Bill Moyers is one of my heroes. I can’t let this interview in Buzzflash go un-blogged. The current state of journalism and media in this country is pretty embarassing. He’s another guy who I wish would start a Web log.

I think these forces have unbalanced the relationship between this White House and the press. Frankly, even if we had tried it in LBJ’s time, we wouldn’t have gotten away with the kind of press conference President Bush conducted on the eve of the invasion of Iraq — the one that even the President admitted was wholly scripted, with reporters raising their hands and posing so as to appear spontaneous. Matt Taibbi wrote in The New York Press at the time that it was like a mini-Alamo for American journalism. I’d say it was more a collective Jonestown-like suicide. At least the defenders of the Alamo put up a fight.

(Ok…forgive the bad title…I’m all sugared up.) Dave posts a long list of new RSS feeds that ABC news is putting out. Just in time for my new journalism class. I’m thinking we’re on the verge of a veritable RSS earthquake…
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I don’t know exactly what determines when a new genre is born, and I don’t know if Web log writing is perceived as one, though I’m starting to think it should be. Doc Searles and others have been writing much about the uniqueness of Web log writing, and today he gives his thoughts on an essay on blogs by Camile Paglia. In a nutshell, she’s not impressed:

Most bloggers aren’t culture critics but political or media junkies preoccupied with pedestrian minutiae and a sophomoric “gotcha” mentality. I find it depressing and claustrophobic. The Web is a wide open space — voices on it should have energy and vision.

She also describes most blogs as being filled with “indigestible prose” and calls much of it “dreary meta-commentary.” I don’t totally disagree, but I also think she misses much of the point. First of all, good blogging (I still hate that word) requires good writing. It doesn’t matter how relevant or perceptive your thoughts are, they still need to be articulated in a clear and hopefully compelling way. That is the power of audience. If you can’t write it in a way that readers understand it and find interesting, you’re not going to have readers for very long. Now that doesn’t mean that all readers have the same high expectations that Paglia does, but it still means that there has to be a voice.

To me, that “blogging voice” is getting more and more distinctive. Some of its characteristics are obvious; it’s first person, it’s informal, and it’s opinionated. But there is more to it. There is a nuance to Web logging that I’m having trouble naming, but it’s an important difference from any of the defined genres we currently have, something that has to do with some heightened sense of dialoge. Donald Murray, who is one of my favorite writers who writes about writing, constantly refers to the craft as a conversation, that the writer must anticipate readers’ questions and reactions, and lead them to where they need to go. It goes back to that silent conversation that Tom McKenna articulated in that comment a couple of days ago. And the more I mull it over, the more I think that’s what separates this form from others.

I read lots of books and lots of essayists and lots of journalists, but I find something very unique about bloggers. I think because of the ease with which readers can enter the conversation, bloggers have to have an even higher awareness of what those readers might be thinking, and they have to write in ways that mimic synchronous conversation even though no one else is in the room. Bloggers know that at any moment, someone can jump in and, like Camile Paglia, say “What? Get real!” It is what sets this apart, and to me, it raises the bar somehow.

And that’s a good thing, especially from a teaching standpoint. Teaching students to write with the reader in mind is what it’s all about. Blogging demands that more than most other forms of writing, I think. It may just be time for Web Log Writing 101 (never “Blogging”) to show up in the program of study.

Tom McKenna’s response to my post yesterday about Web log portfolios jumped out at me because, among other things, of that phrase “silent conversation.” That’s such an apt description of what people who read Web logs do. And it’s not something that I find myself doing when I read other genres. I think it’s because when you read someone’s Web log on a regular basis, you do get a sense of the person behind the words, and it makes it that much easier to enter into the dialogue, in thinking or in writing. There was a thread going around a few weeks ago that echoes that idea that with Web logs, you know someone before you meet him (or her.) It’s like even though I don’t personally know Al Delgado and Tom Hoffman and Terry Elliot, I have a pretty good sense of who they are, and I’m really looking forward to meeting them at EdBlogger next month. (And I’m hoping there will be more of those types of introductions in SF as well.)

