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I wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly Introduction to Writing Studies
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Blogs in Education--an update My use of my personal weblog has fallen off this semester, and in my ongoing study of weblogs in my classrooms, I would also say that students this semester have shown less interest than students last time this year. Fair enough--the technology and the product have to make sense to the user. That said, I browsed Jill/Txt's teaching archives and found some great new material. She talks about three student responses to blogging: 1. You see it, get it instantly, love it and blossom with it. (I'm one of these people) 2. You see it, don't quite see the point, perhaps you're quite sceptical, but if you do it for a while you come to find it valuable. 3. You see it, hate it, try it reluctantly and continue to hate it. The full post is worth the read! Jill/Txt also links to a visual representation of the use of weblogs in education, posted by Scott Leslie. I'm a little obsessed with information graphics right now--very nice! J/T links to Adrian Miles (Australian new media guru) and his assessment matrix -- could be very helpful in my electronic communication class's discussion board. Miles links to a blog parody, and says you know a genre is a genre when it can be parodied: the dullest blog in the world. Finally, 'cause it is late on a Friday night/Saturday morning, I will cull from this archive a link to Mark Bernstein's (mr eastgate, maker of Tinderbox) entry about reading websites critically. His observations are sharper than the usual Library tip sheet: he points out that a #1 ranking on Google does not = quality or authority, just popularity. He uses as examples that Rebecca Blood's history of weblogging is the #1 hit for "history of weblogging" but it is a much criticized article within the community. He also says the #4 ranked site for "theory of evolution" is a creationists site of skeptical value.
Weblogs and online communities Sybil is working on an MA paper: how to build an online community (the bison blog) via a weblog. I need to help her find some relevant scholarship: Everything in Moderation is a weblog about managing online communities. Abbe Don is a interface designer and interactive multimedia artist specializing in digitial storytelling, information architecture, and virtual community projects. Her reading list seems like a great place to start. Derek Powazek has a site promoting his book (which is on the reading list): Design for Community.
The Tetrad in Action Mark Federman, host of the McLuhan Program weblog, has an extended discussion of the fallacy of the brainstorming and the ways in which the tetrad can make brainstorming more productive. scroll down to his Nov. 14 entry.
News Story about Purdue Bloggers This article from Purdue's students newspaper was quickly filtered on Kairos News, but I thought it worthy of more attention. Samantha Blackmond, who I have filtered this summer, describes her array of teaching techniques and technologies. In other words, she does a nice job of putting weblogs in the context of class room discussion, journaling, email, etc. Does make me wonder how much we can cram into our classes. The article also cites a recent survey that found 4.12 million blogs on the Internet, but 2.72 million of them abandoned. We won't be able to judge blogging's success by the # or permance of blogs; they need to be understood, I think, as a process and a technology/genre deployed at specific times for specific reasons. There are no expectations that eveyone journal all the time, and the genre is not considered a failure because people pick it up and then abandon it.
Blog stuff to remember A guide to weblogging.--student directed. An online workshop -- teacher directed. I'm taking good filters and making them bad--see Kairosnews for the good stuff.
Research methods and weblogging I spent two days at a symposium called "New Research for New Media." The discussions were intense, informative, and intellectually fruitful--I hope I can put some ideas into action. Here are some ideas I generated. Ethnographic studies of bloggers. Many non-bloggers wonder "where do bloggers find the time to write every day?" That information sometimes leaks out on a blog itself (I claim only to be weekend blogger), but it might be fruitful to study how bloggers fit their writing into their lives, how it impacts the rest of their lives (are they always talking about blogging?--my experience so far), what it does to their sense of online an offline community. Experimental studies of blogging. I suppose I am partially engaged in this already--what happens when you introduce blogging to the classroom? But at the symposium, we heard a summary of a massive study done by the Annenberg School of Communication at U of Pennsylvania: randomly selected US citizens were given web TV in exchange for agreeing to participate in once-a-month discussions of the 2000 Presidential race. I wonder who would be interested in funding a similar experiment involving weblogging? In other words, the Annenberg study was interested in fostering political discussion/debate; a weblogging study might be interested in fostering reflection, collective intelligence, online community not generated by debate--probably about a specific topic like a Pres. Election, Health Care Reform, the impact-value of GMOs, nanotechnology, etc. Qualitative studies of blogging. I was introduced to a kind of linguistic analysis, Dynamic Topic Analysis, being used to study Chat. Certainly many kinds of close-grained linguistic analysis of weblogging might turn up some interesting patterns, although this kind of analysis seems to work best when couched in the context of trying to study a larger issue. The hot topic in the media right now seems to be the carry-over of IM and text messaging "speak" to formal writing; it might be interesting to see how prevalent this language is, how systematic, and what kind of carry-over can really be measured. A really fun study of video gaming also offered up some categories of analysis that could be used for weblogging: object inventory (what stuff do you find on blogs? -- pics, icons, feeds, weather, etc.), interface study (pretty self-explanatory, I think), interaction map (closely tied to interface for weblogs), game-play log (built in!! the blog is the log--at least in some cases). Also a great "meta-meta" session on research design, where the speakers, in their own ways, suggested that new media researchers do need to think outside the box of research design even as they draw on familiar tools. Some powerful new ways of generating data were explained, and an iterative design process (very rhetorical design, very responsive and flexible design proces) was beautifully presented.
Will Richardson on Weblogs Will Richardson's "Web Logs in the English Classroom: More than Just Chat", which just appeared in English Journal [93.1 (Sept 2003): 39-43] is a really clear description of Richardson's use of weblogs in high school English and journalism classes. He identifies the following benefits: weblogs stimulate debate the motivate students to do close readings the open up avenues for conversation they open up classrooms to authors and parents they encourage depth in student writing. Richardson sums up the benefits this way "They are an easy an inexpensive way to improve instruction, facilitate publishing, build community, involve different audiences, and provide a lasting record of learning" (42). Will's personal weblog is one of the best educational sites going (see my short blogroll), and his practices are clearly explained and reasonable. I took a quick look at Manilla this summer as an alternative to Blogger for my students, but I clearly didn't spend enough time with it to figure out all the features Will describes in this piece. In terms of pedagogy and place, the essay got me wondering about some of the differences btw high school and college settings. My sense is that college students put a high priority on socializing, and while blogs can foster that, they mainly get in the way of socializing. High school students can socialize with such minimal effort, and may spend significant time online already, making weblogging an easy (easier?) activity to integrate Students at NDSU, and other places with course management systems, also seem a little bit confused as to why I ask them blog rather than use the Blackboard discussion board. They understandably want all their information for all their courses in one place. I'm still interested in the potential of weblogs at the college level, but I wonder if the complexity of networks students find themselves in -- especially the first year -- will create some barriers for would-be bloggers. Oh yeah, this essay can be found online if you access NCTE's website from an institution that subscribes to NCTE's journals.
