Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Addicted to Words

The BBC News published an interesting article today. The extract below describes the unsettling disconnect between what Bush says, versus what he actually manages to do:

As I listened to him I suddenly had my own revelation.

George Bush's principal problem is not that he can't articulate what's on his mind. It's that he sometimes says it all too well. (I can only remember one line from that world-class word schmoozer Bill Clinton and it was a disclaimer about Miss Lewinsky which the former president probably wished no one had remembered!)

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Although news of these two blogging events have appeared separately, it is quite useful to make note of them again, together, as an important signal of the power of the internet, specifically of bloggers and writing in the cyberworld. There was wonderful news last week about Glenn Greenwald, which also represented yet another sign of the growing, persuasive influence of writers on the internet. On the same day of the announcement that Andrew Sullivan's daily social/political commentaries on his blog, The Daily Dish, had reached over 2,000,000 readers during May, it also was reported that Greenwald's book, How Would a Patriot Act, had just made the New York Times' Best-Seller List. In addition, his book had climbed into the Top-100 of all books then being sold by Amazon.com. Greenwald is a writer who has reached a readership mainly through his blog, Unclaimed Territory.

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Apropos of my recent reading of Donald Lazere's recent article in JAC, I was thinking about what a great movie Bulworth was. Have any of you used it in a composition course before, or considered using it?

Another plug, but I couldn’t resist after reading Matt Barton’s review of the Steven Johnson book a couple posts down. I’d like to alert Kairos readers to a thread recently begun at if:book — the blog of the institute for the future of the book — where we have mounted a multi-post, ongoing critique of EBIGFY, in which Johnson himself is participating. We were moved to do this after witnessing the near-universal acclaim the book has received since publication. We’ve already come across numerous instances of it being assigned as essential reading for new media and design classes, in some cases by teachers who haven’t even read it. It seemed time for a more rigorous discussion…

Ars Technica is running a story about a new Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. Prepared by Reporters without Borders, the handbook contains a variety of articles on topics relevant to bloggers trying to get their voices heard, particularly those working and living in places with strong censorship. The articles discuss strategies for being picked up by search engines as well as means of circumventing censorship. There are also personal narratives from bloggers who have been prosecuted by their governments for their dissident blogs.

People here have already discussed the troubling nature of Elsevier’s attitude towards intellectual property concerns. (Elsevier, as many here know, is the publisher of the journal Computers and Composition.) But it’s difficult to characterize as merely “troubling” the fact that Elsevier is also involved in the international arms trade.

(Via Crooked Timber; cross-posted in slightly different form at vitia.)

The New York Times has a good essay by Richard Posner on the effects of choice on the traditional media and journalism. He looks specifically at blogging and its self-correcting nature.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31POSNER.html

He echoes many of my concerns about the echo effect. It is a myth that people read the news to become better informed. The audience dictates the news more than people realize. No audience, no advertisers, no station or newspaper, as Posner documents. (Even a political publication needs financial support from someone.)

Blogs do not face the same need for a larger audience.

Great Washington Post article, which plucks a liberal blogger and a conservative blogger out of the midwest and follows them on a tour of Washington, D.C. Along the way, the author makes some wonderful observations about journalism and the American psyche. The link will expire soon, so I recommend you download a copy to save for later — this article goes far beyond painting bloggers as pajama-clad slackers. (And both the bloggers profiled are women.)

Journalists worry like mad about the fate of our own particular jobs. For more than 20 years, roughly since the dawn of the desktop computer, people have been telling us that micro-chips are going to put us in the soup kitchens. For a while, we could console ourselves with the fact that computers were heavy and had to be plugged into a wall. But now people get video on their portable phones, and . . . well, that’s worrisome, if you’re in the business of producing neatly folded stacks of dried wood pulp printed with columns of readable ink stains.