as new text, s a narrative of sorts. These reconstructions come in the the form of digital images I take with my camera; words on the web-page that narrate aspects of my life; hyperlinks to show places I have been, things I have read, etc.
7. I like being part of digital culture network; I like the interaction.
8. I like producing texts that have hyperlinks and that have a range of modalities; it seems important as a cultural develoment and I want to be part of it.
9. I think this is a new form of writing and I want to research it.
10. I can communicate with people I know and people I do not know; I like not quite being sure who is reading.

Apologies that this post repeats a lot of what has gone before … but that is the nature of developing ideas and learning… it is circuitous.