Blog Topic Research…

So I have been perusing cyber space in order to find a few outlooks on the particular blog topic that I have decided to focus on: how the private and public worlds interact with the world of weblog. I came across one very intriging source: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.html . This source introduced a particular part of the broad subject I am researching. It focused on the accountability part of blogging.

Bloggers must understand that their audiences have no limit…blogs are public grounds which entails everyone…your boss, the university you just applied to, competing organizations, your mom, etc. the source discusses the expectations of making public grounds (the web) the venue for exchange and ultimately the broadcast of private content.

Bloggers must identify with the power, the responsibility, and the danger that blogging entails. With its ease of use and open nature blogs must be used carefully. Authors are liable for an degree or method they choose to blend and blur the lines that separate the private and public world.

Blog Topic Search.

I think that searching the actual topics on blogging (the ones which we touched on in class) has helped me to see that these topics are bigger than I imagined.

For the privacy topic,my google search turned out many links about how to blog safely or different aspects of privacy settings.  It was very broad and spread out on many topics like the ones we talked about in class. My search about visual design turned out a lot of information about (as expected) coding and different ways to make a blog look the way you might want it to.

I used the “Academic Search Complete” data base for the subject of “privacy in blogging” (thinking that might have been too specific of a topic) and found 32 results just for privacy.  So then i was thinking, well privacy is also a critical issue that is a bit more controversial, so i decided to search for something on visual design in blogs.  For this i only found one specific article that actually spoke about web design. I think it’s safe to say that the privacy issue is more of a common or written about topic because of it’s interesting nature where as the web design is the less controversial of the two and therefore can be deemed less interesting.

The one about privacy I found to be interesting is one called “Blogging in the Academy”. It was intriguing because it talks about blogs being a “hot topic in academia”.  This kind of touches on some things we talk about in class, and also talks about safety and security.

Either way I find the Social Action blogosphere article more interesting, as does (in my opinion) the general public.

Poking around blogs…

When blogging first started in the late 1990s, it did not catch on right away but by early 2000s it was the next big thing. At first bloggers had to know and understand HTML but soon sites like Blogger.com came along providing templates that allowed people to write what they wanted without worrying about design.

In one article I found, the author said, “The flood of online content has become a tsunami.” When blogs were new, he tried to keep up with all of those pertaining to his work in employment law and HR, but that soon became impossible and he had to give up as the blogging world exploded with new bloggers jumping on the bandwagon at every turn. 

The author of another article I found says she blogs as a way to connect. Instead of publishing her family memoirs, she blogs so she can get more exposure than she would writing a book found in a library. She does not blog for the masses, but for the lost family member who will someday come across her blog in an online search.

School districts want students to be computer and Internet savvy by the end of eighth grade. Classroom blogging has become a popular and effective way to accomplish this. One of the articles I found about classroom blogging is about a project that did not work out as well as planned. In the Talkback Project, middle school students were supposed to be posting as they read their novel but soon unrelated links and topics were being posted and discussed so the blog had to stop. Students complained and one even said, ““By taking away our access to the Talkback Project blog, you have taken away my voice.” They wished the unrelated posts were removed instead of the entire blog. When the blog was canceled, the classroom went to a written journal between the kids and their teacher that the students compared to Dark Age torture. Using computers to blog helped them learn to write in a way they found enjoyable but when they went back to using paper and pen writing was no longer fun.

S. Craig Watkins, “The Young and the Digital,” interview

I came across this interview with S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital and professor of Radio-Television-Film at University of Texas-Austin.  This interview raises a range of issues we’ve talked about…There’s an interesting part on “safety,” an issue that Laura has raised in class.  There’s also some interesting stuff on the “migration” of people from MySpace to facebook as they move from high school to college.

If you’re interested in listening, click here

findings in the world of visual blogs

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/

things like photojournalism are becoming easier to find through blogs. even an industry giant like the new york times uses blogs visually to tell stories.

in scarier thoughts, there are people stealing others pictures off the internet and using them to their advantage. can you imagine seeing your face next to someone else’s words and thoughts? that wouldn’t be fair now would it?

can i say it now? google sucks!! it is impossible to find sites that actually fit with what i’m trying to convey. for example, i was looking for a site that descibed plagarism and pictures but there is no guidelines for copyright pictures. how does that make sense? maybe like normal the government is hiding information on pictures being misused because they also misuse pictures. that’s the way america works.

The Classroom and the Blog

I feel like with that title I am about to tell a tale about a valient hero and an awful villian. However, not about to take that route.

After reading this article about blogs in the classroom, I realized that blogging is an extremely useful and modern tool for students in the classroom. Blogs are a much easier venue for students and teachers alike to express their ideas and to reviews each other’s work. I think it also makes students a little more weary of waht they are saying. Anyone can see what they are writing. Not to mention, in today’s day and age, students also have this obsession with making their private lives public, as the article details. This can be a positive idea when it comes to motivating students, especially since this generation’s kids are pretty lazy at times. It may be more appealing that their work will be online, for all to see, much in a way that MySpace and Facebook serve their purpose.