It also has something to do with what Jay Rosen said at BloggerCon about writing for readers who themselves are writers. (The exact quote was “I don’t think we know what journalism will be like when every reader is also a writer.”) It’s that second part that almost requires the conversation take place publicly or privately. It’s great when people decide to get actively engaged in the dialogue; I know I don’t take the time to comment on other people’s posts as much as I’d like. But the silent conversation with all of them is ongoing. And it’s what continually pushes my own thinking and my own writing. What I want, obviously, is that it do that for my students as well. I want them to find writers that they can tap into for ideas and inspiration and talk back to them in whatever form that might take. Definitely a goal I’ll be shooting for this upcoming quarter…

Lakewood School in Kenora, Ontario has an MT homepage that being run by Jason McDonald. Note the the coming events section is fed by RSS and that Kevin has his own Web log up and running.
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I’ve been a longtime proponent of student portfolios and one of the most appealing things about Web logs for me has been the obvious ease with which they could be used to create an online repository of student work and reflection. I’ve written a lot about this here, and these struggles aren’t new, but I’ve been trying to slowly work toward implementing them on some small scale with the hopes that the idea would grow. Today I sat with my English Dept. supervisor and explored the idea in more detail, and it became obvious that despite the promise, there are still some serious issues to work through and some serious differences between online portfolios and digital portfolios.

The biggest stumbling block is the potential for plagiarism. I’ve done some testing, and the good news is that Manila sites that are Editor’s Only sites are not Google-ized. Posts from our Creative Writing class (which is a closed site) haven’t come up in Google searches to this point while most stuff from open sites usually shows up within a matter of weeks if not days. So making all the sites eds only would solve the problem to some extent. But one of the reasons I like the Web log is the open publishing aspect of it. That, to me, is one of the most important parts of the portfolio process, the one part that until now has been the most difficult to accomplish. But if student Web logs were online, I don’t think it would be a big step for kids to find work done by students in earlier sections of the same course. (Yes, a good teacher will be looking at process for any assignment, but it’s easier to start at the end and work backwards in many cases.)

The other issue is the carrying forward of teacher comments that are most often found in writing on student work. Unless teachers input those comments into the Web log, which they certainly could do, there would have to be another way of capturing them.

So I’m weighing the pros and cons here with a general tepid response from teachers in the department primarily due, I think, to an incomplete understanding of how this would work. The plan has to be clearer before I can sell it. I’m sure there will be more about this later.

We are lucky enough to have a radio station here on campus and we’ve started a semi-regular broadcast named “Voices of Youth.” It started from a project we did with the PBS show POV last spring dealing with random student drug testing (we do that here, too.) Anyway, the result for that show was good enough that we decided to continue it this fall, and today we created the Web log for the site. Now, if anyone can give me some pointers on how to turn a .pcm file into something Internet playable…

I’ve also added a number of other feeds to my school RSS subscription page. I’m getting ready to have some of these sites go live next week, I hope. Just for the record, we’re up to around 225 sites…

I’m trying to put together a panel at the EduBlog gathering on how school districts are using Web logs from an organizational and communication standpoint. I know we’re moving toward that here, and I know Tim Lauer is doing something along those lines at Lewis Elementary. So, I’m looking for other examples, and ideally some other folk to participate on the panel. Please contact me asap if you or someone you know qualifies.
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Fifteen already signed up, including Mr. Winer, and I’m thinking we should be able to make 30 without a sweat. As I’ve said before, the Trotts of Moveable Type fame are expected as are people from Blosxom. And Erin Clerico and Bryan Bell will be working their magic on Sunday. If you are serious about Web logs in schools, or if you’re thinking about getting there…c’mon, what are you waiting for????? Click the link, book your flights, and get ready for a great couple of days in SF in Novemeber.

Dave Winer says:

I’m just about ready to flip the switch on the new archive for Scripting News. We’ve also made major progress on bringing a new management team on board for UserLand. Hope to have the deal ready to announce next week. And to celebrate 500 days of No Smoking Dave, I placed an order for two new servers, to run in a new cage here in Boston. This is where I’m going to put various specs and public services that are currently running at UserLand, so the new team can focus on Manila and Radio. Murphy-willing there will be quite a few changes, for the better, in the remaining weeks of 2003.

Fingers are severely crossed…

And from someone who’s coming up on nine, count ‘em, nine years without a cigarette, congrats, Dave. Keep it up.

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Just a bit of an update on our international Web logging efforts. Our collaborations with two Polish schools and a local elementary school has been slowly but surely coming to fruition. Regardless of the ability to bring everyone to the same Web space, it would still be a lot easier to plan and create these projects if everyone was in the same room. I still think the potential is there for some valuable exchange of ideas, but it’s now pretty much up to the teachers involved to make it happen. The other bit of news is that we’re also starting a “cultural exchange” Web log with a class in Brazil which should be up and running later this week. Also, we’re on the trail of a possible collaboration with a school in Israel.