Great Description of the blogging process Dave Pollard describes and illustrates his blogging process--with an emphasis on how to turn a weblog into a conversation. Beautiful--a must read.
Professors who blog Hey, I'm not on the list! I think I must be on the "C" team--somebody please blogroll me! Oh, that's right. This weblog is for me and my students--I shun publicity ; )
File Sharing and RIAA The hotest issue in music that isn't directly about music is file sharing. I just read in Wired (Sept. 2003), the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is cooking up a variety of technological solutions (to supplement their legal actions) in order to foil file sharers. SUCK, for example, will be an RIAA program that looks for large collections of MP3s, then starts downloading files in order to jam the host system and likely draw the attention of the host's Internet Service Provider. I also read a profile in Rolling Stone (Aug. 21, 2003) of one of the four students the RIAA sued and settled with, Jesse Jordan. Jordan settled for $12,000, but file-sharers around the US are sending Jordan money because they hate what the RIAA has done, and is doing, to their sense of "fair use." Jordan shares his experiences on chewplastic.com--a weblog worth following if you want lots and lots of views about file sharing.
Weblog thoughts I have been working on an essay about weblogging, in which I claim that weblogging pushes aside "academic writing" because I would rather be digging around the web for good material to filter and not writing long, difficult to follow, academic essays that consume a lot of time and energy. But clearly the academic writing won out for a while, and maybe there is hope for me--I might be able to balance the two. If you are looking for more updates from the TeachingBlog, however, don't expect anything until the middle of August--I'm heading to the wilds of Minnesota for a little R&R before the semester starts.
Eminem I suppose if anyone wants to think seriously about the state of music in 2003, Eminem's work has to be considered. An Interview from 2000--he says, among other things, "I feel like when something's bothering me, the best way to get it out is to write a song about it, I think when I do that, people can relate to me more. The more I tell them, the more in touch they are with me. " Sounds a bit like writing a weblog, or reality tv. An Interview from 2002-- about his movie, 8 mile. The Infotrac Expanded Academic Index has about 250 articles on Eminem. Ray Grundmann's essay in Cineaste, partly about 8 mile, but more generally about Eminem's fame and controversy, is an example of academic commentary on popular culture and music. If the link doesn't work, go into Infotrac and search for Ray Grundmann as author.
Top 40 Weblogs Some days, I realize that I am quite out of the blogging loop. I just followed some of my favorite links to a site that gives a daily top 40 stories--the stories most frequently linked to by the 1000 weblogs this site has indexed. Today's top story: "Blogs shake the political discourse"--a piece about the blogging exploits of Vermont Governor Howard Dean. I had been hearing about his use of blogs, and wanted to read more. Thank you, blogosphere.
Sean D. Williams on teaching integrated composition I just spent a couple of hours getting to know the scholarship of Sean D. Williams, currently at Clemson. He wrote a 2 part piece for Computers and Composition in 2001 (18.1 and 18.2), and his essay in JAC 22.2 builds on that work. His fundamental argument in C&C isn't going to get any arguments for those of us who want to encourage/teach digital literacy--he says we need to expand the definition of composition to include visual as well as verbal components. The actual work that he envisions students doing, however, is always presented as hypothetical--no specific examples are used--and he always labels these integrated compositions as "arguments." He works from Mark Berstein's notion of neighborhoods to visualize hypertext, but I guess since I have started blogging, I have been thinking and worrying less about the structure of hypertext. Now I think in terms of database and scroll, not neighborhoods. And while I am engaged in an argument with William's text right now, I see the central purpose of my weblog as not being argumentative, but as being connective. I hope a few people will google by, and maybe exchange some ideas and observations, but I don't really want to argue with them. Sean, if you read this, I am not arguing with you--I just want to talk more, and flesh out our similarities and differences. I suppose I am starting to split hairs about what an "argument" is, but let me wrap up with one more observation. In the JAC article, he turns to Toulmin's The Uses of Arguments to continue expanding on his notion of how arguments on the web work, but I can't imagine a more print-based theory of argumentation than Toulmin's. I know I am being ego centric to wonder why he doesn't turn to McLuhan to think about web arguments, or turn to McLuhan to understand that the web is not primarily a medium of argumentation. Sure, there are lots of arguments going on via the web, but a cool medium like the web encourages participation and engagement, it encourages images and associations, and it encourages collecting, but not the sustained kind of argument that Toulmin theorizes, and that Williams seems to be imagining for his studetns. I just read the other day that web-readers, on average, spend less than a minute on a screen when they are surfing--no time for engaging in an argument! So, yeah, I guess if I want my students to construct a good old fashioned web argument that is still pretty print-biased (spiced by an image and associative logic), Williams is definitely on the right track. If I want a videossay, a probe, a killer power-point, I think I slightly need a different frame of refernce. I hope this doesn't sound to argumentative. These are good pieces--I'm just more interested in understanding how my own take on digital literacy, on integrated composition, is different from the views of leaders in this field.
