Blogtrax

It would have been impossible to predict the lifespan of a blog several years ago. There just wasn’t enough history. Perhaps we’re just about reaching a point where we can comment on some trends as try-it-for-a-bit bloggers fall by the wayside and yesterday’s online sodalities come untethered. Seasoned bloggers seem to find their own rhythms and frequencies whereas project and student blogs grind to a halt in this vaporous space of self-publishing. At the same time mainstream blogs, and often those associated with media or business interest, thrive and even seem to have become absorbed into the public imagination to such an extent that a mention of the word ‘blog’ does not evoke the same glazed expressions and eye-rolling that it once did - these paralinguistics now refocus on the word ‘wiki’ instead. And so it can be said that blogging has reached a rather early maturity, as those day-to-day postings aggregate and the trendy sparkle begins to tarnish. Why aren’t you blogging is now not as interesting a question as what keeps you blogging. Why keep up this purpose-built blog that once served as a repository of our autoethnography of academic blogging?

Well there are several good reasons, or so it seems to me. The first is entirely personal and perhaps may seem strange to some. I just like the look and feel of Blogtrax. It somehow invites longer posts than my personal blog, it feels more private (ie less visited) and it just looks great on the screen. Secondly, I like the idea of the autoethnographic postscript. The piece is finished, published and probably largely unnoticed but it still stands as a record of the sense that two academics made of the world of blogging and the kinds of meanings they read into their own blogging practices - and, yes, let’s pluralise that. In that sense it’s a frozen record, but I’m rather attracted to the idea that Blogtrax itself could map the contours of ongoing practice. Dr Joolz and I have now co-written two book chapters on blogging and a further chapter in our forthcoming book. That’s a lot of words about a practice which I still believe is developing. Thirdly, there is something about the accretion of meanings, the building of knowledges and the forging of new understanding and this builds on the previous idea of forward momentum that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.

So, is there a sense in which a blog can really lead to development and to the creation of something new? Can we write ourselves into a new frame of mind? For some reason, that I haven’t quite yet fathomed, I get the sense that this is a distinct possibility. I wonder if I have developed my ideas through successive outpourings, whether I have become more skilled at appropriating the voice of others, whether I have written a new script for myself. Under what conditions do the stories we tell about ourselves become emancipatory, I wonder? This is not to suggest that I am subscribing to the romantic view that imbues writing with magical properties, but merely to inquire into whether a process of regular reflection - regular and relatively short-burst reflection has its own strengths.

The difficulty is one of how to unscramble such a chaos of conditions. The regular conversations, the reading, the other writing all appear to contribute to a sort of onward march of ideas. Certainly that’s the way it feels. And four years ago, when we started up this blog I don’t think I would have thought about it those terms at all. But that was then, and as I scroll down the tags, to find something appropriate for this, they all seem like postcards from another place. Oh, I suppose I’ll go for Blogging, Learning and Identity - they seem more or less OK.

I started taking pictures of padlocks. As a matter of fact I copied the idea from someone else. Here’s a short exchange on my photostream

lizjones112 Pro User says:
Nice shot, I’m glad I’m not the only one who takes pictures of padlocks!

on-the-run Pro User says:
Actually it’s contagious. I thought your’s were so good that I suddenly found myself copying!!

lizjones112 Pro User says:
Thank you, glad to know I can inspire others to take interesting pictures

I wrote about this on my own blog, referring to visual memes, but all the time I was thinking about copying and the whole ambiguity of that culturally located concept of copying. I guess we are first socialised into the complexities and nuances of copying in school. We learn for example that:

- close imitation is good in certain contexts (such as letter formation, lining up, singing, turning somersaults, using technical vocabulary)

- imitation is bad, when we make fun of how people walk, speak and so on…that is as long as they are not legitimate targets (and of course what constitutes a legitimate target varies from situation to situation)

- imitation is good in creative tasks, particularly in the broad sweep of things such as kinds of representation, writing genres and so on

- imitation is bad in creative tasks when it shows a lack of originality and when it is a straightforward (literal) copy

