One of these days, I’m going to make it to Educause. Until then, I will just have to enjoy the presentations I can find online. Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins has a marvelous slide show (featuring an excellent use of presentation software) called “Social Media and Education: The Conflict between Technology and Institution Education, and the Future,” that’s well worth a look:

I was especially struck by her insights about the changing role of educators in an information society, “relating as more experienced co-creators rather than employers.” I see this in my own practice in a class I’m teaching now in which I, and all my students, are blogging. I’ve done this a couple of times before in different classes, and in those courses I’m very much a co-creator with them in that experience rather than an employer-professor-taskmaster.

There are some real challenges to this as a pedagogical strategy, however. If you’re working at anything but an elite educational environment with hyper-motivated and highly skilled students, it can be difficult to get students who are used to the professor-taskmaster model of education to engage with social media in a meaningful way. The dilemma is not the technology, per se, as much as it is the shift in pedagogical strategy. For students who are used to mass-produced textbooks and multiple-choice exams, the unboundedness of blogging and being in charge of their own educational process can be a little disorienting at first. I try to provide my students with some structure by giving them a “Blog Rubric” for how their blogs will be graded, but still, this can be a daunting task for some students. Even with these challenges, I think it’s worth the effort for those us in front of the classroom to figure out ways we might shift our pedagogical strategy so that we become a “guide at the side” rather than the traditional taskmaster-employer-professor.

It’s Blog Against Poverty day, and that coincides with the unit in my Intro Sociology courses on social stratification.  Coincidence or the divine intervention by Durkheim?  Who’s to say.

I’ve been screening documentaries to show with this unit and ran across, “People Like Us.” It’s a fine film for the intro classes and one I’d recommend for most sociologists teaching at most universities in the U.S.   It’s got some good expert interviews and some amazing footage of rarely-seen people of the upper classes!  And, the story of “Tammy” – a woman who walks ten miles a day to her job at McDonald’s is heartbreaking.  However, the film’s got a fairly pronounced white-suburban bias, or at least, that’s pretty clearly the intended audience.   About the only place that people of color ever show up in the film is in the section on “Bourgeois Blues” about the struggles of the black middle class.   I just don’t know that my students, who are predominantly black and Latino, urban and from poor backgrounds,  are going to relate to the film in a way that’s meaningful for them.     Instead, I’m thinking of either using “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” or “The Corporation,” to provide them with some insight into the current financial crisis.

As part of one of my current research projects interviewing feminist bloggers, I attended a Blogher conference over the weekend.   BlogHer.com is a syndicate of 1,500 blogs written by women.   At the opening session, one of the organizers discussed some interesting stats about women blogging from a recent random sample survey. The survey, conducted in 2008 by Compass Media with Blogher, sampled 1,250 female Internet users through a nationally representative panel, and 5,000 visitors to BlogHer’s network. Here’s some of what they found:

• 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogsophere every week (15.1 publishing, 21.1 reading and commenting)?
• Women are so passionate about blogging that large percentages of women said they would give something up to keep the blogs they read and/or write:

  – 55% would give up alcohol

  – 50% would give up their PDAs

  – 42% would give up their i-Pod

  – 43% would give up reading the newspaper or magazines

• More than half of women surveyed consider blogs a reliable source of advice and information

You can download a presentation with more about that survey here. One of the things I found most interesting about the opening remarks was that among women who blogging at Blogher, 43% are watching less television to keep up with the blogosphere.   I find that’s generally true for me.  What about you – blogging more (including reading more) and watching the tube less?

Sarah Lai Stirland writing for Wired magazine calls this Democratic Convention the “techiest” (her term) convention ever.   That’s not hard to believe as lots of people bypass the talking-head-pundits on the broadcast networks and seeking out their own streaming video of the convention (as Jon described yesterday), or looking for outside-the-mainstream commentary from their favorite bloggers at the convention.    All this makes me think about Todd Gitlin’s famous book, The Whole World is Watching (1983), about the role of the mass media in the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  But, the world has changed since 1968…. more...

Since starting Contexts Blogs, I’ve had the chance to talk to lots of blogging sociologists. I’ve also had the chance to have a lot of non-blogging sociologists firmly say “No!” to my attempts to turn them into blogging sociologists. So over the last year or so I’ve given a lot of thought to why more sociologists don’t blog, and of course the related question of what drives those who do. Here’s my current take on the topic:

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Stanley Aronowitz has suggested that sociology may be experiencing a resurgence of interest in the work of C. Wright Mills, a veritable Mills Revival. I think this is a good thing for sociology. I confess to having a keen fascination with C. Wright Mills (image from: C.WrightMills.org). I, like so many sociologists, came to the discipline through Mills’ notion of the sociological imagination, that is a grasp of the intersection of biography and history, between private trouble and public issues. In part, I identify with him because we shared a similar geographic trajectory as Mills and I are both Texas-born and raised sociologists who ended up in New York. I don’t, as Mills famously did, ride a motorcycle (though my girlfriend does).