I’m really hoping these come off and are done well because they are obviously potential best practice examples of what Web logs can do. And if anyone has any thoughts or ideas for other connections, please let me know.

Had over two dozen links in my aggregator this morning that were generated by my custom search feed for “weblogs and journalism” that I created at Feedster. 75% of them led to unique sites, and of those at least half were interesting and useful discussions about the topic. To me, that’s a pretty good percentage, and I’m finding it’s a great way to track discussions outside my normal blogroll. In fact, it’s added a few folks to my Bloglines aggregator which now tracks about 200 sites (including many from here at school.) I’m going to experiment with a couple of other terms to see how specific I can get.

I’ve also been using the Google News to RSS feed with a pretty fair amount of success, and it’s with this one that I really plan on getting my students up and running. And I’m still playing with the Google Alert RSS feeds which I haven’t had as much success with, though it probably has the potential to be the best resource since it’s not limited to just news or Web logs.

At any rate, there’s a valuable application of RSS for professional development in all of this. I just keep getting amazed at the idea of having the newest ideas and research come right to you instead of having to go and look for it. Very, very cool. Next step is to try to get a couple of teachers to tap into it and see what happens. (And speaking of searches, how about what Amazon is doing? Can you believe that there are 37 books that come up when I search for journalism and weblogs? That’s pretty amazing too.)
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So what if the judge says no live video from the sniper trial going on outside of Washington, DC. Kerry Sipe is blogging it live to the readers of the Virginian-Pilot. Granted, it’s not as good as seeing the proceedings as they occur, but it’s not a bad alternative. The article linked from the title does a pretty good job of explaining how newspapers are starting to find their way with Web logs. I’m not sure it’s the best for the hard news reporting, but for the in depth analysis of an event, I’m starting to wonder if it might not be a powerful way to cover a wide range of stories. More to think about for my journalism kids.
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I said to someone today that I was trying to think of ways that my students could “do more blogging.” It sounded strange at the time, and I’ve been mulling over that phrase in my brain ever since wondering what it was, exactly, that I meant by that. I’ve always been interested in getting kids to write more, and I know posting in a Web log is writing. But I think I’m starting to differentiate what blog-writing is and how it differs from what we traditionally teach in school.

I remember when the five paragraph essay was all the rage and the emphasis was on structure and clarity. And then came those writing workshop days where the emphasis went to process and reflection. And now, with the prevalence of standardized tests, the pendulum is swinging back to form and construction more and more. Regardless of how we teach it, however, I’ve always felt that most kids never get too far beyond the form, that voice has always been the poor relative that we made time for if we had it. But the truly great writers have both; you can hear them in their writing. The people I read on a regular basis have that voice. It’s what keeps me reading.

What I’ve found most interesting about writing a Web log is the way it has nurtured my voice. In many ways, I feel like it’s the anti-form, the place where I do my thinking about the writing and the reading. And sometimes, I do some real writing too. It’s driven a lot by the assumption of audience, no doubt, and I guess that’s what makes it truly a different form of writing. It’s more reflective and analytic, and it gets it’s genesis in the day to day or someone else’s well-written phrase. It’s driven by reading and thinking. It’s not personal writing for myself, and it’s not formal writing for the test. It’s a different beast that I think I’m still trying to characterize acurately.

All I know is whatever it is, I want my students to do more of it.

Ok, this is a true story. I’m talking on the phone with my cousin in Vermont and she’s telling me that her twins are reading none other than The Secret Life of Bees in their high school. Now my cousin knows the book because I was raving about it to her and we ended up giving her a copy last year and she loved it. So she goes in for parent teacher night and she’s chatting with the teacher about how she loved the book and how cool it was that he was teaching it. Well, believe it or not, it comes up in conversation that in studying the book, the class is using a “really great Website about the book” that was made by some high school class in New Jersey. My cousin just looks at him and says, “actually, I know the guy that did that site…” Too strange.

But also very cool. I searched the book title on Google, and I couldn’t believe it when the first hit was the amazon.com site and the second was, you guessed it, my site. This is a book that’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has been on the best seller list for months. And get this. Since August when we moved our server, that site has gotten OVER 160,000 HITS. Swear to god. Now I know that hits don’t necessarily mean visits, but still…and that’s just in two months or so. That site has been up for a year now.

That really is the power of this stuff. The thoughts and ideas and connections that my kids made to that book (good or bad) would of had a shelf life of about three weeks without that Web log. Now, they live on, and they apparently are spurring others to learn about what I think is a truly great piece of literature. Amazing.
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