Assessing students blog posts

I love the synergy of the blogosphere.  Today I was driving around thinking about how I can assess the blog posts I will be asking my students to write.  Of course my first answer is "read them all."  Which might be do-able in a small class but it time consuming no matter what...plus saying "good job" over and over loses some effect.  So what did I find will doing blog reading?  I found Weblogg-ed's link to 2 Cent's Worth's post Blog' What's in Gaston County, which among other things talks about writing and assessment questions for students and for teachers.  This is good stuff to think through, it's not the full answer I'm looking for but it is a start.

So I will be suggesting five questions that will be asked, not by the teacher, but by the student, as a way to assess blogged content.  I call the questions “Blog’Whats?”:

- What did you read in order to write this blog entry?

- What do you think is important about your blog entry?

- What are both sides of your issue?

- What do you want your readers to know, believe, or do?

- What else do you need to say?

These questions assume that blogging is seen as a practice of literacy, accessing, processing, and communicating information.  They also serve to help the writer to focus on the broader aspects of the issues being written about, exploring all sides and perspectives, and even exploring the next phase of the communication.

I think that these same questions, reworded only slightly, can also be used to examine and evaluate the blog writings of others, other classmates, and other blog content being used for learning.  Those questions would be:

- What did the blogger read before writing?

- What was important about the blog entry?

- What were both sides of the issue?

- What do you know, believe, or want to do after reading the blog?

- What else needs to be said?

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June Advisory Committee Report

A short report because of the writing...enjoy http://www.professional-lurker.com/linked/2006/06/2006_06_ACUpdate.pdf .

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Dissertation Reflections

Clancy Ratliff at CultureCat has a valuable post on the process behind her dissertation writing, Dissertation Reflections. I'm taking notes and so should you.

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CFP - 'Language, Communication, Culture' Conference

4th International 'Language, Communication, Culture' Conference
Lisbon, Lusofona University
November 28-30, 2006
http://lcc.ulusofona.pt/index_17.html

An organisation of the staff, students and associates of the 'Culture and Society' Postgraduate Pogramme University of Lisbon), of the staff of the Department of Communication, Arts and Information Technology (Lusofona University), and of Best Travel Agency.

The conference will be structured round three topics:

1. Media, media-making and the politics of news production
2. Visual culture and hegemonic cultural policies and practices 
3. Cultural studies and the production of knowledge and social change

This year’s LCC Conference will be hosted by Lusofona University, a private academic institution in Lisbon. Having previously been held in Évora and Beja, the LCC conference venue alternates annually amongst several institutions that comprise Portugal’s academic panorama. Apart from Lisbon’s centrality favouring participation in this event, both transport and accommodation-wise, Lusófona University was chosen as a venue due to this institution’s focus on communication, visual arts and new technologies. This academic slant coincides with the Conference’s principal vectors, namely media, visual culture and cultural studies.
 
For full information on the themes and sessions, Cpf, registration fees and deadlines, go to
http://lcc.ulusofona.pt/index_17.html 
 
"The LCC Conference mandate is to bring together scholars from all disciplines and fields of the humanities and social sciences with contributions on language, communication, social and cultural themes that analyse the contemporary world, its vectors of crisis, its tensions and conflicts, its lines of development, and its resources of hope."

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Pictures from my drive to Santa Fe

I drove from Pagosa Springs to Santa Fe to spend the weekend with friends. The books say it is about a 2.5 hour drive but since many miles of the road was stripped down to hard pack AND since my car's very narrow tires don't like rough roads it took over an hour longer than listed. The colors of these pictures seem unnaturally bright but they are accurate...the colors are very intense in the South West.
This is a natural ampatheatre. Isn't nature amazing.
When I was driving back I went via Taos yes I know it's not a straight line but it was a really nice drive. A rain storm was tracking my route so I got to see a desert storm...hehehe.
My friend told me that this bridge is fairly famous. I need to look up the name of the place. It is very high above the river...very high. I didn't walk out to the middle because it was raining...yeah that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Dust devils facinate me.
I forgot that the headquarters for Earthship Biotecture is outside Taos. I had to backup and grab some pictures of the site. Had it been before 5:00 p.m. I would have taken the tour, but I guess I can do that sometime in the future.
Just beyond the Earthship subdivision I started seeing lots of dust along a side road. Everywhere I had been to this point I had seen cattle trucks moving stock between pastures and from the farm to the auction. Not sure what these folks were doing beyond kicking up a dust storm.

