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Blog on blog (for the pioneer sessions) -- the remix
DE and networked-learning researcher Glenn Groulx has asked for contributions to "a group blogging activity about your own blogging activity . It is titled 'AU Landing blogging pioneers'." Groulx envisions that "document[ing] the impressions of top academic bloggers participating in the Landing" could generate "a 'treasure chest' of archived resources." (I envision it will also give him a treasure chest of research data to mine.)
"Top academic blogger," though? I haven't blogged in the Landing since June. (Then again, I have been a bit busier on my other blog.) As for the "pioneer" image, I get that it fits with the Landing branding, but it still seems discomfitingly ... colonial. (Especially when juxtaposed with the rhetoric of "digital natives.")
Anyhoo. To answer Glenn's questions:
When did you begin blogging. What were your reasons?
I started a blog in the fall of 2006 on taking a teaching job abroad, just as a way to keep in touch with family and friends in Canada. Now that I've moved my family west across Canada, we use that same blog to keep in touch with family and friends back east.
Has your blogging changed over this time? How? (topics, focus, frequency, etc.)
I likely blog more infrequently now than when I started. But I started a more specifically academic blog in 2008 and this year have tried publicizing posts on certain topics, especially IP regulation, to widen the audience. Sometimes with unexpected success, in terms of eyeballs and comments.
How has blogging helped you with learning?
Learning about what? I've sure learned a lot about blogging, about imagining the kind of public audience one writes for online, and then about how to engage with the real audience that reads you. And in the process I've learned this and that about integrating blogging in pedagogy. The learning's all stayed very meta, though: blogging to learn about learning with blogs.
On further reflection about the meta-ness of edublogging and blogging ed, I guess I should add that as a very user-friendly and seductively public technology for composition and comment, blogging has helped me learn more about writing, as a process and a practice. About how to outline and draft on the fly. About starting out without necessarily knowing where the writing will lead. (In his eminently more writerly way, Michael Ondaatje has called this sort of approach "writing into the dark." So there's an alternative to the pioneer image: that of a spelunker, or a miner.) About, simply, starting to write -- which is often the hardest part of the process (as just about anyone who writes will attest).
I have found blogging a great kick-start for writing, with its instant-gratification publishing form and -- an important corollary -- its implicit imperative to serialize: the form demands you to keep producing. This serializing imperative takes several technological forms. I'm thinking primarily of my Wordpress blog, where every time I log in, the "dashboard" shows me viewer stats as a line graph of views per day -- and so the longer this graph is a flatline on account of there being nothing new to see, the more implicit pressure I feel to produce something new there. (Amazing how potent cheap statistics are.) For another, more imaginary example: the Landing is now considering a "karma" factor, something like Whuffie in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: an index of social capital that I can see getting quickly tied, here, to reliable, routine production.
What are the main reasons you have persisted in blogging?
Keeping in touch. Building community. Reporting on research events. Crowdsourcing ideas. Archiving research materials, and publishing occasional research. Calling bullshit on bad policy. Craving attention. Romancing a will to genealogy: the rescue and documentation of histories that would otherwise go unrescued, undocumented. Archival fever, maybe. And only connecting.
How do you think your blogging activity will change in future?
Organically? Not on any particular plan, anyway. That bit about the plan's not true, actually. The plan is to turn a blog into a book deal. This happens all the time, but usually to blogs on a more popular, less learned tip: witness The Museum of Kitschy Stitches, The Vegan Lunch Box, Passive Aggressive Notes, even the Shit my dad says Twitter account (which scored not only a book deal, but now a William Shatner TV series). So it's less plan than goal, maybe, but the idea is to come up with a great idea that starts as blog and goes coffee-table book. (I mean, a Twitter account did this. How hard can it be?)
If this all sounds mercenary, and decidedly beneath learned discourse, don't get me wrong. It's not a career decision. (I've got some other actual plans for actual research dissemination.) But there's evidently some kind of paper-based market for digital cleverness, and it looks like fun (yes, ironic fun) to court it.
How has the Landing influenced your blogging?
It's informed it immeasurably: with lots of dialogue, directions, theory, troubleshooting, and tech tips. And it's helped, also immeasurably, to make a relatively new faculty member feel very much on campus at a distributed institution.
