English Graduate Student Mardi Gras Conference

Cathy Davidson will be delivering the keynote address at the EGSA Mardi Gras Conference, 5:00 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 29. Room to be determined. Check the schedule on the website for the room and other sessions of interest.

Blogs in My Senior Capstone Course

My students and I are experimenting with blogs as an alternative to Blackboard's Discussion Board for responses to readings and comments. They have the option of limiting readership (of course) to just their group members and me. We'll see who chooses to limit and who chooses to leave them open. This may change over time as we read Convergence Culture, Wikinomics, etc. --L

Collaboration

Yesterday at the Engineering Communication Advisory Council meeting in the ECS Studio (http://cxc.lsu.edu --> studios), executives from BASF and Shell described their companies' uses of collaborative postings by employees working on projects. Their descriptions sounded very much like ideas we have discussed for CxC. Only employees have access to comment on each other's materials, add materials, etc., so the pattern of limiting participation to an internal audience seems like a good one to follow for class projects. We could do this via PAWS, Moodle, or limited membership in Blogs (like the one Kevin set up.) Should these limited blogs be organized around classes, studios, or both at LSU? We need simulations of these professional activities connected to studios somehow. On the other hand, some people feel very strongly that participation should be open to anyone who cares enough to post. This may just be a case-by-case decision. Thoughts?

Do you want the "New Alexandrians" reviewing your articles?

What do you think about this? "As large-scale scientific collaborations become the norm, scientists will rely increasingly on distributed methods of collecting data, verifying discoveries, and testing hypotheses, not only to speed things up, but to improve the veracity of scientific knowledge itself. Rapid, iterative, and open-access publishing will engage a great proportion of the scientific community in the peer-review process. Results will be vetted by hundreds of participants on the fly, not by a handfull of anonymous referees, up to a year later. This in turn, will allow new knowledge to flow more quickly in practical uses and enterprises." Wikinomics, Tapscott & Williams, 159-160. I think this is coming, but not without some problems. If such vetting were to replace the typical peer review process we have now, we'd have to know whether reviewers were in engaged in what H. Paul Grice (ordinary language philosopher) called the "Cooperative Principle." Grice knew very well that this wasn't how all exchanges work ("violations" of his principles or maxims were the fun of language analysis). How would we know if reviewers had motive other than "cooperative" ones? Of course, we don't know it now, but having experts picked for their expertise serves to weed out at least some of the "uncooperative" reviews one might get if invisible variables (money) were in play. Wikipedia has certainly given us the example of a "fairly" reliable source of information because experts on the subjects go there to check things out. But is this good enough? Could a combination of free and open posting plus editors (the Wikipedia model now?) give us the best of both? Thoughts?

Making Facebook Commercial

Here's Facebook's latest advertising plans. It's interesting to watch a "free," (once) user-centered technology becoming more and more commercial in order to achieve a bigger payout for its "founders" when it's eventually sold off. Here's an out-dated history of Facebook, if you're curious about its origins.

Some Resources

Annotated Bib (on Groups)
http://www.chass.ncsu.edu/ccstm/pubs/Biblio/Index.html

The Educated Blogger (article)
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_6/huffaker/index.html

Weblogg-ed (a blog by Will Richardson)
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/

Richardson's blog is great -- so if you can only visit one link, then go there.

Social Networking Site for LSU Alums

Last week at the Campus Communicators meeting I heard about LSU's plans to launch a university social networking site. It will at first be open only to alums, but Public Affairs hopes eventually to open it to current students as well. Once that level of participation is available, whether we get MacArthur funding or not, we might want to explore the site as a forum for discussions between our Distinguished Communicator candidates and our graduates from the program. As the number of DComm graduates grows, I think we'll have many of those alums willing to share their "real-world" communication experiences--I heard from another of our Spring DComm students today about his success giving a presentation for his supervisor and boss.