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Pictures from the drive to Colorado

Pictures are long overdue I know. Well here goes. I took a high mountain route from Colorado Springs to Pagosa Springs along Colorado Highway #. I snapped a few shots of these high valleys and platues. This is semi-arid country and global warming is taking it's toll on their fragile eco-systems.
It snowed as I was going up Wolf Creek Pass. The day before I had worn shorts as I was driving through Kansas, now it was cold in the mountains.
My only attempt, so far, to do movie capture on my digital camera is available in a Quicktime version. I included a still in case this doesn't work well.
And then I was in my kinda heaven, in the middle of the San Juan Mountains above 7000 feet.
A picture looking West off the front stoop of my rental house.

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CFP - Int. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Int. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
March 26-28, 2007
Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.
www.icwsm.org

Recent years have seen a flourishing of social media - the promise of the WWW coming to fruition. Across the world, individuals can share opinions, experiences and expertise at the push of a button. There has been a fundamental shift thanks to significant advances in the ease of publishing content. Creating web content was for years the domain of tech-savvy people; now the barrier has been torn down.

Perhaps the most visible among the successes of social media in recent years is the blogosphere. Tens of thousands of new blogs are created every day; blog content is becoming ubiquitous, surfacing in news portals, search results and corporate public relations. Even those who are unaware of the blogosphere are still influenced by its content. Although blogs are highly visible currently, other forms of conversational spaces continue to flourish, especially message boards, mailing lists, review sites and Usenet.

Social media covers all forms of sharing: from photos, to videos, to recommendations. In the past few years, many examples of social media have become hugely successful. Flickr is a premier photo sharing site; del.icio.us has become a touchstone for sharing recommendations of websites; Web 2.0 applications in general abound with newcomers in the social media space.

One of the fascinating aspects of social media has been the drive from within to study the ecology as it evolves. People act at once as creators, observers and influencers of the space in which they participate. At the same time, businesses are quickly grasping the potential benefit to attending to the new space of social media. Monitoring the aggregate trends and opinions revealed by social media provides valuable insight to a number of business applications: marketing intelligence, competitive intelligence.

The fast growing blogosphere and social media space is a fruitful area for investigations across many disciplines. For example:

• Natural language processing and machine learning researchers study the extraction of factual information from text; can blogs be processed in a robust manner and can knowledge bases be populated with facts from blogs?
• Social network researchers and graph theory researchers are concerned with inferring community structure; analyzing the linkage patterns among blog entries can provide explicit community structure; can we infer implicit communities through the content of the blogs?
• Political scientists are looking at ways of identifying influencers in a community; who are the influential bloggers whose voice is echoed by others?
• Multimedia researchers are attempting to categorize audio and video content, aggregate information from diverse sources (textual, audio, video); can visual & audio social media be stored in a way that allows search across different modalities?
• Market analysis researchers are concerned with what people think of the products and services of a company; can we process blogs automatically and find consumer complaints and breaking reports about vulnerabilities of products; also when does a burst of blogging activity become a trend?
• Social psychologists study the response to current events, including emotional and attitudinal dimensions as well as content and patterns of influence.

Despite the growing relevance of blogs and social media, existing research has only begun to address the spectrum of issues that arise in their analysis. Blogs, for example, are a different kind of document than the relatively clean text that NLP research is based on. Such differences in term of structure, content and grammaticality will be a challenge considering that blogs will likely represent the most common way of publicly accessible personal expression.

AREAS OF INTEREST

The conference aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas (e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster discussions about ongoing research in the following areas:

1. AI methods for ethnographic analysis through social media.
2. Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on the media.
3. Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs.
4. Crawling/spidering and indexing.
5. Human Computer Interaction; social media tools; navigation.
6. Multimedia; audio/visual processing; aggregating information from different modalities.
7. Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.
8. Semantic Web; unstructured knowledge management.
9. Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction.
10. Social Network Analysis; communities identification; expertise discovery; collaborative filtering.
11. Text categorization; gender/age identification; spam filtering.
12. Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media.
13. Trend identification/tracking.
14. Visualization, aggregation and filtering.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submissions: December 8, 2006
• Acceptance Notifications: February 2, 2007
• Camera ready copies: February 16, 2007
• Tutorials: March 25, 2007
• Conference: March 26-28, 2007

SUBMISSION

People interested in participating should submit through the conference website a technical paper (up to 8 pages), a short paper (up to 4 pages), a poster or demo description (up to 2 pages) by midnight (PST) of Dec 8, 2006. Each submission should, to the extent possible, indicate a list of relevant areas from the list above (e.g., 03, 04, 10).

CHAIRS

• Natalie Glance, Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
• Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Inc.