In a nutshell, we learn by copying and we learn not to copy. Our academic life is shot through with similar notions about copying. Plagiarism is bad, summarising someone else’s ideas and acknowledging them is good. Doing a similar thing to someone else locates you in a particular discipline or field. Doing exactly the same thing is unoriginal etc etc. Underlying all this there seem to be some cultural constructs about individuality, originality, authority and authorship that are related to the way that knowledge and learning are conceived of and policed in the dominant Western paradigm. These are all concepts that new media and new technologies challenge. Yet, we still prize the originality of our blogs even if we riff off the posts of others; we celebrate the uniqueness of the images in our photostream even when we are inspired by others. Cut/paste, capture/remix, and rip/burn technologies suggest how we can make new knowledge or art out of the work of others. Originality and creativity is perhaps re-defined in terms of the juxtapositions we make, the new links we establish. What we do then is less like orchestrating new comments more like deejaying, seguing one idea track into another whilst still keeping our audience on the dance floor. Maybe copies our OK (after all they serve DJs well), we are distinctive in the versions we have and the combinations and sequences we make and, of course, the spaces in which we produce them. After all that’s where we perform our identity and develop our reputation.

Well, waste not want not! Here’s the alternative conclusion to Inside Out, if I don’t put it somewhere it’ll get lost forever (which may not be such a bad thing after all!)…..there are a number of significant issues for literacy educators that derive from the deep learning of our engagement with these new literacy practices. We beklieve that our study throws some fundamental features of writing into sharp relief. These features apply to paper-based abd screen-based texts, but are differently nuanced (!) because of the potency of online practices which are dynamic and immediate.

Firstly, writing is essentially an act of self-representation. What motivates or inhibits writers (irrespective of medium) is as much to do with the desire to communicate or the affective pull as it is to do with content or skill.

Secondly, understanding the material affordances of the textual form are central in the sense that they offer limitations and degrees of freedom. he mulimodal and hypermodal affordances of blogging software allow for new ways of writing. We learn to work with the affordances through situated social practice.

Thirdly, communicative purposes are intertwined with our imaginings of audience and our writing, as a social practice, is located within familiar and unfamiliar social networks. In our blogs these are mulitlayered. Audience is important to our performance of self, whereas textual affordances determine the nature and character of interaction…..

Well that’s the unedited version of what I wrote on the plane. I reckon what will become the published version in the New Literacy Sampler book will actually be better. But there’s a couple of germinal ideas in this that might be worth hanging on to.

Last week, or maybe the week before DrJoolz called me on the mobile about the paper. What was interesting was her comment about being ‘stuck in the middle’. She said something like ‘you know, that point when you don’t think it’ll ever get finished.’ That’s what I like about collaborative working – learning from each other about what it’s actually like! Her comment captured a very familiar feeling.

Now, a bit further on it feels like we’re working our way through the middle. The end isn’t quite in sight, but it’s imaginable! One of the interesting things that’s dawned on me is that we don’t need to tidy up/agree on things. If our super-ordinate categories are suitably robust our individual bloggings and meta-bloggings can afford to be out of harmony. In fact it would be more likely that they would be, at least some of the time.

From the methods bit, I’m putting up this draft paragraph, because I’ve been talking to various people about research positions in studying digital culture. Here goes:

If the complex interactions between people and machines lie at the heart of communication through digital writing, methodological questions about the nature of enquiry and the position of researchers are equally important. Existing work in the field of digital writing shows how researchers can adopt a number of possible relationships to the digital culture they study. This suggests that it may be possible to identify specific research positions. The list below shows our emerging ideas in relationship to these and we recognise that these may overlap, shift or indeed expand.

• Researcher as identifier of new tropes (Ito,1995; Rheingold, 2003; Lankshear and Knobel, 2004)
• Researcher as insider (Markham,1998; Sunden, 2002)
• Researcher as analyst (Werry, 1996; Shortis, 2001; Burnett et al, 2004)
• Researcher as both subject and object (Mortensen and Walker, 2002; Guy and DrJoolz, this paper)
• Researcher as activist (Gee, 2004; Prensky, 2001)

OK I am wanting to describe the affiliations we have on the web in our online affinities.
I am planning to write an article on blogging academics for Discourse, (and is this too public to declare that here? Is it dangerous? Or does it help me stake out a space at an early stage?)

