Entries associated with the tag "Blogging":

Every teacher is a fountain of stories, but few tell them as well or as honestly as recently retired Michigan music teacher Nancy Flanagan in her blog "Teacher in a Strange Land." (Hat tip to Blogboard.) She's a real person (so, like Howard Dean, she'll never be president) and not an ideologue. The Blogboard link will get you her hair-raising story about trying to become a substitute in the district where she taught last year.

A few days earlier, she posted about her grad-school office-mate Jeff, "precisely the teacher that the talking ed-heads and columnists say we desperately need: a bright, well-prepared high school science specialist" who used to teach in Cincinnati:

"A few years into his career, the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers proposed a new pay system tied to an innovative evaluation plan, involving classroom observations by principals and peers, plus a professional portfolio, all standards-based. While Jeff had some reservations about the plan—he felt some of the indicators were less demanding than they could be—he thought the system would reward hard workers like himself and weed some of the deadwood. In fact, he was sure he could reach the top of the scale in a couple of years—a five-figure salary boost. For a young husband and father, this was reason to stay in teaching for a good long while.

"The plan was voted down in May of 2002, by 96% of Cincinnati teachers. Jeff believes he was one of only two teachers in his high school who voted for the plan. He says there were issues between union and district leaders and a mistrust of the new evaluation system, not enough time for teachers to absorb the ramifications of change—too much revolution all at once. Lots of reasons, all boiling down to the same thing: fear. Jeff began seriously looking, that spring, at graduate schools and new career paths, plotting an eventual escape from a system that suddenly felt unbending and stuck in the past.

"Jeff will be a world-class teacher educator, but it is a shame that he stopped teaching those kids in Cincinnati so soon. What is absolutely criminal is that he was pushed out by the intransigent fears of his colleagues. We are not a profession of risk-takers or innovators. We sometimes prefer the mediocre known to the potential of the unknown, and we keep settling for a little extra for everyone rather that shuffling the deck and trying to use our resources to reach our goals."

Bloggers who aren't navel gazers are supposed to be up to the millisecond, but it just ain't so. Strange Maps just put up a five-year-old map of how different states do in setting standards for teaching evolution, lifted from a May 2002 antievolution Web site, which lifted it from the March 2002 issue of Scientific American (text available here).

I liked the old map, because it was in color, it had funny comments, and it allowed for piquant observations about Indiana's doing a much better job than Illinois (at least in statewide standards -- what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom). But the author of all this information -- Laurence S. Lerner, a University of Chicago alum and an emeritus prof at California State University, Long Beach -- hasn't stopped tracking the subject. A year ago January he published an update in Freethought Today on state science standards in general (Illinois scored a B, Indiana an A, 15 states got Fs) and evolution standards in particular (Illinois and Indiana both scored well; the worst states include Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Connecticut). The associated map is in shades of gray.

And Lerner's accompany article is fun as well as informative. He writes, "As creationism has evolved under the selective pressure of a series of court decisions ..."

From the Daily Bellwether: "Somehow, the Ohio General Assembly has gotten into the act with a law that limits access to certain public records about people who have gun permits to journalists. Big News and its industry lobbyists and editors helped craft the law. Meanwhile, [the word] novelist has not been hijacked. It means someone who is writing a novel. Author still means writer. Poet means someone who works in verse. Diarist is someone who keeps a diary. Many bloggers publish web logs, which is a recent arrival in the digital-era lexicon that describes an electronic journal. But journalists -- writers who record daily events, who journalize -- apparently can work only in journalism, which has come to be defined by the big media as the big media." (H/t Munir Urami at The Blogging Journalist.)

Quite aside from the personal interest of those of us who lack any credential other than experience, should the government even be in the business of certifying those who can get information or ask questions? Too much like judging its own case.

And it's not as though the credentialed have distinguished themselves. Environmental Journalism Now rips Time a new one for photofaking.

While today's Chicago Tribune covers presidential candidates' fund-raisers, the blogosphere has been all over  the story of two well-known feminist bloggers being hired by the John Edwards campaign, then fired, then quickly rehired. They're Chicago-area blogger Melissa McEwan, aka Shakespeare's Sister, and Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte. Short version: a potty-mouthed conservative Catholic called them potty mouths.