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Mark A. McCutcheon
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Hi Mark,
A decade from now, researchers will be looking back at the role of the Landing and its first users, and wondering what was going through the users' minds and what background they had. So, I have invited bloggers from within AU Landing to participate in what George Siemens referred to as a pause-point - preparing a reflective post that places us at the point where the Landing is about to become more widely used (I am hoping). I have invited alumni, faculty, students, and researchers to reflect on their blogging activity, and how the AU landing fits in with it.
Thus, for me, everyone participating in the pause-point as bloggers are "pioneers", in the larger context of a generation of users looking back over a decade, two, or longer, and having a snapshot of the thoughts of the first users of the Landing.
The one crucial shift in the way we will likely be learning in future is the emphasis on life-long learning, on lifestreams, and less emphasis on course-based instruction. The web as most people know it is 15 years old (1995 - year of the web). Sometimes, I think, we need to look far enough forward to consider creating content for our future selves and for the next generation, as much as creating something of short-term use.
I apologize if the impression I gave you all was that I was using a colonizing vocabulary. The choice phrasing of the pioneer is hopefully explained from a longer view rather than a colonizing perspective. It was certainly not my intention to do so.
I recognize that my choice of words in the overview of blogging processes is heavily influenced by my life experiences - For example, I have chosen terms such as berry-picking, piling, weaving, jigging, setting, path-finding, path-making and path-sharing. The descriptive metaphors explaining knowledge construction processes reflect in large measure what we all do to collect and harvest information online either individually or collectively. I also use seeding and homesteading as identity construction processes as well.
The use of five or six questions to generate a pause-point is a blogging meme, and the intention is to start an open discussion among previously unconnected bloggers. The power of the meme is that it generates a lot of collective sense-making and enables everyone to contribute when they can what they can, and benefit from the others' responses.
Thank you for your post, Mark.
Glenn:
It's a trip to try imagining the digital mediascape in even just ten years ... given how different everything is now from what it was in 1995 -- or in 1987, for that matter, when I watched -- but paid no attention to -- the early fax-handshake squeals of the Internet's popularization on the TV show _Max Headroom_. Imagining "content for our future selves and for the next generation" resonates uncannily with _Star Trek_ and a moving SF film I just watched, _Moon_ (which, unlike anything _Star Trek_, I highly recommend); more to your point, it seems both ironic and entirely necessary that blogging today, still widely imagined (romantically) as spontaneous overflow of individual expression and as a "rough draft" of history, will provide (at least in part) the documentary record of future history. (Assuming the next generation won't be preoccupied entirely with fighting over fresh water in a tropical, radiation-saturated stormscape. But I digress.)
About your choice of words: no apology's looked for or necessary. I know you don't espouse a "colonizing perspective." I was being a bit of a jackass to comment in that tone on this point. But as a scholar of postcolonial literature, I'm sort of contractually obliged to call that sort of thing out. The metaphors we pick build the language we use, and the language we use builds the world we live in, and so if we're pausing to take stock of early blogging in the Landing, we can pause to consider the frames of this activity's representation. My revised posting suggests some alternatives to "pioneering," with its Euro-centric connotations of clear-cutting, mastering Nature, and protecting imperial property and prospects from a horde of demonized Others. I wasn't so much calling you out on this as calling out the vocabulary that frames so much current discourse on digital life. Note the pervasive ease with which "digital natives" are criticized for "destroying civilization" through their disregard of social propriety and norms, their constant chatter, their fetish-objects: between the pioneers and natives of the digital frontier (and the whole line all the way back to Gibson's "console cowboys"), a whole -- and wholly obsolete -- discourse and ideology are given free rein to colonize -- and thus control -- our imaginations as today's weavers, seeders, and pathfinders (love those alternatives), spelunkers and data miners (um...), cybernauts and conceptechnicians, remixologists and dubjects, digiterraformers and datascape artists. We're distributed subjectivities of the in-formation society, still very much (always already?) in process; let's not let nineteenth-century ideologies live rent-free in our heads.
Lastly: is there a group blog page/site/group that I should link this post to?