Hello DMACkers
So there I was last night, staring at the ceiling fan in the moonlight thinking about our DMAC blog. Such smart posts from people who are invested in a lot of the same threads that I am.
When I think of blogs, I think of a single person posting reflections or updates related to some or all aspects of their daily lives. A blog might focus on a person's identity as a professional, a parent, a student, a DMAC participant, etc. More complex examples might put more than one of these identities into conversation with each other. The next logical progression, I think, is that someone covers many themes or identities within one single text. For me, that's part of what makes a blog so great. Other than the fact that a blog is public, I don't see how that might be different than working through those things in a diary. So I guess what I'm suggesting (and I'm about the million person to suggest it) is that blogging adds the potential for public disclosure as well as audience response to a personal diary. So why do I foreground this commonplace?
I want to know how these notions and assumptions are complicated by multi-authored blogs like this one for DMAC 2008. Specifically, I thinking about how this blog, to which we're all contributing for the next week or so, functions (or has the potential to function) differently that a discussion board or message board?
Is this a case of a new technology adopting and relying on the conventions of the already-existing technologies in order to gain purchase/traction? If so, then how do you see it playing out once it gets on its feet? (These questions are each about multi-authored blogs, not single-authored.)
I look forward to your responses, and I'll be especially curious to see if you post as a “new post” or a “comment.” :)
See you all tomorrow.
Trauman
5 comments:
Doug and I were talking about this at lunch yesterday. What we're doing here isn't very "bloglike," but then again the whole idea of a "blogness" is sort of a misconception, as it's really, at the core, just a software for us to re-task.
I don't think the collaboration is all that odd, but the written voice and length of some or our responses is. This looks much like what a classroom blog looks like in my experience.
Which isn't bad (or good, really). It just means this isn't like the "usual" blog.
But you didn't need me to tell you we're unusual.
Maybe what the faciliatators of DMAC had in mind for this is differnt type of conversation, or a better word is probably dialogue. Blogs are usually single-authored but written for others to read and engage in. Otherwise, as Trauman said, why not write in isolation. We are engaged in dialogue all day, but asking a question or writing a response to either the scholarship or the events taking place through this medium creates the need to slow down and be reflective. Maybe the distance from the the day, the people, the events, and, of course, the stress of learning and being moved out of our comfort zones, enhances that reflective process. To be honest, I have previously shied away from blogging or reading blogs because of the time element. What has impressed me with this experience is the thoughtfulness and insight into the questions and answers posed.
The thoughtfulness of these posts makes them engaging to read but pressure-some to write. Unsure why, but am wondering if I'm suffering from "genre confusion" -- I thought blogging would be shorter conversations and quick responses. The craft of the current posts makes me want to stay a voyeur.
I'm intrigued as to why we're using a blog as opposed to a threaded discussion board, honestly. I don't particularly care for multi-authored blogs that much--too much digging around, especially if tags aren't really used. In contrast, a threaded discussion board makes things easier to skim and scan through. This seems a moment where we're almost forcing a genre (or we've chosen to use a technology because of what we hope it will do (create community) but that hope is at odds with what is commonly done with that technology).
Don't get me wrong--I love blogs. I blog regularly myself. But not here on Blogger. And I don't find blogging all that useful for classes IFF *if and only if* my aim is to have students read each other's comments and comment on them. In that case, I use discussion boards--much easier.
so...my first blog post. i guess i have been a very bad student here at dmac, not doing my homework properly and all. but i have been a good student, i suppose, in that i have been thinking so hard about so many things that i just really haven't had the energy or the time (or the actual computer available to me in the hotel room) to get my half-way processed thoughts into public.
i'm thinking about this blog too, and the form of it, and how appropriately it works with all these people writing and only the "newest" posts right there in front of my face when i opened this up. this was kind of like a lesson i learned when i was considering using podcasts for class--to make the sort of audio essays akin to the ones on "this american life," and the consultant i talked to suggested that podcasts are the kind of thing one would use to do a daily updated type of thing. if we all wrote a story and shared that, a podcast isn't the way to do it.
now i know about this new word that grows more incredibly sexy each day, affordances, and i'm making sense of that experience through it. and thinking much more seriously about how to choose among the growing array of options i'm learning that there are for producing, distributing, and consuming (though i hate that word in all its manifestations) various communications. it's complicating everything i've thought i knew and believed about every single rhetorical canon.
i think i write too much for collaborative blogs. there's not enough space on the page. i find myself wanting to see a map of this thing and what it would look like as a system of roots. why so many single posts? i think we are in kind of a unique situation in that we are sharing space in physically embodied ways as we create this blog--i wonder how it would differ if we weren't meeting face to face each day.
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