Poet Ponders the Digital

Blogger was amazing when I first began blogging in  2004 . That’s right, there are posts on my blogs dating to the year Google relaunched the platform. Today, Blogger isn’t so great. It feels old and out-dated. But it works and I have hundreds of posts on five Blogger-hosted blogs (1334 as of tonight). The idea of exporting and importing 13 years of posts into WordPress or Medium scares me. Should I migrate? I do not know. I’m preparing to start podcasting in 2018 and it would much easier to create podcast feeds and links within WordPress. Blogger themes? They stink, and customizing or creating your own is a pain. I don’t like the choices, yet I don’t have the time to tweak the themes as much as I want. Even the tweaks I have made are lost too often - and that annoys me. Blogger’s editor? It stinks. So does the formatting of posts with line breaks in place of paragraphs. Google could surely make Blogger an HTML5-compliant platform or at least use something mo...

MarsEdit and Blogger are not cooperating, and I’m uncertain if I will use MarsEdit past the trail period. Currently, what the application offers me is a way to compose drafts outside of Apple Mail, but it isn’t offering me much more than that because I use Google’s blogging platform. Annoyances that require using a menu choice, instead of the Option pane: Date should be included with “Post Status” for scheduling purposes. Enclosure settings should be within the editor window, along with Title. Bullet lists should be a default formatting choice, as they are common. More serious annoyances: Paragraphs require two blank lines, even in Rich Text mode, or you must clean the code within Blogger. Images do not function properly, no matter how many experiments I have tried.  I’m not saving much time if I still need to carefully format a post in Blogger and insert images from within Google’s interface. MarsEdit prefers WordPress, without a doubt. For Blogger, MarsEdit ...

MarsEdit (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Mailing posts to blogs, a practice I adopted in 2005, allows a blogger like me to store copies of draft posts within email. If Blogger , WordPress, or the blogging platform of the moment crashes or for some other reason eats my posts, at least I have the original drafts of most entries. I find having such a nicely organized archive convenient — much easier than remembering to archive posts from Blogger or WordPress to my computer. With this post, I am testing MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software based on recent reviews, including an overview on 9to5Mac . Composing posts an email offers a fast way to prepare draft blogs, but the email does not always work well if you want to include basic formatting, images, and links to online resources. Submitting to Blogger via Apple Mail often produced complex HTML with unnecessary font and paragraph formatting styles. Problems with rich text led me to convert blog entries to plaintext in Apple Mail ...

Should we teach our digital composition students the "tricks of the trade" for bloggers and other new media publishers? The ancient texts on rhetoric discuss proper attire, gestures, and tone of voice to appeal to audiences. Aren't these almost as shallow as writing the best headline to drive traffic to an online post? Clearly our Greek and Roman ancestors understood that the superficial (nice robes, deep voice) was part of the persuasive art. We tell our students to focus on the quality of their arguments, while blogging, reporting, and scholarly writing fades fast on the Web of today. The great World Wide Web that was going to bring information to everyone is one giant magazine rack, thanks to Facebook and Twitter. Short headlines, ideally implying something sexual in nature, drive traffic. Shocking. Horrible. You won't believe your eyes. From the Huffington Post to old-stalwarts like The Atlantic, clickbait headlines dominate the flow of information (as op...

Like most educators interested in technology and pedagogy, I have followed the digital revolution down many dead-end paths. We want to believe in publishing (and sharing) for the masses, but I'm less convinced today than I was twenty years ago that the masses want to share serious ideas. The masses want to share kitties, their latest meals, breaking celebrity gossip, and photos they will regret sharing almost as soon as the images enter the data stream. Blogger. Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. I have five semi-active Blogger-based blogs. My wife and I have a less active writing blog. I have Facebook pages for the blogs, Twitter feeds, and two Tumblr accounts. The traffic to the blogs is in decline, from thousands of weekly visits to a few hundred. The Facebook pages are also trailing off, as Facebook seeks to charge for promoting content. Twitter just annoys me, with an endless stream of automated tweets. I do have one account from which I follow real people posting real,...