While most of us who have taught an introductory sociology class have drawn on the concept of the sociological imagination, what endures for many sociologists about Mills’ work is his appendix to that work, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” If you can read it while translating every “he” to “she” (or a gender neutral pronoun), then it can be a compelling and relevant text for what we do as sociologists. I was just re-reading it and wondered how Mills, were he alive today, might update it for the digital age. Kiernan Healy has done a nice job of this in his post “On Wasting One’s Time,” in which he pulls an excerpt of Mills’ appendix and strategically inserts the word “blog,” for Mills’ use of the term “file.” The notion of “playfulness” that Mills writes about, the arranging, re-arranging of the file, contrasting extremes and opposites of one concept, the search for comparative examples, are all quantum leaps easier in the digital era. For someone who loves knowledge, the Internet can seem like a vast playground of searching and knowing and exploring. Mills, as Todd Gitlin points out, was also a gifted – if solitary – political radical. And, in that regard, I have no doubt that were Mills alive today, he’d have his own blog.

There are lots of other bits in Mills’ appendix that are worth revisiting in the digital age, and I’ll be exploring some more of those here in days to come.

We read things on a computer screen differently than we do on paper. It’s that simple. So when we write for the web, we should be aware of that and write accordingly. This is easier said than done for academics accustomed to writing books and journal articles.

Michael Agger has an interesting article on “usability expert” Jakob Nielsen’s thoughts on writing for the web. Using techniques like eye tracking, researchers have learned a lot about how people read on a computer screen versus paper and what writers need to do about it. In short, people don’t read: they scan. How to make scannable text?

• highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
• meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
• bulleted lists
• one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
• the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
• half the word count (or less) than conventional writing

I wrote this for my personal blog, but thought it might be of interest here, seeing as this blog is partially about introducing new technology to people. Twitter, if you haven’t heard is a new “microblogging” service: you’re limited to 140 characters and the interface is designed to make posting and replying to others’ posts as simple as possible. I decided to try it out and here’s my response:

I’ve been using Twitter for a little over a week now. For a long time I was hesitant to sign up. While Twitter had lots of hype, the hype was all within a pretty narrow circle: sure, all the internet celebs on TWiT each week love Twitter, but they’re in the crowd using Twitter. Nobody I knew used Twitter and it seemed like the kind of thing that’s only useful if you know lots of people using it. But both the geek and the sociologist in me were interested in it, so when one friend signed up, I decided to give it a go.

My first response to Twitter, and I think the first response of many people, is “Why would anyone care what I’m doing minute to minute?” There’s definitely some vanity involved in Twittering, but not really that much more vanity than is involved in the human experience generally: Twitter is basically an extension of our capacity for gossip and our curiosity about others. We all gossip to some degree (some people think it’s even the key to our evolution as linguistic creatures), even if it’s the simple “So what’s new?” kind of catching up we do everyday with virtually everybody we see regularly.

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Eric Alterman’s article in the current New Yorker, Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper, describes the Huffington Post’s editorial process:

The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.”

I’m posting this for two reasons: 1) it’s hilarious, 2) we’re actually having conversations about this right now about thesocietypages.org. (Not that we’ve called it the “mullet strategy” — though we will now!) With the magazine, we have to be really careful and selective about what makes the cut, so it’s so tempting to go in the complete opposite direction for the web and just throw every idea imaginable up on the web. As web editor, I’m pushing strongly for our website to not become the trash can of Contexts: where ideas not good enough for the magazine go to die. On the other hand, this is a pretty interesting way to think about managing community websites, funny imagery and all.

There’s a review on The New Republic’s website about Sara Boxer’s book Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web. I haven’t read the book, but the review contains a funny description of blogging:

Acoustically, it evokes both a burp and a yawn, seeming to anticipate the toss-away, fervent, carefree prose it would come to define. One doesn’t craft a blog, just as one doesn’t plan to puke. One pukes. One blogs.

Them’s fightin’ words! While humorous, I don’t think it’s true: anyone who’s blogged for any length of time—and saying this I just now realized my personal blog is almost five years old!—knows it’s actually a lot of work to stick with it and most bloggers agonize a lot over what they post.

There is some truth to what he says though though: if you think too much about a blog post, it will likely never be posted, at least in my experience. But then again, I think the same is true of academic publishing—it’s tempting to workshop an article to death for years until it’s just perfect, but you won’t publish very often with that attitude. I wouldn’t compare academic publishing to puking though.