Friday, March 11, 2005

Apophenia Rocks


I continue with my Friday series of favourite blogs. Check last week for intro to Lance Mannion.

Danah Boyd of Apophenia (http://www.zephoria.org/) has been blogging for so long, I guess before she was properly potty-trained, that she is now a subject of a cartoon:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/03/06/caricatured.html#004530

Anyway, she has several good recent posts. In one, she alerts us that Friendster now offers blogging tools to their members. I guess I am a member (a bunch of us signed up as 'friends' of John Edwards in order to facilitate ground-level organizing during the primaries), though I have forgotten my password and have not been there in months:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/03/03/friendster_blogs_powered_by_typepad.html#004526

Interestingly, The Facebook (http://thefacebook.com/), a kind of Friendster for College students only, has very few people blogging. Some have Flickr or other picture pages. Occasionaly some link to webpages they made in class (thus not updates in ages and not interesting to begin with). I found a couple of Livejournals and no blogs on any other platform. What is the future of blogging if the youngsters are not at the forefront of using the new technology?



Interesting post on the value of group projects in school (with some useful info in the comments):
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/03/04/pedagogy_of_group_projects.html#004528

A thoughfull critique of Wikipedia:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/03/06/situating_wikipedia.html#004529

I love this one:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/03/09/are_bloggers_journalists_wrong_question.html#004533

Danah comments:
"Are bloggers journalists?" I think that this is the wrong
question.


...then continues:
Let's switch artifacts for a moment. Paper. What do people
use paper for? They take notes, write lists, document their lives, and publish
things. Hmm. These practices sound a lot like some of what people do with blogs,
only using a different medium. Of course, i'll be the first to argue that blogs
and paper are architecturally very very very different - that have notably
different affordances and result in entirely different culture. But they both
have an array of practices associated with them. And thus, you would never ask
something like "Are paperists journalists?"


...and concludes:
I think that the question needs to be shifted. We need to
stop asking if bloggers are journalists and start asking if journalism can occur
on blogs? People didn't used to think that journalism could occur on radio or on
TV. And there's no doubt that the medium changed the practice. But we all
recognize these venues as legitimate sources of news. In a society of corrupt
media, a shift in media is actually quite appreciated and should not be
oppressed simply because it does not yet have legitimacy or because its
legitimacy is not associated with any corporation's credentials.




Finally, this one really made me think:

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/03/09/affirmative_action_diversity_in_universities_and_conferences.html#004534

Perhaps liberals see universities as places where education occurs, while conservatives see academia as a place where networking occurs. Both are probably correct, but then one starts to wonder if what Horrorritz is really trying to do is not so much to undermine education as to undermine liberal power-networks and replace them with conservative power-networks.


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