Back to school means back to the battles with Blackboard (I've posted on that plenty of times). Even if BB was the perfect learning management system, there would still be the days spent planning and organizing online content for a new course. This week, I'm gathering the reusable materials I will upload and preparing new materials. By next week, the shell for the writing course I'm teaching will be reasonably complete. My summer was meant to be spent learning to program in Objective-C. It was also meant as a time to finished a research project and revise an academic book chapter. None of those things happened. Life in the digital age doesn't seem to give us more time, but it does give us more potential tasks. My to-do list kept growing faster than I could complete projects. Maybe it is a time management issue. I completed a lot of tasks in the last few months, many of them creative writing projects. I also am preparing a new website complementing my creative inte...

University instructors have it somewhat easier than K12 teachers: accepting "friend" requests from our students, especially our adult and non-traditional students, isn't much of an ethical quagmire. Still, you have to be careful and have some guidelines or you'll risk trouble. 1) I only accept "friend" requests from former students who are 21 or older, so nobody can claim I have favorites or suggest anything untoward. Connecting to young students is, in my opinion, always a bad idea — especially for male teachers, but we've seen female teachers have "problems" online, too. I explain to students that it isn't that I don't like them or want to be friends later in life, but it is important to maintain professional standing while they are in my courses. 2) LinkedIn is the "safest" social network for teachers to remain connected to former students. It is a professional, career-oriented network that is more about employment ...

My wife and I maintain two blogs, Twitter feeds, and a Facebook page dedicated to creative writing instruction. I have discovered that readers prefer to choose how they receive updates and blog feeds, so we've tried to offer the most popular options. First, a reminder to visit the Tameri Guide for Writers ( http://www.tameri.com/ ) if you are interested in creative writing. The Tameri website is not an academic writing website, though it includes some resources for teachers of writing. Our blog on creative writing and mass market fiction: http://www.tameri.com/wordpress/ You are reading my blog on using technology in writing instruction: http://poetcsw.blogspot.com/ The two blogs are featured on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tameri-Guide-for-Writers/239305212783049 You can find "Follow Us" links for Twitter on the blogs and on the Tameri website. Please consider following us using the social networking method of your choice.

Me : Why are people so personally rude via e-mail and blog comments? I'm deleting more mail and posts than ever lately. Friend : What are your blog topics? Me : I maintain websites on economic theory, political rhetoric, technology, autism, creative writing, and philosophy.  Friend : You do realize only creative writing and technology aren't likely to trigger hate mail. Me : It seems Linux is a religion.  Friend : Says the person with an Apple sticker on every vehicle.  Sometimes, it is easy to forget a personal zealotry. I am having a strong reaction to the fact my future employer is an all-Windows campus. Yes, I use Windows sometimes — but I just uninstalled Boot Camp from my Mac and removed the last Windows software.  Turns out, I am a fanatic, too. 

Blog post: describe the search methods and databases you employ to collect information for use in your writing; how do you determine the validity and credibility of the information you acquire and how you categorized and organize that information for use in writing; how might you use RSS feeds to Bloglines or Google Reader to enhance your students how could you improve your students’ search strategies (see the Teachers Teaching Teachers site) Work on your vlog This week we are being asked to consider two very different topics, so I'm going to split my response accordingly. However, I'm also going to take a detour, which isn't that unusual for me. I like detours. [rant] Knowing a blog is for a course, especially a course on teaching writing/composition using online technologies, leads to blog posts that are anything but "bloggy" in nature. Instead of a wry wit or wandering observations, the writing feels controlled — mediated by the context to the point it is an...

I have several blogs, some public and some not-so-public. This blog is specifically for ramblings on "digital writing" and how we might use new technologies to improve the writing skills of students. My other blogs range from photos of my cats to updates on life in Minnesota so my friends can share in my adventures. In some ways, these are the same uses students have: vanity sites (who else cares about my cats?) and keeping in touch with friends. The question we need to ask is if using these technologies can improve writing in ways other tools might not. Or, are we merely entertaining students with new toys, deceiving ourselves into thinking what is more exciting must result in more learning. I am a skeptic, having been a business owner, corporate executive, and college administrator. Technology might not only do little good, it might encourage bad habits and mistaken notions of what is acceptable when writing later in life. My first required posts will be th...