Tag: blogging styles

Blogging Skills, Canadian academic bloggers, writing and blogging

Explorations in Academic Blogging: Tony Bates

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Academic blogging is quickly emerging as a separate genre. In the first of my series of blog posts, I explored Dr. Terry Anderson’s academic blogging style, and analyzed his blog post on Rethinking Disclosure and Surveillance .

In this post, I explore Dr. Tony Bates’ academic blogging style. My purpose for careful analysis of the writing styles of Canadian academic bloggers is to make explicit some current blogging practices. By identifying exemplars with the Canadian academic blogging community, a clear set of blogging standards can be identified for use by student bloggers and their instructors within emergent practice networks hosted by formal institutions.

Blog Post Analysis

Tony Bates has posted a comparative analysis of two articles and identifies barriers to change from several different perspectives. The post, Barriers to Change: two perspectives, is an excellent example of how blogging will impact the genre of academic writing in an open, online environment.

 

In the article, Dr. Bates engages in academic blogging differently from other academic bloggers, using a different style and tone. Here are some examples.

Online Sources

He introduces the sources at the very beginning of his post, highlighting the titles in bold, and embedding the links to these articles in his post.

Framed, embedded links with context clues

He embeds a number of links within his post; for example, report from EducationSector, and inserts a brief description of the organization ((a non-profit, non-partisan independent think tank) after the text link.

Relevant quotes, bridged by introductory commentary

He inserts a number of quotes from the report that does the following:

States the problem; and

Identifies the major conclusion of the study

Dr. Bates then summarizes Trent Batson’s perspective on change, and selects a relevant quote about the myth of technology.

 Extra notes to the audience (to add extra details) that switch his voice to “commentator” from “reporter”

Use of opening questioning, or framing of issues, as rhetorical device to bracket ideas within a set perspective

Dr. Bates engages in a process of questioning to frame his arguments, and his expert shifting between the two perspectives (faculty will not take responsibility unless bribed, versus faculty with integrity seek to be innovative and make things better).

Framed by the questions, he outlines several major barriers (of direct relevance to my professional context as an instructor) to change (2 of 5 are listed):

Lack of training for administrators to manage change, and for faculty on how to teach effectively;

  • Complacency with current dominant teaching paradigm, placing instructor, and not students, at center of the teaching and learning process;

Additional links to supporting resources of interest that offer additional perspectives

He prefaces his two conclusions by first referring to Keith Hampton’s Higher Education Management Group, as an embedded link.

Details that provide rich context of the types of sources he drew from, how they fit in with his ideas

 Acknowledgements of who drew his attention to the articles

Blogging Skills

Blogging an Argument Not the Same as Writing an Argument Essay

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Path-Sharing – setting the context for audiences.

I am responding to the ideas D’Arcy Norman has covered in his post on private “classblogs” vs. the wild, wide open

Rationale (setting context for the audience-as-self for future reference)

This post analyzes his techniques to explore the topic with his blogging tool. He uses specific techniques to address both his audience-as-self (potential self but not present self) and the potential external audiences (other readers following his ideas that same day or others who discover his ideas years in the future). I am exploring the development of academic blogging as a distinct writing form by making explicit edubloggers’ commonly used discourse strategies and expressive styles to provide exemplars for student bloggers.

Analysis

First of all, D’Arcy describes his way-making context, referring to a couple of blog posts (see Stephen Downes’ post and the originating post in the Innovative Educator)  that inspired him to write his response.

Then D’Arcy sets his own professional context, referring to the UCalgary Blogs, and how some bloggers set restrictions on their content to block it from public access.

An interesting thing about this post is that it frames his shift of perspective from being resistant to accepting others’ unwillingness to being open, and blogging publicly, to actively engaging in bracketing, the transformative act of opening up his awareness to account for others’ views.

Initially, this bothered me. People weren’t seeing the Power of Being Open. I tried arguing the whole “information wants to be free” and “going public with network effects” etc… yaddayadda.

But faculty and students just didn’t see it that way. They weren’t comfortable posting their work in the open. And instead of trying to convince them that they were wrong, I took the radical approach of actually listening to them.

Strategies

D’Arcy organized his ideas within this blog post in four different, but interconnected, ways:

He introduced the issues in a preamble, added an aside for his audience (in brackets), listed the main issues, and then added his own commentary as additional points.

For example:

—preamble—

Their points were pretty consistent, and boiled down to a few issues:

—listed main items—

1. discomfort with publishing on the open web

—shift of focus – to address audience—

 (identity issues, work being archived/indexed forever, etc…)

—additional commentary—

  • the fact that this is mitigated through pseudonymous posting doesn’t negate this one entirely.

D’Arcy then weaves these ideas and siphons them into one main question, which he presents as bold text:

What right do we, as educators, have to compel students to publish on the open web?

D’Arcy explores points by stating his stance, and then referring to the opposing view (called bracketing) of  his likely ‘detractors” by stating counter-arguments, and then switching voice (by adding brackets around the sub-text) to address these arguments. For example:

As educators, we compel students to do things all the time. In the “safety” of the classroom. As assignments. But, not In The Open™, with permanent and public archives of their work. Yes, there are cases where we do this, too (drama classes may have public performances – but those aren’t often archived permanently and publicly).

