Speed writing

If you’re reading my blog, I trust you feel insecure about something. Blogs exist in this ironic space whereby they can somehow shore up your insecurities and mine at the same time: yours because you see how much worse off I am; mine because I know you rely on my abjection to feel (momentarily) secure.
But [...]

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The personal may be political, but is it academic?

For the last few semesters I’ve taught a 90-minute course on academic blogging for my Writing Center—it was as a result of having taught the course a few times that climbed out of pseudonymity and began to tilt my writing slightly more towards the profession.
The course is really just a blog zoo: we introduce attendees [...]

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Blogging, women, and a swipe at ’90s gender psychology

As I’m sure you know, the WordPress license agreement mandates a monthly blog post about blogging. What could I do?
Responding to Emily Gould’s self-exposé in the Times Magazine, Jemima Kiss on last week’s Tech Weekly podcast suggested that gender differences on blogs are most pronounced in the kinds of blogs men and women tend to [...]

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Having a name on the interweb

This whole anonymity kerfuffle in the academic blogosphere is sign #476 that we haven’t really thought through how online writing can relate to academic writing in our everyday lives.
Some links to this week’s kerfuffle for readers outside academia:

A writer in the Chronicle sees anonymity (not in blogs but in CHE articles) as a “danger”; a [...]

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The Amazonification of higher ed

Stephanie Rosenbloom’s “The Professor as Open Book” (NYT 3/20) quotes professors’ responses the complaints leveled against them on RateMyProfessor.com, but, perhaps surprisingly, doesn’t critique RMP as a system.
When I was an undergraduate in the ’90s, my college squelched a local effort to compile a database of students’ responses to their professors, arguing that students ought [...]

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Can blogging be a kind of peer review?

Two weeks back, Alex Reid argued that humanities journals don’t always benefit from peer review, and might be better served by Web 2.0-style filters à la Amazon’s reader reviews.
It’s not hard to see scholarship taking this turn: open-access journals (Reid again) and academic blogging are becoming decreasingly rare. By inviting scholars from multiple fields to [...]

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Modblogging: a roundtable at MSA X?

Edubloggers go two places: the faculty lounge and the seminar room.
The best blogs fit the first category—in the faculty lounge we can ask questions about pedagogy and share fears about research without fretting over how we’ll look to our committee members and peers. Take, for example, Sisyphus’s recent remarks about a class observation: there is [...]

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On blogsmanship

Back in ‘97, I had a great idea: why not blabber my terrors, lusts, and just a little gossip onto the web space provided by my college? There was no way my friends would find out what I was saying about them!
Back then I was 18 and a dithering idiot; what’s my excuse now?
I’ve been [...]

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