It is also interesting that this article includes the opinions of writing teachers in which they support this way of expression. Look at our class, we can look at each other’s work and comment on it. We can post things that are relevant or funny. It doesn’t really matter what ends up on there. They also address the idea that at times students would like privacy, and therefore things such as Blackboard have come into existance, plus some blogs allow students to decide if they would like their posts to be private or not. This allows still for students to participate, but not necessarily letting the world see it.

Overall, I like the idea that this article proposes. I think that blogs should be and can effectively be integrated into the classroom.

Visual Blog and Literary Labyrinth Summaries

Visual Blogs

As far as visual orientation goes, the concept of having blogs with more pictures than words is spreading like wildfire across the internet.  People are very visually oriented.  They are more likely to gleam their information from pictures and snippets of text rather than reading large paragraphs.  Visual blogs play on this idea.  News reporters are posting more and more pictures to go along with text, forming image sequences that tell a story all on their own.  Artists are posting their works in progress to get progressive feedback from their fans.  The average blogger posts pictures of his/herself to try and relate to their readers.  However, the problem with visual blogs is that they can only be taken at face value.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  What a snapshot means to one person can be completely invalid to another.

Literary Blogs

Blogs are not just diaries to vent your  insignificant problems onto the worldwide web.  They are also not just programs like myspace and facebook that are merely a glorified instant messenger service.  The term ‘blog’ encompasses a large assortment of topics such as warblogs, educational blogs, news blogs, medical blogs, and so much more.  These blogs are not insipid and shallow; they are beyond useful and are a great resource for the average internet user.  Although a good deal of the time slathered with personal opinion, blogs are extremely influential.  They are literature, not trash.  People have the common misconception that they are a waste of space when the are, in fact, a huge part of the way we communicate since we are all, for the most part, heavily technologically involved.  However, the thing about most blogs is that they are a source of information from an illegitimate source.  They are not employed by an agency, paper, magazine, or company to write on certain subjects.  They are an individual work.  This causes some controversy as to the validity of the blogosphere.

Visual Blog Summary

Visual Blogs

“Different mediums evoke different ways of viewing. While we might gaze at a painting, we watch television and we see films. The Internet, however, we tend to glance[1] at; our eyes skim over the screen in a freefall of vision until something interests us enough to pause the plummet momentarily.”

I cannot express how much I adore this introduction by Meridith Badger. She sums it up perfectly. We live in a fast paced world, and nothing is a better example of that than the internet. You can’t often put up a wall of text on your webpage and expect many people to read it. You need to catch their attention, pull them in.

This article explores the uses of picture and visual medium in blogging. A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say, but what thousand words? Everyone can percieve these as different messages, can string images together in different stories. And with the internet the way it is, you can never be sure where this picture is really coming from or what it’s original intent was supposed to be.

Overall I really like the ideas and questions brought up in this article. A photo-blog, expressing someone’s personality without hardly any words at all, can be a beautiful and intriguing thing. A completely made-up story using a girl’s photograph without her permission or knowledge? Now that’s a little sketchy.

In this modern world the internet is the subject of much awe, adoration, and intense debate. Where do we draw the lines, what is acceptable, what can we believe? And where does this movement towards visual blogging leave the debate for the supposed deterioration of language through the internet? Are no words at all preferable to chatspeak? If a fictional blog can be argued to have merit, could we do the same for a stolen picture?

blogs in the classroom

after reading the blog about blogging in the classroom, i have come to realize the good and the bad ideas about it. some good i see is that it is simple to use. anyone can easily create a free account and start telling the world their opinions. in the classroom setting it is helpful for the teacher to have all their students homework on one spot. for students it helps to be able to access their work online on one simple blog. the bad things in my opinon are that it can be hard to remember to go on the blog. i personally forget about it because everytime i go online facebook calls to me and i forget to do the assignment. another good thing about blogs is that you can write and you dont have to worry about printing anything out! how easy is that!

Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom

     Ok, so I chose to focus on this as my blog from another group, a blog I’m not actually focusing on.  I like the idea of using blogs in the classroom.  It is a more useful purpose for a blog.  Also, others can view the class blog and learn from it.  Class blogs add to the whole internet community, whoever uses it.

     Also, I would agree that having such a huge audience does change the way a student writes.  They not only have to worry about their teacher reading, but also peers and even those they do not know.  (Perhaps class blogs are best for older students, high school and college only, as they should be most confident in writing abilities and able to write to a specific audience.)  The fact that so many can look at the writings, however, can lead to more people giving input on the writing.  Constructive criticism is always good, and the more people read your work, the better.  Others can point out things the writer may have missed or help the writer understand an idea better.  Overall, using blogs in the classroom is a great idea, and should be done for various reasons.