And I want to include the idea of power, not just about a lovely, cuddly creative commons, as there is clearly a pecking order, a hierarchy etc etc. I also want something in there about how the coming together of people from a llover the world allows for exciting dynamics and the creation of new cultures online. Do these then impact on our work as researchers?

Nice phrases I am thinking about:

· Third space

· Co construction

· Satellites of temporary coherences

· Cultures of participation

· Affinity spaces

· Communities of Practice

· Emergent/divergent cultures

· Glocalisation

· Glocality

· Synthetic cultures

· Synergetic cultures

How about …. Digital Glocalities??

This is all embryonic but I am thinking hard.

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.

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.

I just found this.I think it is interesting .
One of the most obvious defining features of blogs is the way they are structured around chronological time.
But as a reader, I really have never felt confined in anyway by date;some blogs have topics down the side so you can read them like an index to posts. I assumed loads of people do that.
But the great thing about this blog is the way you can untangle that and read in topic order.
And as I have said earlier this will really help our research.
And as Mortensson and Walker’s paper points out, Barthes did a piece that was organised alphabetically.

Blogs escape the tyranny of certain structures but readers certainly seem to bring their own restrictions

I discussed Bourdieu’s Forms of Capital with Jackie and Anne-Marie.
I am thinking about a model for online learning communities which takes appropriate bits from Communities of Practice and Affinity Spaces but which also includes the dimension of power dynamics.
Bourdieu talks about social alliances like this: ‘Each member of the group is thus instituted as a custodian of the limits of the group: because the definition of the criteria of entry is at stake in each new entry, he can modify the group by modifying the limits of legitimate exchange through some form of misalliance.’ which is highly resonant of Flickr groups, in the way people set up new themes but these then develop and there is some kind of negotiation going on through the comments system, which reflect what things are valued and what are not. I believe that certain discourses become highly valued on Flickr; for examle the discourses of gratitude, of appreciation etc. People praise each other’s work, their houses, their babies, their belongings even. On Star not Star this is exemplified very well here, where the photographer tells so much of her life in describing the ciircumstances by which she took the photo. She reveals lots about her family life, her lack of expertise, here gratitude for praise and also for receiving useful critique to help her understand something about her photo she had taken. The way she received the comments from others seemed to facilitate more teeming in. I have seen this elsewhere on the site. This is all about being a member of the group who can use the right discourses. This does not have to be calculated at all, I am not suggesting that . I am saying that some discourses are very powerful and that people who are popular in the groups are able to interact in these ways.

Another interesting group is Pirates. TT set up a Pirates group where he intended to invite pictures not of literal pirates but of transgressive people in urban settings- a kind of intellectual pirate, a pirate who challenges social norms. The group is now filled with loads of pictures of real pirates; TT was not actually in control of what pictures went on. The power is illusory sometimes. This does not mean that social capital has not been acquired where it is apparent, for I think in these spaces where the right discourses are used, (discourses of gratitude of admiration, etc) powere is sustained. I.e. power is embedded in the discourses and the modes of the space. So ther is power also in images and people’s critique of what makes a good picture helps to shape what is valued in the shared images!!

Anyway there is lots there; I want to describe the way Flickr uses the space of the web to help me make a stab at describing an online community which draws on the notion of affinities, of learning, of valuing different types of knowledge, etc etc but which also acknowledges those elements of power which are undermined by other models. Gee talks about leadership in affinity spaces being ‘porous’; I certainly feel that there is more opportunity for leadership in online groups, (and that is probably part of the attraction - to feel empowered in a safe (ish) space) ; but I also think groups are subject to hierarchies. We cannot forget for example, that it is Yahoo that supports a system of ‘favourites’ which help confer status. Or that the system of picking people as contacts is seen as acquisitive in some way; the discourses of mutuality are perhaps a little bit misleading over in the Flickr camp.
If I can try to draw up a model for Flickr I can then think about testing it in other groups.

I am feeling quite excited about all this. Multi modal forms of capital, yeah.

The move to this site has been a learning process about technology. Without doing this learning it would not have been woryth the move. Technology is impacting on the way we do our research but we have to learn new things as well. This is a learning about technology through the desire to acquire particular textual affordances.
Learning by doing.
But there is also something here about the relationship between technology and behaviour.