If you want the details, here's what William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said they said. Here's a sample of Donohue's own output. And here are the statements from Edwards and the two bloggers. Salon's Alex Koppelman and Rebecca Traister have been on the case.

I've quoted Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister here before. I think they're right on the issues and Donohue's wrong. Like Edwards, I'm not always comfortable with their language, but then again it's not my uterus that Donohue wants the government to regulate according to his sectarian beliefs.

Media Matters documents the noncoverage of a similar situation involving John McCain and a right-wing blogger who not only engaged in what Donohue now wants to call hate speech but didn't disclose that McCain had employed him. And you may recall the vice president of the United States dropping the F-bomb on a colleague on the Senate floor.

Some distinctions may be in order:

Is there a difference, at least in degree, between offensive language and bigoted language? Marcotte's explicit physical description of the Immaculate Conception strikes me as offensive, but it's not as if she called Catholicism a gutter religion. Similarly, calling Al Sharpton a liar isn't racist; calling him something using the N word would be. 

Political positions get rougher treatment than religious ones in the public square. If the Catholic Church merely denied its members the right to choose abortion and encouraged others not to choose it and prayed for the practice to end, then its position on abortion wouldn't be attacked in the same way -- and if it were, that would be inappropriate. But a large number of Catholics, including the hierarchy, want the government to forbid anyone to choose an abortion. That's a political position and a theocratic one. It deserves rough handling, and that rough handling isn't bigotry -- it's fair play. If Donohue can't stand the heat he should get out of the kitchen. The excellent Glenn Greenwald says this well and a good deal more. (I should add that the same principle applies to official church positions I agree with, such as opposition to the Iraq fiasco.)

The also excellent Archpundit points out that this episode doesn't speak well for the Edwards campaign's savvy. Yes, John Edwards didn't roll over for right-wing critics, but he obviously wasn't prepared for them either. Now that candidates need blogger help, they're going to have to be ready to deal with the fact that bloggers spill their guts every day in every way -- and not always in ways that will attract the kind of voters who make up their minds at the last minute based on casual impressions.

Greenwald thinks this episode is over, but it's not. Today, Donohue says, "I have developed a game plan that will keep this issue afloat for the remainder of the year." Would it be bigoted to call that rounding up a lynch mob?

"The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced," writes Joseph Rago, assistant assistant editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal at Opinion Journal, "and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness."

Blog journalism, on the other hand, "appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form.... Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought -- instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition."

Overgeneralized twaddle like this is nothing new, and substituting ideology for cognition is what most people do most of the time in any medium available.  But it's especially instructive to hear it from a publication that has just published ten articles on "Poverty: The Search for New Solutions", in which race is mentioned, very briefly, just twice.

Keith Olbermann tells the truth about the liars running this country (print or video, you decide).

It's official: "Hallways and office doors are not 'free-speech zones'" at Marquette University, at least if you're a libertarian TA with the gall to quote humorist Dave Barry. Some discussion here.

I don't hang my clothes out to dry, but I sure wouldn't want to live somewhere I couldn't.

Wal-Mart's fake blog exposed here and discussed here. Warning: these people take PR seriously.

Amanda Marcotte hates rapists, not men.  So if you call her a "man-hater," what are you saying about men?

Admit it: all your life you've wanted to be able to type a sentence and have it instantly illustrated by images from Flickr. (Hat tip to The Generator Blog.)

If not, then you've undoubtedly been dying to read a 42-page article (PDF) on the uses and misuses of popular song lyrics in legal writing (Bob Dylan rules), including our own 7th Circuit Court of Appeals' footnote quoting Ludacris in order to clarify the distinction between "hoe" and "ho."

• Kevin of CTA Tattler rode north from Chicago and State on the red line: "There were 21 people in the 34 square feet of space (4.5 feet x 7.5 feet) area between the doors. That is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. I counted the people and then paced off the area after the crowd thinned. One woman just screamed out in frustration: 'Oh good lord! If I'm touching you where I shouldn't be I apologize in advance.'"