This next section is an example of how D’Arcy uses the blogging tool to mix his formal and informal rhetorical styles to argue persuasively.

I have absolutely no problem with faculty and students wanting to have private “classblogs” – if it gets them to a place where they’re able to use the blogging platform in a way that amplifies the effectiveness of their discourse, even (or especially) if the site isn’t public, then it’s absolutely worth doing.

The use of the first person “I” signifies the willingness of D’Arcy to take ownership of and personalize the message. The use of “keywords”, or capturing words or phrases in quotes signifies “self-as narrator to self-as audience” an ambivalence or ambiguity over the use of the words or terms. The use of the hyphen – in this case – prefaces contingent thinking, setting up specific conditions.

The use of the hypen, the quotes, and the brackets indicate the presence of narrator ambiguity, a ‘working-through’ process not yet complete, and hints at further re-working of imprecise ideas at a later time in a future post, an opening, so to speak, for the blogger to address the ambiguity in a future post.

Notice the shift in certainty with this last section of text. Notice the voice of authority, of clarity and conviction. D’Arcy uses shorter, more active, sentences to sum up his ideas.

And I don’t see this practice 1 as simply replicating the closed model of the LMS in yet another platform. It’s different because faculty and students are largely in control of the environment used for the classblog. They can configure it together. They can customize it. They can shape it to meet their needs. That’s the important reason for moving outside of an institutional LMS.

Another important element of blogging is the absence of the beginning, middle, and end of traditional essay writing. Blogging requires a juggling act to balance the different intentions of the blogger. It requires a shifting sense of blended voices and audiences.

  1. use of private classblogs for students to express their ideas ↩
Blogging Skills, Canadian academic bloggers

On Weaving Ideas – Exemplar for Practice

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This is part of the series of posts analyzing expert academic blogging styles of top edubloggers. The series is intended to introduce student bloggers to a variety of connective writing styles used in the academic blogosphere.

The post is an exemplar as it provides a template for student bloggers engaging in tentative meaning-making activities. This type of blogging examplifies process-capture, drawing ideas from others’ texts and re-working them from one’s own perspective. The techniques offer clues to the readers. However, more importantly, I think, the clues offer context cues for easier retrieval to facilitate the blogger’s re-using the blog post as a future resource to build upon.

Dave Cormier’s blog post Does the PLE make sense in the connectivist sense?, at http://davecormier.com/edblog/tag/ple/, uses a more informal writing style, mixing the techniques commonly found in more formal prose with a more casual informal style. Dave is very much aware of his audiences, and blogs as a performer, frequently switching between the roles of the narrator and the trickster, the voice that reveals and adds detail to the audience as (whispers to the side stage or to the audience). Dave has a very theatrical style, breaking character to add various actors’insights to the production.

Blogging as Performance to Multiple Audiences:
Dave outlines a number of techniques student bloggers should draw upon as part of their own blogging.

His introduction is a follow-up to a tweet that got some reaction from colleagues. He describes the background for writing the tweet, and sets some context for his audience. (as much for himself as for others).

Dave frequently switches his voice to add humourous asides, and addresses different audiences by using a combination of bracketed phrases in several cases for different purposes:

1. Switches tone or perspective, ie. I guess that’s not necessarily a bad thing (to someone like me).
2. Define terms, ie.  VLE (virtual learning environment)
3. Add humourous asides ie. I’m more than willing to have someone explain to me what i’m missing… (I’ll accept whole hearted agreement as well).

Another common blogging technique used is the single quotes for tentative phrases, indicating attempts to ‘try on’ the phrases. This word-crafting is a crucial part of working through ideas, and an interesting technique studnets might find useful while engaging in their draft posts.

Examples of tentative phrasing:

‘where we are two years later’
‘first sentence’
‘their knowledge’
‘non-individualistic’
‘controlling’

Dave embeds two formal quotes in his writing as part of his performance:

“Lets start with a couple of quotes from George’s 2005 paper. These are both ‘first sentence’ quotes from summary sections of the paper.”

Dave’s choice of phrases are specifically aimed at providing his readers a deeper insight into what he is thinking about the ideas he is working through, capturing the essence that formal language cannot accomplish so effectively:

My problem with…
I guess..
…but most people I’ve met…
We often hear of people talking about…
Leaving aside the …

He breaks his review of Siemens’ two quotes with a sentence in bold text before starting his new narrative that analyzes a coupple tweets from the twittersphere.

What is intriguing about Dave’s post is how he continues the narrative to include further replies from other tweets received afterwards. The post continues Dave’s workign through of ideas, and accounts for multiple perspectives.
Dave also organizes his post into sections using headings.
In the section titled Things I understand I’ve glossed over, Dave explains the grey, blurry areas of his own thinking, and identifies gaps that he will want to re-work in future.

In the section titled So what am I saying? Dave introduces the idea of “Snapshot of my personal thinking platform” (SOMPTP).

In formal essay writing, the conclusion is not a place for introducing new ideas. Whereas in blogs, ideas are less structured, lacking a coherence (start, middle, and ending). In this blog post, Dave is working through ideas, sharing his musings, and inviting his audiences to interact with him further. In that Dave leaves himself room for change, he in fact addresses himself (as the futures reader among the audience of others) as he would be in the future.