Nancy K. Miller on Autobiography Nancy K. Miller's new book But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives jumped off the library shelf at me--I might have to rename my weblog "But Enough About Me." Key insights from the book so far: "it takes two to perform an autobiographical act--in reading as in writing . . . the writing autobiographical subject--female or male--almost always requires a partner in crime--and often that partner is the reader" (2). heightened sense of identification in reading memoir, and writers seek readers who identify with them. "Writers of autobiography and readers of autobiography are codependent. Writing autobiography, like reading autobiography, can be addictive." (3) Miller also has a great list of reasons why memoir is so hot as a genre, including the "me" generation, the access to truth, the minority experience in an antielite era, an assertion of identity and agency in a postmodern era, voyeurism for a declining, imperial narcissism (12). Miller doesn't buy, or doesn't stress, the "me" component of the autobiographical act, however, as her title suggests. "I want to propose the notion of memoir as prothesis--an aid to memory. What helps you remember. In this sense what memoirs do is support you in the act of remembering. The memoir boom, then, should be understood not as a proliferation of self-serving representations of individualistic memory but as an aid or a spur to keep cultural memory alive." (13-14) I really like her rhetorical focus: she is getting at what the genre does, not what it says, and that is fundamentally important act for understanding weblogging. Memoirs seem more narrative than database, to use Manovich's distinction in (new) media forms, so I'm inclined to think that bloggers are comfortable with fragmented identities, and may not be railing against postmodernism. And I am a little underwhelmed by the notion of memoir as prothesis, because since Socrates/Phaedrus, writing in general has been understood as either a poison to memory (if memory is seen as contained only within an individual), or as an aid to memory (an extension or prothesis). Miller's analysis, however has got me thinking that blogging is about participating in a moment / movement, about participating in the sputtering, tentative, growth of the web as interactive space. Bloggers are definitely not writing for themselves: they are hoping, screaming, crying, philosophizing, performing in the hopes that someone will stop by and say hello. I shouldn't over pitch that notion--I am finding much intrinsic value in blogging. But I have, since the middle 1990s, since I first became aware of the web, sought, interaction through discussion boards, listservs, maintaining a website, and now blogging. Other teachers stop by the site occasionally. With any luck, a few McLuhan scholars might say hello at some point.
The latest words on weblogs Sixteen days since my last post--ouch. Working on a paper tentatively entitled "Understanding Weblogs: A Rhetorical-Poetical Probe," and I need to update some of the scholarship/journalism about blogs. Here goes: Increasingly, I realize that Dave Winer must be cited for insight/opinions on the web: his brief history identifies early bloggers like himself, and links to some stories from '99 and '00. From Dave, I got Nichole Manktelow's observation: "There are two kinds of bloggers. Those who want complete control over every morsel of their website, and those who'd prefer someone else did all the hard work." Dave also shows up at the "Harvard Weblogs" site: good ol' HU is offering weblog services to students. On his BloggerCon site, he filters Chris Lydon filtering Harold Bloom saying that Ralph Waldo Emerson is a valuable figure for Americans (and especially bloggers) during these transformative times. Would McLuhan call this a movement from cliche to archetype?
Blogumentaries Chuck Olsen says he wants to make a blogumentary--makes good sense to me. Check out his clips if you want a visual introduction to blogging--students might dig this! He led me to a PBS component about weblogs. I'll have to bring the video camera to our next blog work session. Oh, and I'm batting around an idea for trying to put my weblog in motion. I imagine an html page with flash component, but I don't know how I would bet the weblog entries to feed into the flash file. Any suggestions?
Online Lives: Blog essays The journal Biography published a special issue about "Online Lives" in winter, 2003. I've skimmed the first two essays, and both authors are in one way or another disturbed by weblogging. Having been blogging for about a year now, and having included very little of my personal life on this teaching blog, I sometimes forget how raw and perhaps disturbing the journal / personal blogs might be. But to be honest, when a reader is disturbed by somebody else's presentation of self, it seems likely that the reader is, in general, disturbed the huge cultural barrier that is being broken. The self-contained, private, individual self of print culture is, McLuhan might say, "imploding," or turning him or her self inside out. Neither article draws on McLuhan or Ong or any of the scholarship that has really tried to trace the historical changes in orality, print, literacy, electracy. Manovich is well used to talk about blogs as personal databases. I will definitely need to come back to this issue later.
Theall on the Tetrad Donald Theall in Virtual McLuhan makes a detailed and convincing argument for understanding McLuhan within the context of Modernist writers like Joyce and Pound, and does a particularly nice job of explaining how to read and write tetrads. "The question then becomes how to read these complex, multiplex, semiotic constructions. Essentially there are two ways to read (and for that matter to construct) a tetrad as well as any McLuhanesque percept and/or affect: first, reading (or constructing) it as a poetic construct, permitting it to have all the necessary ambivalence in the interactions of the four components, including in each tetrad all of its complementary and supplementary quotes and comments; second, imitating ("matching" its structure) by merely inserting relatively flat single-directed, or at best dual-directed elements into each of its positions as many who imitate the tetrads do. The latter readings move the tetrad away from being the rhetorico-grammatic device McLuhan suggests they should be, turning them into what he would have labelled a dialectical device--a trivialized logical square. McLuhan's weakness, which he shares with most of his commentators and most commentators on media, is that his suppleness, dexterity, and complexity is more restricted and restrained than that of a poet like Joyce or theoreticians such as Walter Benjamin or Gilles Deleuze. " (152) I know I am guilty of having tried to use the tetrad as a dialectical device, and before reading Theall, I struggled to understand the poetic dimension of McLuhan's tetrad. But some colleagues and I are going to try and play around with what Paul Levinson calls "spiraling tetrads" -- tetrads about reading and writing weblogs, about how the effects might differ (or be surprisingly similar) if one weblogs for academic, creative, and / or personal purposes.
Dakota Writing Project Michelle Rogge Gannon and the folks at the Dakota Writing Project have a slick weblog up and running. I should contact the UND Writing Project people and see about getting us online.
What is blogging pushing aside? I've been thinking and worrying about this question for the past two days, although maybe I am just worried that I can't really stop blogging. Technologically, weblogging pushes aside email and word processing. But it really pushes aside formal writing, essay development, the kind of writing I am supposed to be doing. And as long as I treat writing as a technology with specific manifestations, I am continuing to write (maybe writing more), but not in the genre my employers probably think I should be writing. It pushes aside time, or uses it up, in ways that I enjoy but may not be appropriately productive. That will be the long-term question: does all this blogging eventually lead to higher productivity and visibility? In the spirit of one well-linked blogged, I am doing a lot of thinking with my fingers. If I could just get 100, 000 visitors a day, I might be able to argue for the scholarly importance of my notebook.