• Archpundit thinks Eric Zorn needs an editor to remind him where he's from--and that the Green Party needs to stand for something besides causing Republicans to be elected. (OK, that last clause was me, not Arch.  But good grief, first Nader campaigns in swing states and hands it to Bush in 2000, and this year the Greenie in Pennsylvania takes gobs of Santorum money. Thanks for nothing, y'all.)

• David Nirenberg of the University of Chicago, writing at the New Republic online adds needed context to Pope Benedict's September 12 speech that provoked a number of Muslims to violence. (Don't get all technical on me about whether it's a blog; it's online and it has comments, though not enough links.) The Pope's key idea, writes Nirenberg, is that only Catholicism unites faith and reason; Islam, Judaism, and at least some strains of Protestantism overdo the faith part and worship a deity unconstrained by reason. Nirenberg concludes that the Pope was inviting Muslims not to dialogue, but to conversion. (Several commenters disagree vigorously but intelligently--how can you have a dialogue with someone who has no regard for reason at all?)

• What may be the best television show ever aired gets a good going-over by Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James at Slate. (Hat tip to Whet Moser.)  Money quote: "I have repeatedly discovered as a documentary filmmaker what you, Alex, so brilliantly captured in There Are No Children Here: There's no substitute for putting in the time it takes to really get past seeing people as mere symbols—be they symbols of good or bad, or the powerful or desperate. This is what David Simon and his team have done now for four years."

• If you thought all the trouble was just on your CTA rail line, learn the depressing truth (and the number of energetic activists laying it out) at Scott Gordon's place in the Beachwood Reporter. Money quote: "We can't quantify any of the aforementioned problems. The CTA has released some specific data about slow zones and how long it takes certain lines to go around the Loop, but so far has not released much in the way of empirical data that tells us how specific train lines and bus routes are performing. (The CTA just waits for the Campaign for Better Transit to release its own independent reports and then dispatches its flaks to dismiss them.)"

• Mike Klonsky at Small Talk on a study in which Cornell researchers were shocked--shocked!--to find that students average only 16 minutes of activity per physical education class: "Well, duh! Didn't these researchers ever go to high school? . . . But seriously, is gym any different from other traditional high school classes, which are usually about 45-50 minutes long and where, after taking roll and getting things 'on task' they're lucky if there's 16 minutes where students are really engaged?"

• The So-Called Austin Mayor doesn't talk as much as I do, but when he does he makes it count. Here he impeaches the supposed integrity of retiring suburban rep Henry Hyde, without even getting into that gentleman's walloping double standard on the subject of presidential impeachment.

• Jessa Crispin at Bookslut will never have to read the New Yorker again, thanks to haiku! Who would've thunk it?

• Alexander Russo's District 299 Chicago Public Schools Blog is fast becoming to CPS what Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and Illinoize are to politics--sources of both information and intelligent discussion from many viewpoints. Victor at Chicago Teachers Speak Out rescues the following from a number of insightful comments responding to CPS's Peter Cunningham, who was invited to make a statement on college-graduation data. The anonymous commenter asks, "Why free a group of schools from bureaucratic oversight? If that oversight is harmful, free all schools. If it is supportive, don't 'free' any. If it is harmful, change it. It's like Cunningham is saying, 'we not imposing our stupid rules and regs on everyone, just the bad schools.'"

• Steve Rhodes at Beachwood Reporter explains in painstaking detail why the Sun-Times's coverage of Daley's Olympic brainstorm would get an F in any reputable J-school. 

• So many ways to demotivate, so little time. Posters and paraphernalia to culture-jam any imaginable corporate propaganda.

• Brian Dillon at frieze: An established magazine has to "keep reminding your readers of that first flirtatious thrill, even as you settle into something like domestic routine with your faithful subscribers. At which point, in a sense, you’re already sunk: you’ve begun to second-guess your readers’ motives--or worse, to service their whims: their sensible preference for information over style, their taste for gossip, their impatience with illegible typefaces." (Hat tip to kottke.)

