Print

Print
Hello colleagues,

Indeed, an interesting topic!  Yes, I think the time has come to bring on blog-shedding.  An academic blog is the perfect means to keep our community updated, discuss issues close to our hearts, retain a history of our conversations, and raise our global profile--all at the same time.  

I'd also like to offer a few practical advantages to taking the blog route:  

•Cost.  A basic WordPress.com blog site is free, and even the free version offers some nice little tools and features.  It is cheap, but doesn't "look" cheap.
•Access.  One person sets up the site and keeps an eye on it, but others can serve as authors and editors--ensuring that the site is updated as often as needed. 
•Technical expertise.  None, really. Just eloquence and an eye for style!  It isn't even necessary to know HTML.  (One day our distant descendants will uncover old HTML runes and wonder what they meant.)
•Collaboration.  Even the most willing and selfless webmaster might one day decide to sail to the Azores.  But a blog site doesn't require a webmaster; in fact, it thrives on an Inkshed-style collaboration and meeting of minds.
•Interaction.  I love discussions like this one, but I hate long email threads. In the flurry of talk, good stuff soon gets buried or pushed further and further to the right (of the screen, not the political spectrum).  Listservs did the job when nothing else had been invented yet, but they are really best suited for announcements or notifications: for example, that twenty people have left outraged comments about your latest blog post.  Blogs keep conversations in one place, allow easy response, are searchable, and as Tania mentioned, are archivable.  

Finally, some of you know that we've been having a version of this discussion in CASDW-ACR.  We were concerned about dependence on a single webmaster (however selfless) and/or institutional affiliation.  If someone leaves a university or simply wants to step down, what happens to the site?  Is it better to share the tasks of updating, announcing, and maintaining our online image?  With these questions in mind, we're now testing a WordPress.com site that allows us to combine static, legacy web content with postings, updates, comments, and media like PDFs.  

Cool note:  when I Googled "Inkshed," the first three hits were inkshed.ca.   The fourth hit was http://edurhetor.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/inkshedding-for-events/

Best,
Amanda

-- 
Amanda Goldrick-Jones, PhD
UBC Writing Centre
2021 West Mall, Ponderosa Annex C / Vancouver BC Canada / V6T 1Z2
604-822-1985


On 9 June 2011 08:51, Roger Graves <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
An interesting thread (gmail keeps all these messages together for me as one string), but I'm starting to think there are two kinds of publications being talked about here. "The Newsletter" as it was in the 2000s wasn't really a newsletter (of the newsletter genre) at all. People were putting substantial pieces in it, and it really functioned more as a quasi -journal. The comments so far argue against using Facebook for that kind of publication, and I think I would agree with that. Now, news and less formal writing that I think we would associate with the genre of the newsletter really should be transmitted via one of the new electronic genres of publication--blog, FB, something like that. If we were starting a new writing studies organization in Canada in 2012, would we really create a newsletter to facilitate exchanges of information? I doubt it. 

Part of the problem is generational: when did newsletters proliferate? I associate it with the advent of desktop publishing in the early 1980s, or perhaps it is associated with the typewriter and the spread of cheap photocopying in the 1970s. As a medium of exchange, it is one-way: from the authors, through the editor, to the readers. There is no liveliness to it, no flattening of the information hierarchy, no spreading of the author function. The "news" part of the Newsletter should migrate to a social media site--no question about that in my mind. The extended discourse part of the Newsletter should migrate to a publication with a more formal title, a clear review process/notification, and an online publication format (not paper). 

If we want to attract new members and if we want to take advantage of the affordances of new technologies to support communication and interaction, we should re-think our traditional methods of exchanging information. Among the various advantages would be the ability to maintain a link to other blogs/online resources such as Rachel Cayley's blog on Academic Writing:
and Tania Smith's blog, EduRhetor: http://edurhetor.wordpress.com/

The traditional Newsletter format isn't going to do that well.

Roger



-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- To leave the list, send a SIGNOFF CASLL-L command to [log in to unmask] or, if you experience difficulties, write to Russ Hunt at [log in to unmask]

To view or search the list archives, go to https://listserv.utoronto.ca/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CASLL-L -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-