Photocams and Weblogs Same issues as the Virgina Postrel article (Wired, 11.07, July 2003) has a short piece about phonecams, "a cheap, fast strain of DIY publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts." This piece isn't online, so I'll quote some more. "Weblogs are giving way to photoblogs, and these are morphing into phoneblogs. . . . They may not consider themselves writers or photographers, but they're using the gadgets to broadcast the days of our lives, every wherer they go, through improvised frame-by-frame stroyboards. " -- story by Xeni Jardin Good description of remediation, although I'm not sure that the current technologies obsolesce other technologies in quite this linear a fashion. McLuhan didn't make this point as well as Bolter and Grusin--convergence keeps more technologies in play, and in either competition or a symbiotic relationship. I'm unlikely to move from blogging to photoblogging because I like to write and my environment isn't photogenic. Or, I'm likely at some point to pepper my weblog with photos, but keep working with words. That will be a bandwith issue.
Weblog teaching tips Clancy Ratliff, who started the weblog discussion on KairosNews, also asked for help on her personal blog, CultureCat. I could have stuck this entry with the last, but I'm up to four notes without a freeze up: go Jaguar!
Lev Manovich on the web I've probably linked up to Manovich before, but I am also testing my Jaguar Update to see if my Tinderbox will be a little more stable. Be sure to check out Manovich's extensive collection of essays online. Still finishing his Language of New Media and while he wasn't writing about weblogs, he noted the tendency to turn "data collection" into a hobby. Yeah, that's why I am doing this even though nobody reads this blog. It's just a hobby.
Discussion about teaching with weblogs Over on KairosNews, a short discussion about teaching with weblogs is evolving. The observations and practices are certainly in line with our own--there are not magic bullets, Charlie Lowe notes, and ESOL students, one commentator mentions, have trouble with free writes. Suppose I should go jump in.
Moby, the Prolific One I've missed my blog. Phone line was out for about a week and a half, I was moving, the end of the semester was crazy--I have new admiration for those who can blog amidst adversity. And then, to start my summer blogging in preparation for fall courses on music, new literacy, and other miscellaneous topics, I read a May 24 weblog entry from techno-muscian Moby saying he has averaged 1.375 blog entries per day since 2000.
Information Graphics (275) (320) Learning to communicating visually, and specifically learning how to create effective information graphics for my courses is probably my #1 professional development goal right now. But ironically, my first blog entry is about a very cool, text-heavy weblog devoted to information graphics. This weblog lead me to the website of Edward Tufte, information design guru, and then I had to track down Robert E. Horn, the author of Visual Language and the inspiration for the information graphic assignments in these courses. He has an essay on his site, "What kinds of writing will survive in the future?" This might become required readings in my courses.
Blog research sites Not surprisingly, blogs about doing research on blogs are starting to pop-up. Will Richardson's Weblogged (see roll) led me to a couple tonight: "blogresearch" is a collaborative site where, among other things, the possibility of landing an NSF grant to research blogs in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) is being discussed (good idea--NSF has the cash!) "collogatories" seems to be taking a similar approach, and discussed the value of weblogs for education on Dec. 17 and 18. My colleagues and I collected some reasonable data on our use of weblogs in first-year English, fall 2002, 5 sections. We hope to get the data into presentable form before too long; it will be interesting to see some research reports to supplement the speculation about weblogging in education. I did promise myself that I wouldn't lose so much time to weblogging this semester (Spring 2003), but if tonight is any indication of how things are going to go, I am in trouble. Finding weblogs that are filtering material so close to my own teaching and research interests quickly sucks me into a vortex of blog-hopping.
Gutenberg Galaxay node Semester is wrapping up, I'm starting to think about next semester's courses (spring 2003), wondering if I can sustain my weblog. This is a transition entry--relevant to my class on technology and literacy, as well as the spring class, "Introduction to Writing Studies." I found a very brief summary/commentary on Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy in "The Electronic Labyrinth," a project from the early 1990s about electronic and hypertextual writing. The "Labyrinth" authors write: "McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He [McLuhan} writes: the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. (136)" The Labyrinth authors doubt that a return to language (called "secondary orality" by Walter Ong, or sometimes referred to by McLuhan as a return to tribalism) will bring about a return to diversity, and use the homongeniety of American popular culture as their example. Most readers of McLuhan are concerned about his apparent technological determinism (technologies invent selves) and concerned about some of his conservative, utopian, speculations. I don't have good answers to these issues yet--his work, however, is always provocative and engaging.
Weblogs, What's the Use? I asked my students to answer this question about 1/3 of the way into the semester (after having researched the topic, weblogged a bit on their own, read some weblogs, etc.). Having slowly neglected this blog over the course of the semester, I have to answer this question for myself. 1) This weblog might be a valuable record of a course. It certainly shows early enthusiasm and gradual exhaustion--an accurate representation of the course (and a typical semester, to be honest). What I will do with this record has not been determined. 2) The blog contains many valuable links. My students turned up some great sites relavant to the topic "new literacy," and I certainly found a truckload of interesting sites on my own. Will I get back to any of those sites? Another good question. Will I ever have time to draw on any form of personal archive, or will I just keep running as fast as I can to stay a few days of my classes and my next tenure review? Okay, my life isn't that dramatic. I'll get back here. 3) The weblog hasn't been particularly valuable for my own writing, yet. If my collaborators and I stick with the project, we will reap more rewards from our work. Cindy and Sybil report similar blog fatigue. Okay, same theme for all three. What do I need to do in order to make blogs work? 1) A categorizer. Other blogs have them, I have to figure out how to make one work here. 2) Comments. I'd like to hear from readers, if there are any. A form of motivation for me. Just read that I could incorporate them in Tinderbox, but need to get that figured out. 3) RSS feeds. I've been trying to figure this out, but still struggling. I was talking with a friend last night about writing in a networked culture/space, and I got rapping about writing in spaces like a Tinderbox blog/website. Our writing spaces will increasingly be a hybrid of our own writing and collections of other feeds. Mark Taylor uses Chuck Close pictures to illustrate the complex new grids of networked culture--that image seems particularly relevant to a site that draws content from other places. Another friend maintains one of those personalized Yahoo pages--not sure if they have any room for people to write. They just feed content. What's the theme here? Improve the archive (categorizer--oh yeah, search engine too!), but mainly improve interactivity. Make this a space I want to come to see other people's writing, not just my own. Familiar ideas for those who reflect on e-writing; gotta see what I can make happen.