• Of 12 things Guy Kawasaki wishes he'd learned in school, one is how to give good voicemail: "First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people play back your message to get your phone number. . . . Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an e-mail that says, 'Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.' Just say, 'Tuesday, 10:00 AM, at your office.'" (Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who also quotes a list of 10 things never to buy new.)

• Forty-six kinds of male privilege, including item number 2: "I can be confident that my coworkers won’t think I got my job because of my sex--even though that might be true." Unlike most employers, symphony orchestras now have blind auditions, in which hiring decisions are made without knowledge of the applicant's sex. In a 1997 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse gathered data from audition records and found that blind auditioning “increases by 50 percent” a woman’s odds of getting past preliminary auditions, and increases by several times the chance that a woman will win the final round of auditions.

• Chartreuse intervenes on behalf of those born after 1982: "The only thing your parents got right was multiculturalism. Everything else is questionable. . . . I know we’re at war but the world is flat. A Jew hating redneck who lives next door is just that, a Jew hating redneck who lives next door. You probably have more in common with a skateboard-riding, hip-hop-listening kid who lives in India. It’s the values that are important, not the land." (Hat tip to Abstract Nonsense.)

To paraphrase your grandmother: if you can't say anything new, don't say anything at all.

So says Steven Berlin Johnson, who has wasted more time on yet another article (this one in the New Yorker) about the blogosphere vs. regular journalism. He proposes "five things all sane people agree about" on this subject, and asks all those who are just repeating them to please STFU:

• Blogs aren't historically unique. (I am legally required to agree with this point, as it's the basis of the Reader's claim to have been performing bloglike functions in print since August 1985.)

• Most bloggers are all about themselves and are uninterested in news or politics.

• The remaining minority will continue improving their coverage and analysis.

• Mainstream journalism isn't going away anytime soon.

• Mainstream journalism will continue to have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than most blogging.

Three out of five ain't bad--I want to cross off, or at least scribble over, the last two points. If this be insanity, make the most of it.

Coming from what used to be called the alternative press, I was dubious of the mainstream media long before most bloggers were born. The signal-to-noise ratio in the mainstream media is unacceptably high because mainstream reporters have no straightforward way to explain that they have been lied to by government officials, other than to repeat the lies and (long after the jump) perhaps acknowledge that some people think otherwise.

Nor do the MSM have good ways to report on scientific issues where they need to distinguish between real scientific controversies (like just how birds are descended from dinosaurs) and bogus controversies ginned up by dogmatic special pleaders (like whether evolution ever happens). In such cases you often get he-said-she-said stories, a format that frequently ends up causing a measurable decline in the sum total of human knowledge.

Those are structural problems. In practice, conditions aren't even that good, because mainstream reporters fail to follow their own best standards (or real-world expertise) even when their conventions allow it. Economists Dean Baker and Brad DeLong regularly pulverize the acts of journalism committed by the Washington Post and New York Times. The best recent example is here. 

. . . but this time he's on to something. He writes,

"my own experience with this blog has only hardened my belief in the intrinsically derivative nature of blogging. As those of you who read the New Yorker know, I wrote a review of the book Wages of Wins this spring, and then blogged about it. The review and my posts prompted a good deal of comments, both on this site and on other blogs. But when I did a search, I was unable to find anyone, among the many who commented on my comments on Wages of Wins, who had actually read the book itself. That’s weird, I mean, it’s a short book. And it's really not that expensive. But nobody—even those who were in highest dudgeon about the book’s conclusions—seemed to want to do more than comment on those who had already commented. Isn’t that the very definition of derivative?"

Indeed. Earlier in his post he makes a different argument that's kind of dubious. There he defends traditional media on the grounds that bloggers very often play off them and link to them--hence blogs are not the future.  "Newspapers continue to perform an incredibly important function as informational gatekeepers—a function, as far as I can tell, that grows more important with time, not less."

Well, not so much. Blogs are having some success at doing what the alternative press has long tried to do--keeping the institutional gatekeepers honest, through commentary and independent reporting. How the media and the blogs will function together remains to be seen, but their relation is already symbiotic.

