vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Links for Lecture on Blogging

Today I gave an introductory lecture to first year students on what is a blog. Prepared a straightforward keynote lecture which outlined the big picture points, and then surfed some blogs to colour in the details. All the media students will be introduced to their own blogs next semester, so hopefully it is a useful primer.

These are some blogs that I selected, more or less out of the blogosphere, to help give a broad idea of what blogs might be.

• Pressthink
• Anne Galloway
• Rebecca Blood
• Ben Ho
• Georgette
• Jeremy
• Tara
• Mark Bernstein
• Anders Fagerjord
• Andrew Bartlett
• Mia
• Grand Text Auto

Blogs in Teaching

Ok, this is an excellent reflective entry from Melanie about blogs and the socius. Questions about disclosure, understanding and so on. All I’m indicating here is these are the sorts of things that blogs in education raise. It is not about content but the processes of networked identities. Without this grounding, this experience, blogs don’t make sense. It isn’t a specific content space, we don’t use blogs as de facto other things. We use them as blogs.

Commentary Five

These are nearly-not-quite transcripts of the commentaries I have made in the BlogTalk DownUnder quote prototype.

Why try to define it: what is the rush?

Because it will get populated (as it is) by the microsoft notion of video and blogging. because it will make video in a blog a solid object. Text in a blog is porous, that is the how and why of blogs. We weave into and out of each other, this is the texture of the network. Video if it stays a blob of video is textureless in the context of the network.

The rush is because I could see, in 2000, that this day would come, and when it did people would misunderstand the role and authority of blogging (blogs gain authority via their connectedness) and in turn mistake the ability to be media producers with being video bloggers. What is missing is the “blogging” bit in video. How do i easily quote a part of your entry? This is trivial in text. Why should there be any difference? Both are technically possible.

There is a difference because people can’t conceive of their ‘finished’ video as being make up of parts. Remixes do this, but remixes are not me being able to easily quote you inside of my video. Or my video citing your video and your video knowing about it (trackback). why not? Why can’t we weave video in the same way that we weave words.

Until that moment video blogging will remain vanity video. It is about me, because your video can’t know about my video, and vice versa, without human agency.

Technorati Tags: vlogTheory

A Recent Finding

A BlogTalk I heard an excellent paper (though it didn’t get to where it should have) by Ben Ho. I’m deeply suspicious of a lot of the stuff going on about digital storytelling. Partly because it is busy repeating all the same claims that hypertext theory Generation One made, yet digital storytelling appears to lack the critical distance (and irony) that such a realisation ought to indicate. And it smacks of an almost smug liberation technology something. But I digress, and I might have misunderstood. Anyway, I think this is Ben’s blog (think because it doesn’t actually say so anywhere that I can find), be an interesting place to visit for a while.

Witnessing

From Ben Ho’s presentation on the use of blogs (and digital storytelling) to narrate trauma. An elegant observation.

The serial networked aspect of the blog form allow for an accretive, rhizomatic approach to writing the self.

and then

“neveryday life”, a contrary to cultural studies’ ‘everyday life’. There narratives of life aren’t heroic, but is atypical. Trauma is present as a limit, destablising because of its closeness to legitimate suffering. This irrupts into the blogs. A productive turn of phrase.

Technorati Tags: blogtalkdownunder

My Blog is a Story

Mark is giving his keynote. As usual he is, it is, brilliant. Rather than keep up, I’m swimming in ideas. One particularly nice one, whether you think so or not, your blog is read as a story, a narrative. And the most important part is what happens in the day after you post.

Technorati Tags: blogtalkdownunder

BlogTalk

I’m sitting in the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia at BlogTalk DownUnder. We had a major technical hitch at the beginning (dodgy projector) but things are now proceeding apace. Some of the material has been thin, but useful for those who might be new to blogs, but the good papers have been very good.

Out the window at the moment a Sydney thunderstorm seems to be brewing. And we’re surrounded by the silverware (it is the CYCA after all). Makes for a delightful informality.

Technorati Tags: blogtalkdownunder

Videoblogging Workshop

These are the notes for the video blogging workshop that was held as a part of BlogTalk DownUnder. They consist of general notes (that won’t make a lot of sense without having attended the workshop!) and links to useful material. Each item below is a link to a static webpage here.

The structure of the workshop is:

• Getting material
• Capture
• Editing
• Copyright Issues
• Compression
• Embedding
• Publishing and Enclosures
• links

What Isn’t

This is my research blog. I’m a media academic. I don’t normally make comments or observations about the Federal Government’s xenophobia. How Australia has changed from a country that is concerned and values social equity to one where one’s own situation is apparently more important than anyone elses. Nor that our policy on asylum seekers will, one day, if there is justice, be vilified for the offensiveness that it is.

But Leunig, Melbourne’s aging puckish eccentric jester, got it right again.

Remember, Innovation in Teaching

A rule I live by. If you innovate in teaching and it leads to more assessment load, it is an inappropriate innovation. Why? It is professionally unsustainable (you might be happy with it, but what about your staff, or who has to take this course next). It can also confuse thoroughness with usefulness – is the additional assessment to persuade you that you’re an excellent teacher, or to improve your student’s learning?