Two notes: Leadership and flash I was reading Chad's blog entries (getting caught up), and thought--I wonder what a metacrawler search on "knowledge management" and leadership would turn up. Wouldn't you know it: a weblog: ManagementFirst: Leadership. Updated earlier today, it has nice filters of some interesting articles, including one about the role of narrative in leadership--appealing to English teachers! Flash aficionados might get something out of Lev Manovich's "Generation Flash." Pretty heady stuff, but his argument is similar to others we have read about new literacy--that the generation flash isn't interested in critique, but is interested in making and doing. I am always sympathetic to this argument, although it runs counter to the other great cultural story of the TV/ MTV generation being passive couch potatoes, materialist, and without political savvy. What say you, Generation Flash?
Weblogs: Can't believe I missed this one This "Web Tools Newsletter" from July of this year (2002) would probably have been a good document to read at the beginning of the course. This site alone is one of the most comprehensive summaries of weblogs in education I have seen. We ended up finding many of these sites--Jay Cross's "Blogging to Learn", Chris Ashley's "Weblogs: A Swiss Army Knife," "Schoolblogs" --and we were found by Will Richardson and his Weblogg-ed. I actually stumbled on this newsletter after reading their most recent newsletter about the importance of involving undergraduates in research. While I have asked all of you to be apart of our study, I would also be willing to include any of you in the "writing up" that we will probably begin towards the end of the semester. Just let me know if you are interested.
Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed (vol 2) I got email from Will Richardson this morning--he hosts a wonderful site about uses of weblogs in education, Nate did his presentation on Will's PowerPoint slides (still online--check out the link), and Will blogged us! Many links to "Best Practices" and other education weblogs. A veritable gold mine.
Getting Started I only heard from a few people today, so I don't really know how the drafting process is going for most of you. If you find yourself stuck, or unable to move from your weblog to actually writing a draft of the essay, take a look at these tips for getting started. Where the tipster says "shuffle the 3 X 5 cards," you get to copy and paste your blog notes in any order you want. Move them around, see what makes sense. Maybe it would make more sense to start with Jo Ann Oravec than with Rebecca Blood--especially if you want to focus on the issue of information overload. I noticed that Nate thinks weblogs only contribute to, and don't help him handle, information overload.
Reducing Anxiety Yesterday, I read the introduction to The Writing Cure : Psychoanalysis, Composition, and the Aims of Education by Mark Bracher. Bracher argues that many writing blocks, avoidance, and resistance, are often connected to subconscious elements in the writer's psyche. He writes about the importance of reducing anxiety in writing classes, and the importance of the teacher helping students pursue their desires, tastes, fantasies, and interests. I fear that weblogging, and the first assignment, "Weblogging: What's the Use?" has created more anxiety than I anticipated. I typically do what ever I can to reduce anxiety in writing classes, and I thought that the sharing of information and ideas via weblogs might be a good mechanism for reducing anxiety. Looks like I was been wrong about that one. Let me know what I can do to help aleviate some of your anxieties--hearing from you, and helping out, will in turn aleviate some of my anxieties. As for the second part of Bracher's advice, let me remind you that the second unit of the course is about defining your new literacy, and pursuing a project of interest to you. If weblogging has been inhibiting, rest assured that you will not need to continue posting after the first unit.
Asynchronous Discussions Derrik and Chad said in today's class that they would both prefer--and contribute to a "forum" or "community weblog" , rather than continue to maintain a personal weblog. That certainly makes a lot of sense to me--contribute directly to a conversation, rather than surf among sites to construct a conversation that may not really be sustained. They also left class with plans to do some research on "forums" or "bulletin boards." I did a google search for "asynchronous discussion in education" and turned up many promising links. The first article I read, "Using Asynchronous Discussion Tools in Engineering Education" [a PDF file--you'll need Acrobat Reader] by Karen Kear from the Open University in the UK, reports some findings that I think will interest you. * When discussion boards are optional, many students do not participate; they say they can't make the time to partipate. *Most of those who do participate read, rather than post. *When required to participate, students who are initially skeptical sometimes see the value in participating. *Students report that they do learn from each other, and often learn better from each other than from the instructors/tutors. [from pages 4 and 5] Although this article is written specifically about Engineering Education, I think it might be applicable to most disciplines and majors.
Gratuitous visual Many students mentioned that they like a visually interesting weblog, including pictures. I just posted a notebook entry on an essay about using visual elements in communication. I'm still a bit of a digital immigrant (rather than all you natives out there) when it comes to using visual elements effectively, so I am just going to paste a picture I like in here and see if it spices out the ole blog. 
What can I do? I was doing a little surfing, thinking about filtering some sites that might be useful for class, but I'm not sure at this point who needs what. There are many, many articles about blogging, a huge % produced in the last year. If anybody is having any trouble finding articles from journalists about blogging, just let me know and I can give you some tips. Finding materials on blogging and education is going to be more difficult, but you might think about more general topics: technology and education, technology and writing, journal writing in education, note-taking in education. In other words, one way to think about the potential benefits (or limits) of weblogging in education is to find out what generally works in education, and determine whether weblogging will provide some of those same opportunities. Will it provide even more opportunities. Think creatively, think inductively, think like a PC-Rat. Read each other's stuff. I know Matt Mitchell found some good sites and articles about technology and education.
More weblog advice A few posts ago I linked up to Mark Bernstein's advice for writing a good weblog. I searched google for "how to write a good weblog" and came to a similar piece from the same source: A List Apart. Dennis Mahoney's "How to Write a Better Weblog" doesn't do the top ten thing; Mahoney believes that writers need to learn the rules of writing before the rules can be thrown out, and he follows this up with some good examples. His suggestion "offer something new" is illustrated with an example from the book/movie High Fidelity: don't be a critic all your life, produce something new (like a weblog). "Amuse your readers" he says--I'm failing pretty badly here, I fear. Great piece of advice: " Instead of, "The party was a riot!" or "I'm depressed today," carefully explain why. Elaborate. Parties and depression are perfectly good writing subjects. The Great Gatsby, for instance, has plenty of both. " His final suggestion also cut close to home: "Beyond Wired" means don't keep drawing on the same source, and this is my second blog about pieces from "A List Apart." Better cast my net further. His conclusion is about "successful weblogs": they are hard to pull off if success is defined by large readership. Instead, keep your goals realistic: "if your goal is to satisfy readers, satisfying yourself is a good start." I hope that all of you enjoy writing in your weblog, and that you end up enjoying each others thoughts and filters. I'm having a blast!!!
