Readings on Blogging

Several of the instructors have asked about readings about blogging practices. This issue of Reconstruction: Studies in Contempoary Culture offers some excellent fodder (blogder?) for discussion and reflection on the role of blogging. Here are some of the articles I recommend:

• Craig Saper, "Blogademia"

This essay begins with the epigram:

There's something about this medium that convinces us that our merest flights of fancy, our wispiest free-floating musings, are Revealed Truths, outtakes from Thus Spake Zarathustra. . . . the chattering class's presumption that it must have something, anything to say about everything? (Joan Didion famously said that she left New York because she didn't have an opinion about everything.)
Mark Dery blog (September 27, 2005)

All of us can appreciate this article on the gossipy-hazards of blogging by faculty memebers. this essay examines what happens when the public disclosure of the blogging worlds meets the professional environment of academic publication.

• Various Bloggers, "Why I Blog: Part 1" and "Part 2"

In this curiosity cabinet of bloggers, your students will find folks who blog for all sorts of reasons from the expected exhibitionism to the desire to rant to various other academic goals. I asked my student to read three of these and post their comments.

These readings do not all focus on academic blogs, but I found that my students enjoyed reflecting on the relationship between the author/personal and the blog. These reading helped them consider their own blogging aesthetics and expectations especially as they began to craft their first posts and mission statements.

I contributed to the post by Writer Response Theory in "Part 1."

Are there other readings you are using?