onfocus

Laura Gurak gave two talks today at OSU and both were weblog-centric. She described the UThink weblog project at the University of Minnesota, and the exclusively-online weblog academic journal she edits. She also mentioned a system for describing the features of any electronic discourse grouped into the attributes speed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity.

Because I somewhat obsessively note books that are mentioned in talks, I have a list from her talks today that I give you with no context whatsoever:

• Victorian Internet by Tom Standage
• Electric Rhetoric by Kathleen Welch
• Network Nation by Hiltz and Turoff
• Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle
• Computers as Theatre by Brenda Laurel
• Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig
• Yale Web Style Guide

Some other interesting reading that she mentioned—

• CultureCat (by Clancy, a Ph.D. student in her department)
• The Web Credibility Project at Stanford
• Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes

I met and had lunch with Laura today where we discussed everything from weblogs (of course), to disruptive academic technologies, to the tyranny of templates, to tech avatars.

I've been working in and around (and publishing my own) weblogs for so long now that I've had glasses and glasses of the blog kool-aid many times over. I already know the benefits of sharing stuff freely in a public way, even though my writing isn't perfected and polished here as I would strive for in a book or article. It was really surprising to me to hear resistance to the concept of weblogs from the OSU faculty.

Update: The OSU Barometer covered her talk: Leading Internet scholar addresses blogs in education