Two tips for writing blog entries I dug a little further into the Weblog site at Florida State being maintained by Charles Lowe, and found an entry of his that saves me some typing: Two Tips for Writing Online. I had been planning on making comments much like these, but Charles beat me to the punch. Implications: weblogs can be wonderful tools for teachers as well as students. Having more and more of my class information online can help up my colleagues locally (and perhaps nationally), and if others are borrowing ideas from me, they might start putting more info online so I and others can borrow from them. The Internet's economy is occasionally called a "gift economy": thanks Charles--hope I can return the gift.
Rebecca Blood, "Weblogs: A History and Perspective." Rebecca Blood's essay has become one of the essays that has defined and shaped the weblog explosion of the last year and a half. Her title is pretty informative: A history: Jan. 1999: 23 weblogs. July 1999: Pitas, followed by Blogger and Groksoup. [too many weblogs to count!] "Original weblogs were link-driven sites; many still are," but the free form interface and absolute ease of use "has, in my opinion, done more to impel the shift from the filter-style weblog to journal-blog than any other factor. . . . Newcomers appear to be most drawn to the blog rather than filter style of weblogging." A perspective: Blood is obviously a big advocate: weblogging has propelled her career and expanded her horizons in a variety of ways. Blood, as blogger, says she 1. discovered her own interests 2. "more importantly, I began to value my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important. " More generally, she says a blogger will become a more confident writer, begin to act in accordance with his/her inner voice, and become more reflective and less reflexive. Filter style leads to critical evaluation of information. Free-style blogs lead to an outbreak of self-expression. Blood is worried that the potential of blogs is being undermined by the masses now blogging. She is also worried that individuals are still outnumbered by corporate entities and their power. "we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human." Blood will seem a little too enthusiastic about blogging for the skeptics in the crowd; I think she has identified the potential of weblogging, but we need to test some of her claims. I want to know if you will become a more confident writer, respond to your inner voice, become more reflective, etc.
Blog of the day I hope it doesn't embarras anyone if I highlight a weblog entry now and then. I was just checking links and reading summaries, thinking about doing my own summary of Levinson's essay for you as a "model," but then I read Cliff's summary and thought--why re-invent the wheel? He states Levinson's overall argument clearly, and then devotes one paragraph to each of Levinson's 3 propositions. When an author gives you as a reader/summarizer such a clear structure, run with it! Nicely done Cliff--great details throughout. I do not, however, want to suggest that Cliff's entry is the only viable model. Cullen's summary is much shorter, but he does a nice job of stating Levinson's three propositions very succinctly, then identifies one of Levinson's strategies (using "experts" as evidence and support). Summaries can summarize both content and form. Next week I will be asking you to present some examples of good filter blogs and good journal blogs, so keep your eyes out for good stuff, and pay attention to the range of styles being used on the web.
Blogging Notes Some blogging tips and clarifications: 1. Make sure that you just keep adding your blog entries to your original blog account--you don't need to start a new account for each item you write. 2. Start getting in the habit of writing in your weblog regularly, and start reading other weblogs. Classmates blogs are good, but most are not very well developed. Sample some of the blogs listed on blogger.com, and/or do a web search looking for blogs of interest to you. Check out the Eaton Web Portal listed on the course homepage. 3. Send me your URL: I would like to get the class blog list filled in by the end of this week. 4. Check out two great weblog entries from my friend and colleague, Cindy Nichols. The first tells you how to get rid of the ads on blogger; the second provides a good analysis of a filter-style weblog and a journal-style weblog.
The Living Web: tips for keeping it pulsing Blogging has re-ignited my passion for the web. The sites I have filtered here are only a small portion of the gems I have turned up. Okay, you may not think all of this stuff is gold, but I'm pretty interested in it. Mark Bernstein, who happens to be someone I pester with questions about my blog tool, Tinderbox, has published a great set of tips for writing a weblog and keeping the pulsating web going. He says "write tight," which is obviously something I need to keep working on. He also says "be sexy," advice you might prefer that I not follow. I'll let you read the rest--great stuff!
Schoolsucks.com Fun, short article about term-paper sites gearing up for the new school year, from Wired. In addition to casinos and porn sites, these plaigarism sites seem to be the only online money makers says the founder of schoolsucks.com. After I made that short entry, I found two other weblogs that had filtered this same article. From elearningpost.com, Aug. 27, 2002 WIRED: Where Cheaters Often Prosper Despite inspiring nothing but scorn from educators, purveyors of collegiate prose are finding life on the dark side of online commerce quite lucrative... With the new school year about to begin, research paper companies are gearing up for peak season. It appears academicians' attempts to eradicate these hotbeds of plagiarism have done little to stifle their growth. From kairosnews.org, Aug. 27, 2002. According to Wired, the term paper mill industry has continued to do well following the dot com industry slide. Interestingly, "in a user survey conducted by SchoolSucks, 48 percent of visitors to the site identified themselves as teachers. Presumably, most were using the site to weed out plagiarism in their classrooms, although Sahr says he also gets resumes from teachers interested in working as term paper writers." Notice three different styles, and filters, at work here! I didn't do a good job of identifying the source, and I think the most significant idea in the story is that term-paper sites are making money--along with casinos and porn sites. The other two allude to the same idea, but put it very differently. The elearningpost.com prose seems a little overblown: "scorn from educators, purveyors...eradicate" . the Kairosnews.org tells teachers that teachers make up almost half of the visitors. That filter doesn't mention that some of these teachers are looking for jobs! ;) Anything to be learned from this comparison?
