ENGL 680M: New Media

Here's a link to my witchcraft bookmarks on de.licio.us . Lots of these are to love spell sites, which are by far the predominate types of witchcraft sites.

In the Fall of 2006 I received an email, filtered down through the chain of departmental command, regarding my course website from the previous Spring. The email regarded a comment exchange between two students from my Technical Writing class. Now, I make it a practice to at least skim all of my students’ comments. Early on in the semester I read them more carefully to ensure that students are “getting” the appropriate content, style, etc of blogging. Once I’m assured that they understand the basic principles, the 100+ comments a week don’t get the same careful attention.

While searching YouTube for short documentaries, I came across the following video "Rock Paper Scissors" . I was fairly convinced that this was a mockumentary, but to be sure, I searched for the Rock Paper Scissors Society mentioned on the site. It's a relatively large website with quite a few posts, and as I went through the site, it seemed credible. Still, I wasn't convinced. You all know how many seemingly professional websites lack real credibility. More research was necessary.

I recently created the following assignment for my students and given the subject of our class and recent discussions of avatars and social networking, I thought that I'd share This is actually three (related) assignments in one. The first has students analyzing their own Facebook entries; the second requires them to locate and annotate two articles pertaining to Facebook; the third requires them to create two avatars to represent different aspects of their self. Since these are business writing students, I asked them to create one avatar that represents their "personal" identity and a second one that represents their professional identity. (We've discussed the emergent popularity of social networking sites as tools for business networking. In class conversation we've at least mentioned Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SL, and LinkedIn.) I'll share the results with you. Feel free to borrow and adapt the assignment. It will also be located on our Student Avatar site, so putting our url [http://www.studentavatar.com] in any online posting of the assignment would be appreciated.

Creating Avatars in the Business World

Many of you, I know, have accounts on Facebook and recently I've read quite a few articles about how folks are using Facebook. Of particular interest are the articles that discuss Facebook as a business networking tool. Not only are young professionals continuing the networking that they began when using Facebook in college, but many people in older age groups are also joining Facebook. A search on the Business Week website pulls up fifteen pages of content dating back to 2005. You can find the list of articles, sorted by date, here; and this is barely a drop in the bucket compared to all of the articles available in other publications. Just in the past two months I have read, in print publications, several articles concerning Facebook, including: Wired magazine, MIT's Technology Review, and Newsweek. These are just a few examples out of many and the number of articles found published on the web far outnumber these. Quite a few of these concern the negative repurcussions of some Facebook content. For example, the colleges who have used photos on Facebook to locate and then charge underage drinkers, like Brad Davis at Emory or students who are rejected for internships as a result of Facebook content. As business writing is very much concerned with ethos, I'd like for you to consider your Facebook entries in the context of both your present and future.

When writing my previous entry on work, I remembered something interesting about documentation and gender. I thought you might be interested in hearing that:

My grandmother never had her own social security number. When she was born they weren't issued at birth and the only time a woman

I happened across a conference that might be of interest, if for no other reason than the fact that they quote McLuhan in their conference description. Massaging Media 2: Graphic Design Education in the Age of Dynamic Media

So many blogs, so many drupal sites, so little time. Ahem, do you ever have those moments when you realize that you've forgotten to do something (for several weeks)? Well, welcome to my moment and the moment finds me thinking about the nature of blogs. Now I know from my various readings and discussions that blogs started as online diaries. From there it was a short walk to social and political commentary, but what I'm wondering is: when did blogs become work?

So, here's the deal. I wrote a fabulously witty entry last night. My computer shut down on me and now won't load at all, so don't judge me, I'm trying to write something in a short amount of time.

Reading McLuhan was an eerie experience; it seemed as though it couldn't have been written prior to the 1990s. His ideas are so entirely relevant that they border on precognition. Since I know the text was published in 1967 but then reissued, I wanted to be sure that he hadn't added to it when it was republshed. I did a little research and located some interesting information on McLuhan (including a musical written about him). I also learned that he died in 1980, so he probably didn't add to it during the 90s.