Writing Online

Siva Vaidhyanathan has a good article, Generational Myth, exposing the myths concerning the digital generation in The Chronicle Review.

College students in America are not as “digital” as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won’t read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don’t like is the price of books.

This Reuters article notes that one in five bosses check job applicants’ online presence to make hiring decisions.

The survey found that 34 percent of the managers who do screen candidates on the Internet found content that made them drop the candidate from any short list.

Blogs are conversations. They listen to other blogs and add their own thoughts to the conversation. That means that you need to be reading other blogs and answering questions like these:

• What are the variety of perspectives on topics?
• What sorts of posts do others make (frequency, length, tone, …)?
• Do there seem to be some blogs mentioned more than others? Why?
• What identities do these blogs project?

Wikipedia articles require research, so should be interested in your topic and the more you know about the topic, the better. Plus, if it’s possible, tie your blog, website, and Wikipedia article together. Here are some examples:

Tom’s blog Silver Screenings could easily have a series of posts related to a Wikipedia article about a black-and-white film. As his website is on his class projects, everything he does fits there without much additional work.

The art and poetry showcased on John’s website could easily be blogged about, and perhaps an artist or poet who has influenced his work could also turn into blog posts and a Wikipedia article.

The content of some blogs and websites doesn’t translate as easily into a Wikipedia article. Taryn’s blog recently talked about a class task in which students were to compare and contrast SparkNotes with the actual book. Taryn wrote:

This forces the student to read the actual novel and critique it themselves. The professor that has tried this found that there are countless errors in SparkNotes. A student would have never figured this out if he studied the SparkNotes alone. Also it helps the students take a closer look at the piece of literature, including figuring out their own themes, motifs, and character analysis!

Wikipedia has many articles related to Taryn’s blog post, so it might be difficult to come up with something new from here. (But if you have an idea, she’d probably appreciate the suggestion.) Still, as her website is on education, one page on the website might be a collection of exercises/tasks for teaching literature which would come from what she had already blogged.

One advantage of having the “same” content across cyberspace genres (besides saving time) is that you’ll be able to reflect more easily on how they differ with respect to rhetorical conventions, audience expectations, identity, and other aspects of writing in cyberspace.

The latest issue of Cybermetrics, an online journal publishing  quantitative analyses of  scholarly and scientific communications on the Web, is a special issue on “What does the Web represent? From virtual ethnography to to web indicators”. All of the articles are interesting, but one in particular looks at cultural identity: Studying the Scholarly web: How disciplinary culture shapes online representations.

Kimberly Alvarado of the Center for Professional Development at Kean University and of K. Aimee web designs had several good comments about designing and adding content to a website. I’ll recap some of them here.

On design, color is important, harmonizing background color with text color. The appropriate choice of color can make a simple design more than aesthetically pleasing. Two online tools mentioned for this purpose were the color scheme generator and the color chart of safe colors. For those wanting to learn more about color, e-books can be purchased at Color Voodoo. The choice of font style, size, and color is also important with the main criterion being readability.
On navigation, Alvarado suggested creating one page that would act as a template for all pages, so that the navigation would be predictable and consistent across pages. Plus, it saves time by not needing to re-create/re-design new pages. All that needs to be done is to add the new content.

Generally speaking, she suggested staying away from sound, although if someone has the option of turning it off, it would be okay. Ditto for videos, although they seem more appreciated than audio.

A major consideration for using audio, video, or graphics is copyright. Is the item in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons agreement? If not, you need to get permission to use these on your website. One place for free music (mentioned by Tom Pawlowski) is SoundClick. Some sites for finding photos/images are yotophoto and Flickr’s Creative Commons photos. Photos on Wikipedia will state what license governs their use (and many are under Creative Commons), and those owned by the U.S. government are in the public domain. It would be a good idea to read about “fair use” at Wikipedia for articles published on Wikipedia and in general.
With respect to content, “the best content is something you really love or love to do or have an interest in.” Some possibilities she suggested were:

• What’s it like to be a student in ENG 3080
• A personal resume website
• A personal hobby/interest/fun website

Regardless of the type of website, two questions to ask yourself are:

• Why are you creating this website?
• Who is your audience? (personal, professional, business)

These questions will provide the framework and guidance for designing your site and for selecting your content.

Darren Rowse of Problogger writes about “How to add to blogging conversations … And eliminate the echo chamber,” saying:

One of the criticism that is often leveled at the Blogosphere is that it is an echo chamber – that the same stories get blogged about in the same ways by blog after blog – without anything constructive or unique emerging.

No doubt. But one might consider the purpose of the blog. For example, this blog is to simply acquaint students with knowledge new to them, that goes outside the textbook and classroom discussions, knowledge that they can pursue as they have time. So, should all blogs put in the time required to construct uniqueness? I’m not sure, but for those who do want to add content of value, visit his post for his guidelines for improving your blogging conversation.

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at the Stanford Law School, is giving a series of presentations over several months on Internet-related proposals for Congress. Here are his descriptions of them:

Copyright: Orphan Works: Orphan Works legislation is critical. Nonetheless, I strongly oppose the Copyright Office’s “Orphan Works Proposal.” I think it is extraordinarily unfair to current copyright owners, and insanely inefficient. My proposal applies an “Orphan Works Maintenance Requirement” to older works only; the requirement is a form of registration.

Copyright: Remix Culture: Congress should carve a robust exemption to the law for non-commercial remix. Commercial use of such remixes should be regulated by a baseline statutory license.

Network Neutrality: No surprise: I support Network Neutrality legislation. Unfortunately, too many of the reigning proposals are, imho, radically too difficult to enforce. I’ll propose a much simpler rule to enforce that would achieve the legitimate objectives of NN.

Spam: The email system is broken. A bazaar of private remedies to deal with spam now clog the system to defeat many of its original objectives. I’ll propose a modified version of an earlier idea to deal with this problem — a problem that costs the American public many times the total profits of the recording industry, but has gotten but a fraction of Congress’s attention.

Harmful to Minors Material: There’s a simple and minimally burdensome way Congress could protect kids online from material deemed “harmful to minors.” Not perfectly, but certainly better than the current regime. And without constitutional risk.

Deregulating Spectrum: Crude radio technology used to make regulating spectrum necessary. Smart radio technology makes it — in many cases at least — unnecessary. We should be pushing to deregulate where technology makes that possible.

In improving the content, design, and search engine optimalization of your blog, four blogs that offer good advice are Problogger, Copyblogger, Daily Blog Tips, and Pearsonified.

They also have good examples of “about” pages, separating “about the blog” and “about the author” information.

Josef Kolbitsch and Hermann Maurer are writing a seven-part series of posts on “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting, Social Networks and File Sharing: How the Web is Transforming Itself” (via Using Wiki in Education):

To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites.

With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly. These new paradigms obliterate the clear distinction between information providers and consumers. The lines between producers and consumers are blurred even more by services such as Wikipedia, where every reader can become an author, instantly.

This paper presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr, and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content.

It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content.

The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.

Although our reflective analysis assignment is due at the end of the semester, we will write a rough analysis of our activities around the middle of the semester. To analyze our activities–designing websites, maintaining blogs, and writing articles for Wikipedia–in a productive way, we need to interpret our activities through the theoretical lenses of our readings, not only in CyberReader but also in the other texts we come across (like the ones I link to from this blog). We need to keep in mind distinctions between reality and virtual reality, and identities online and offline. We want to consider differences in interactivity and immediacy between print and electronic writing.  And we want to consider similarities in all of these, too.