About books, Gladwell's making a different argument--not that bloggers are derivative but that they often don't take the time to know what they're being derivative of. On that point, he's surely on target. We bloggers are in a hurry to be first. This blog will be a month old tomorrow, and by my rough count I've had ten posts that were primarily about particular books. In two cases I had read the book from cover to cover. Just because 20 percent is better than average doesn't make it a passing grade, especially if I was unfair to the rest. 

Those who don’t read blogs tend to think that they’re extremist and weird. And those who pontificate on them are often staggeringly ill-informed. Alexander Cockburn, writing in CounterPunch, appears to think that moveon.org is a blog, and claims that the medium ruins writers:  

“Talented people feel they have to produce 400 words of commentary every day and you can see the lethal consequences on their minds and style, both of which turn rapidly to slush," Cockburn writes. "They glance at the New York Times and rush to their laptops to rewrite what they just read. Hawsers to reality soon fray and they float off, drifting zeppelins of inanity.”

Huh? What's up with those slushy zeppelins? I’ll just refer him to Whiskey Bar and be done with it.  

The egregious Lee Siegel of the flailing New Republic calls lefty bloggers “fascistic forces.” Even in today’s degraded and degrading media environment, this is silly. But Juan Cole thinks at least some antiblog nonsense has roots deeper than ignorance:

“For all the talk about freedom of speech and individual freedom in the United States, ours is actually a hierarchical society in which most people cannot afford to speak out unless they are themselves independently wealthy. . . . The very wealthy [not excluding the owner of the New Republic] are used to getting their way in U.S. politics and to dominating public discourse, since so much can be controlled at choke points. Journalists can just be fired, editors and other movers and shakers bought or intimidated. Look what happened to MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, who dared complain about the propaganda in the U.S. news media around the Iraq War. Phil Donohue, who presided over MSNBC's most popular talk show, was apparently fired before the war because General Electric and Microsoft knew he would be critical of it, and did not want to take the heat. Politicians who step out of line can just be unseated by giving their opponents funding (the Supreme Court just made it harder to restrict this sort of thing).

“A grassroots communication system such as cyberspace poses a profound challenge to the forces of hierarchy and hegemony in American society. . . . Kos and his community, in short, are at the center of a discourse revolution. Now persons making a few tens of thousands of dollars a year can be read by hundreds of thousands of readers with no mediation from media moguls. . . . The lack of choke points in cyberspace means that people like Kos can't just be fired. How then to shut them up? Why, you attempt to ruin their reputation, as a way of scaring off readers and supporters.”

This is clearly not the whole story, since none of the above deign to notice that there are plenty of conservative, libertarian, reactionary, and entirely apolitical blogs.  If you've seen some intelligent commentary on the subject, link it up!

A nice addendum to this, from Scott McLemee: "There is still a tendency to think of bloggers, podcasters, etc as some distinct group that operates apart from the worlds of academia, publishing, or offline culture. To treat them, in effect, as ham-radio operators--people who possess a certain technical know-how, and who talk mainly to each other. The reality is very different." Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia says that blogs combine "text, images, and links."  By that standard, the Reader has had one since August 16, 1985, when the ink for "The City File" first hit the back pages of the paper. (Check out an image of that column below.)

Of course, back then we had neither the word "blog" nor hyperlink technology. "Google" was just a way to misspell a very large number, and any reader who questioned the information in an item had to make phone calls and/or visit a public library.  But a bloggy substance was already there in that first column--short snips that referred to original sources and occasionally provoked conversation.  
 
In that first blog entry I noted that local entrepreneurs had to find venture capital in Minneapolis; today Marshall Field's is set to become Macy's, dancing to a tune played at regional headquarters in--Minneapolis. Other items back then chronicled drug-war insanity and racism in schools and public housing, and one quoted now-famous new urbanist Peter Calthorpe's case that city dwellers are doing the environment a favor just by . . . being city dwellers.  

The medium has changed, but the stroboscopic alternation of insight and idiocy goes on.