Architecture weblogs I saw the classlist the other day, and that got me to wondering: what kinds of weblogs are available for different majors? Do weblogs make good reading for students who are just starting out in a field? Of the sites on my blogroll, kairosnews.org is the one I read most frequently, and typically get the best links from, because it is maintained by people who teach courses like this one, and by people who do the kind of research that I do (rhetoric and composition professionals). If you are in computer science or computer engineering, I bet there are hundreds of blogs that might be of interest to you--let me know what you turn up. I did a search for "architecture weblog" on Google and turned up two blogs that seemed promising. Archlog: An Architecture Weblog, seems to be a community site that links to stories about architecture in online newspapers and publications--very accessible. I especially liked the story about Rem Koolhaas wanting the move the Charles River in Boston to accommodate his latest addition to the Harvard campus. Koolhaas is often featured in Wired magazine, and in addition to being the world's greatest architect, seems to be the official architect of digital culture. The Elegant Hack maintains an individual weblog that has more to do with information architecture (IA) than with brick and steel architecture, which is okay with me, because when I grow up I want to be an Information Architect. It seems like the most logical progression after being an English professor (so passe), and I think my fortune once said I would have three careers. Or maybe I was just thinking that I would need to keep changing every once in a while. Sorry, back to the filtering. The E. Hack is definitely minimalist in his approach to filtering--probably would tell me to back away from the keyboard, too. The EatonPortal has a long list of architecture weblogs, but none seemed as interesting as these two. Most here seem to have simply identified their weblogs as being about everything, including architecture.
SchoolSucks.com Fun, short article about term-paper sites gearing up for the new school year, from Wired. In addition to casinos and porn sites, these plaigarism sites seem to be the only online money makers says the founder of schoolsucks.com. After I made that short entry, I found two other weblogs that had filtered this same article. From elearningpost.com, Aug. 27, 2002 WIRED: Where Cheaters Often Prosper Despite inspiring nothing but scorn from educators, purveyors of collegiate prose are finding life on the dark side of online commerce quite lucrative... With the new school year about to begin, research paper companies are gearing up for peak season. It appears academicians' attempts to eradicate these hotbeds of plagiarism have done little to stifle their growth. From kairosnews.org, Aug. 27, 2002. According to Wired, the term paper mill industry has continued to do well following the dot com industry slide. Interestingly, "in a user survey conducted by SchoolSucks, 48 percent of visitors to the site identified themselves as teachers. Presumably, most were using the site to weed out plagiarism in their classrooms, although Sahr says he also gets resumes from teachers interested in working as term paper writers." Notice three different styles, and filters, at work here! I didn't do a good job of identifying the source, and I think the most significant idea in the story is that term-paper sites are making money--along with casinos and porn sites. The other two allude to the same idea, but put it very differently. The elearningpost.com prose seems a little overblown: "scorn from educators, purveyors...eradicate" . the Kairosnews.org tells teachers that teachers make up almost half of the visitors. That filter doesn't mention that some of these teachers are looking for jobs! ;) Anything to be learned from this comparison?
What am I doing here? I have asked my students to write, and post to their weblogs, a classic five paragraph theme that answers the question: what are you doing in college, at NDSU, and in this class (English 110, Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century). No reason why I can't tackle the assignment myself. I've never seriously considering doing anything except being a college professor, being at NDSU is the product of serendipty (or so it seems), and I'm in this class because I think figuring out how to help students acquire the literacy skills needed in the 21st century is the most important task English teachers face. I don't remember precisely when I started thinking about being a college professor, but I do remember being thirteen or fourteen when I started reading the essays of Stephen Jay Gould and Lewis Thomas, and got such a rush that I knew I had to be able to find a way to write arguments for my living. I also remember one of my first visits to the University of Manitoba's campus and thought--very cool, a city within the city. The space and architecture of universities has always held tremendous appeal for me. A. Bartlett, Giamatti, Yale Professor and Commission of Major League Baseball when he died, has written about the appeal of "sacred" places like baseball diamonds and universities--I couldn't agree more. I could go on and on about why college, but why NDSU is simple: the English department was hiring in 1997, and I was looking for a job. The real question is probably "why have I stayed?" because turn-over at NDSU is a common occurance. Again there is a simple answer: no one else has offered me a job. But there is a more complex answer. As someone from the region (born and raised in Manitoba), I immediately sensed that I was "home" when I interviewed and when I first started working here. I'm close to family and friends, I'm not afraid of winter, and Fargo is a comfortable, if not always exciting, place to live. I'm also still at NDSU because the department and college have given me an opportunity to design and teach a class like this one. I've been dabbling with the complications of teaching 21st century literacy skills since 1995, when I taught a computer-intensive course, started building web sites, and saw the excitement that students felt when they put together a web site for the first time. I'm excited about exploring the possiblities of weblogs as a tool for learning because they make few technological demands on writers, and I am excited to see what students produce when they stretch themselves. I'm in this class because I think it has the potential to help me rethink almost every class I teach. The final paragraph of a five paragraph theme is the most difficult, because the essay is so short, I don't really need to sum much up. But if I bring these three points together, I would say that I think University education has to distinguish itself from high school teaching. As a professor, I need to keep abreast of developments not only in scholarship, but in the tools of literacy. This course will hopefully generate new scholarship through the research component built in, and it will give me insight into what tools students think they need. A course like this is especially important to teach at NDSU, as it undergoes a transformation from a quality state university into a world-class teaching and research institution.
Types of weblog entries Rebecca Blood identifies "three very broad categories" of weblogs: "blogs, notebooks, and filters" (6). Most of what I am asking you to do for this class would fall under notebook and filter entries, but I certainly encourage you to do as many "blog" entries as you would like. I think that term isn't going to work--she means "journal entries," and I am going to be inclined to call any post "blogging," but let me summarize her categories for you. BLOGS: "these sites resemble short-form journals. The writer's subject is his daily life, with links subordinate to the text. Even when entries point the reader to a news or magazine article, linktext give the feeling of a quick spontaneous remark, perhaps of the type found in an instant messaage to a friend" (6). These types of entries are by far the most common, although this has only been the case since the tools for easy publication have been available. NOTEBOOKS: "Sometimes personal, sometimes focused on the outside world, notebooks are distinguised from blogs by their longer pieces of focused content. Personal entries are sometimes in the form of a story. Some notebooks are designed as a space for public contemplation: Entires may contain links to primary material, but the weblogger's ruminations are front and center" (6-7). I would call this thing I am giving you a notebook entry. It isn't especially contemplative, but I am sharing notes, and I am thinking about types of entires even as I am quoting Blood. Her book is too big for me to "filter," so I am just pulling out this small chunk, sharing it, thinking about it, asking you to think about it. FILTERS: "When I think of the classic weblog, I don't think of a short-form diary or a series of stories or short think pieces. I think of the old-style site organized squarely around he link, maintained by an inveterate Web surfer, personal information strictly optional. These weblogs have one thing in common: the primacy of the link" (7-8). This kind of blogging may seem less personal, more academic, and that migth be especially true when I tell you [I'm talking to my students here, even though I haven't met them yet] to filter specific articles, but I think Blood is right to say "they [filter entries] reveal the weblogger's personality from the the outside in" (8). I can hear Neale Talbot saying, "Put your keyboard down and walk away from the computer" because this notebook entry definitely exceeds the "brevity" convention in weblogging. Here is my contemplation: I suppose I need to get better at sorting out weblog entries and classroom handouts. What started out in my mind as a quick list of entry types gave way to more developed definitions. This monster probably doesn't belong here, but I will leave it as a lesson and reminder to myself--and others--of some the contraints, expectations, and effects of a genre.
