Sep 21, 2011 0
A whispering blog
Inger Mewburn came and did a lecture in networked media on blogging earlier in the semester. I have been meaning to blog some notes from the presentation. There was many good points but here is a few that are relevant to this blog and networking online.
It was interesting here about how the Thesis Whisperer blog had been networked out there into relevant communities using twitter. Bringing up the idea of integrating services to promote a blog and using those services relevant to their affordances. Mewburn described twitter practice as being similar to DJing. Putting out the latest stuff people want to hear and then throwing in your mixing style. (I need to get to grips with DJ practice more to fully grasp this analogy) But, the long and short of it is using twitter to tap into communities discussing/researching a similar area then jumping into that discussion and pulling people across to your own research – blog etc.
While facebook for example was described as being kept ‘light’ – used for different purposes.
Blog writing it was suggested is writing like you talk and you need to put yourself into the writing ‘every so often’…’speak it out aloud’ to as a test…
Another idea that came up was the dinner party concept from (Kamler and Thompson 2006) Seeing yourself as being at a dinner party which has selected guests (like the Q&A show on ABC), who represent a number of different perspectives/sides on a topic. The conversation has some bite but there is also an understood politeness. This analogy was used to think about developing a confidence to talk about ideas and not be ‘terrorised’ by the big hitting theorists. The conversational style is personal but in certain company discussing politics for example you want your ideas (pov) to be taken (reasonably) seriously. The dinner party sets up a situation to discuss something from multiple perspectives in a manner that sits between the informal-formal boundaries. Gets away from the rigid style of the traditional academic approach. ( I do need to find the original source in the book mentioned to get the full grasp of this concept).
Googled it p. 37 Your own writing is the food on the table that your invited guests ‘eat, chew, digest’, the dinner is in your home organised by you – the selected guests are conversing about their ideas/concepts/theories in relation to your own inquiry.
Finally, editing was the other point made working from the book Writing to Learn , by William Zinsser. A editing technique which is used to get rid of the ‘fuzz’. Putting brackets around material to be removed and drawing a comparsion between for example the original paragraph and the edited version.
Another couple of notes Mewburn uses morguefile to have copyright free images working with text in blog entries. (something I neglect in the pace of existence) A blog entry is often ended with a question to prompt readers to comment.
Kamler, B & Thomson, P 2006, Helping doctoral students write pedagogies for supervision, Taylor & Francis Ltd, Hoboken.