The Eaton Portal The Eaton Portal is generally recognized as an important early weblog about weblogs. I haven't seen any other site categorize blogs as effectively as the Eaton Poral. Within two or three minutes on the site, I found three new blogs that I would be interested in following: only kairosnews.org is going to make the blogroll. I have to be realistic--if email is a time hog, blogs could be a blackhole.
Weblogging is . . . creepy? I was in a meeting with a bunch of other teachers, we got talking about weblogging, and somebody said "weblogging is creepy." Her daughter has started a blog, and the idea of putting one's "diary" online made her more than a little nervous. I think many people have that reaction, and quite honestly, you aren't going to see me baring my soul much. I can see how putting oneself online can be useful, therapeutic, or even just a kick (for the exhibitionists out there), but I see the potential of weblogging in the sharing of ideas and the building of community--either within a class, or a work setting, or a wider, dispersed group of people who have common interests. By all means journal/blog/do the diary thing--but my future in blogging will be the notecard/filter. This is actually a pretty revealing entry: all work and no play make me a slave to the academic system. Would you rather read how surprised I was today when my son (3.75 yrs) bounced a basketball into his crotch and said "Ouch, my nuts!" ?
We've got blog: essay collection Two weeks until classes start--I had better start getting the blogging bug. Many of the essays in We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture are inspiring. Powazek's essay is there, along with Rebecca Blood's "Weblogs: A History and Perspective." They both believe strongly in the democratic potential of weblogging. Rebecca Mead's "You've Got Blog" is in here--an essay that first appeared in the New Yorker and altered me and many others to this emerging online force. Neale Talbot is a blogger who is happy to celebrate the useless of weblogging, and to yell at bloggers with 3000+ word entries (I'd better wrap this up). Nice collection of essays that give advice, and short sections on blogging as the new journalism and community sites, but nothing explicitly about the use of blogs in education. The authors are journalists and web developers, not educators.
Powazek, a good place to start Derek Powazek designed the weblog template I am using, so I thought I should check out his site (see blog list on left). I get there, and find a great essay (among other things): "What the Hell is a Weblog? And Why Won't They Leave Me Alone." Powazek believes in the web--"This [is] the anti-television. Digital democracy"--but he was initially suspicious of weblogs. He didn't see anything revolution in link + commentary, and he was turned off by the hype that emerged in 1999. But to really understand weblogging, he says, he had to give it a try. He did, and feel in love with the web (got the virus--same thing!) again. He started getting mail, a community, and realized that weblogs are a great place to put our little stories. We can construct websites when we want to tell big stories. He does acknowledge a dark side to blogging and the web--critics who want to tell him how to design his blog, who want to pin down the web with rules. But Powazek remains hopeful that blogging and other creative acts on the web will keep challenging the rule makers--great links to other blogs and sites!
READ ME FIRST
start writing your weblog Now you're ready to start writing your weblog. To begin, add new items to archives. You can make new notes (just select on old note and press return) or duplicate existing items. New notes should use the *protoNote prototype; they'll automatically be colored dark green and will automatically be set up to be formatted as notes with the appropriate template, permalink, etc. The main page is an agent! It gathers the 12 most recent notes from the archive. (You can easily adjust this agent to gather more or fewer notes, or to give preference to important notes) So adding a note to the archives automatically - adds it to the main page - scrolls older notes off the main page The recent page gathers recent items that no longer appear on the main page. If you have news items you'd like to write, but don't want to publish yet, placed them inside Ready to go. When you're ready to publish them, drag them in to the archives; the archives will automatically timestamp their publication date.
Write your ABOUT page Your "About" page tells readers more about you -- who you are, what your weblog covers, and how to contact you. Often overlooked, the About page is one of the keys to building a successful web log. First impressions matter, and new readers often turn quickly to find out who the writer is and why they write. Your ABOUT page is a note named "About". You can add notes to it, just as you'd add notes to a weblog page.
write your left column The "sidebar" contains useful information that doesn't necessarily change every day or week. Use this for: a short description of your web log contact information a list of your favorite weblogs (sometimes called a blogroll) links to special features, stories, or services you offer links to merchandise you sell The sidebar items in this template are located in the Boilerplate container, in the container called sidebar. Feel free to rewrite these notes, delete items you don't need, and add your own. You can add or delete notes from the left column as you wish; these notes should use the *protoInfo prototype rather than the *protoNote prototype used for news items. I wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly Introduction to Writing Studies
Name your weblog First, open the Attributes Window if it's not already open. Select the User Tab. This window lists various user-defined Attributes used by notes in your weblog. Select WeblogTitle: this is a convenient place to store the title of your weblog. Change it's default value to the title you prefer, and press Change. Select WeblogTagline: this is the tag line or slogan of your weblog. Enter the tagline you prefer, or simply leave the default value blank. Press Change to set the value.
HTML Templates Main.html Describes the overall layout and appearance of pages in the Web site item.html Describes the appearance of each individual weblog item in the main section of the we log. This template specifies whether items have titles, how the titles look, whether items are dated, how the dates look, how the permalinks appear, and so forth. sidebar.html Describes the appearance of each item in the sidebar normal.html Describes the appearance of item item in the About page. The same template is ideal for other "story pages" that contain topical notes or essays too long to appear in the main page, textOnly.html A simple template that includes only the text of a note. Used to present the title of the page. news.rss newsitem.rss Templates that format your recent headline in a special format called RSS. These headlines can be shared by other sites or imported directly into other people's Tinderboxes.
*protoNote This note represents a weblog item or note. Notes won't usually be exported as separate pages; instead, several notes may be assembled together to make a page of current items, while older items are assembled in the archives. |
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