CO-CHAIRS

• Eytan Adar, Univ. of Washington.
• Matthew Hurst, Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
• Mark Liberman, Univ. of Pennsylvania.
• James H. Martin, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder.
• Franco Salvetti, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder & Umbria Inc.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

• Paolo Avesani, ITC-irst, Italy
• Bran Boguraev, IBM Research, USA
• Chris Brooks, Univ. of San Francisco, USA
• Claire Cardie, Cornell Univ., USA
• Scott Carter, UC Berkeley, USA
• Steve Cayzer, HP Labs Bristol, UK
• Thierry Declerck, DFKI Language Lab, Germany
• Donghui Feng, ISI, USC, USA
• Kathy Gill, Univ. of Washington, USA
• Michelle Gumbrecht, Stanford Univ., USA
• Eduard Hovy, ISI, USC, USA
• Jussi Karlgren, SICS, Sweden
• Laura Knudsen, OSC, USA
• Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel
• Cameron Marlow, Yahoo! Research, USA
• Lluis Marquez, Univ. Poli. de Catalunya, Spain
• Rada Mihalcea, Univ. of North Texas, USA
• Gilad Mishne, Univ. of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Tomoyuki Nanno, Google, Japan
• Apostol Natsev, IBM Research, USA
• Kamal Nigam, Google, USA
• Jon Oberlander, Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland
• Peter Pirolli, PARC, USA
• Oana Postolache, Univ. of Saarland, Germany
• John Prager, IBM Research, USA
• Alessandro Provetti, Univ. of Messina, Italy
• Drago Radev, Univ. of Michigan, USA
• Jonathon Read, Univ. of Sussex, UK
• Maarten de Rijke, Univ. of Amsterdam
• Laura Ripamonti, Univ. of Milan, Italy
• Irina Rish, IBM Watson Research Center, USA
• Dan Roth, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• James G. Shanahan, Turn Inc., USA
• Emma Shen, OSC, USA
• Suresh Sood, Univ. of Tech. Sydney, Australia
• Savitha Srinivasan, IBM Research, USA
• Carlo Strapparava, ITC-irst, Italy
• V.S. Subrahmanian, Univ. of Maryland, USA
• Belle Tseng, NEC Labs America, USA
• Janyce M. Wiebe, Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA
• Tong Zhang, Yahoo! Research, USA
• Liang Zhou, ISI, USC, USA
• Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard Univ., USA

VENUE

The conference will (provisionally) take place at the newly built St. Julien hotel located in downtown Boulder, Colorado.

SPONSORS

ICWSM is proud to be supported by:

• Google, Inc.
• NEC Labs America 
• Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
• Umbria, Inc.
• University of Pennsylvania.

ICWSM is a IW3C2 endorsed conference.

HISTORY

The International Conference on Weblogs and social media grew out of two events: the annual series of Workshops on the Weblogging Ecosystem (WWE 2006, WWE 2005, WWE 2004) held in conjunction with the International World Wide Web Conference and the Spring Symposium organized by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs (CAAW 2006).

CONTACT

info@icwsm.org

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CFP - Fan Cultures in the Palm of Your Hand: Cult TV in the Age of Podcasts

Society for Cinema And Media Studies Conference (SCMS)
Chicago Hilton, Chicago, IL
March 8-11, 2007

Proposals are being sought for a panel entitled "Fan Cultures in the Palm of Your Hand: Cult TV in the Age of Podcasts."  Besides exploring the subject of cult television from a variety of thematic perspectives, this panel will examine the ways in which consumption patterns and fan cultures have changed over the past three years due to the increased viability of podcasts as both method and content of multimedia delivery.

• How have mobile viewing technologies (or vodcasts) transformed fans' relationships to televisual texts that can now be downloaded from the Internet onto personal video players and consumed in public spaces?
• What role has the Internet played in strengthening and diversifying "interpretative communities" made up of fans who communicate daily, share files, and actively contribute to the cultivation of particular television shows? 
• How have producers of cult TV series such as DOCTOR WHO, LOST, and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA utilized the digital podcasting platform to expand the textual universe of their programs? 
• And how might the audio commentaries being authored by participatory audience members filter into and inform that universe in a meaningful, interactive way?

I welcome submissions that explore any of the above questions.  Panelists might also consider any of the following topics:

• Particular cult programs that began online and have since gone on to broadcast television (HAPPY TREE FRIENDS, QUEER DUCK, etc.)
• Adult Swim programing (ROBOT CHICKEN, SEALAB 2021, etc.)
• Podcasting and "textual poaching"
• Podcasting and "subcultural" sensibilities
• Podcast forms and aesthetics
• The cult of I-Pod
• Fan podcasts for particular TV series (including but not limited to):
• GILMORE GIRLS (Stars Hollow)
• ALIAS (Previously on Alias)
• VERONICA MARS (V for Veronica Mars)
• DOCTOR WHO (Podshock; The WhoCast)
• LOST (The Lost Experience)
• BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (Buffcast)
• ANGEL (Angel Investigations)
• FIREFLY (The Signal)
• STAR TREK (Starship Exeter)
• BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (Galactica Actual)
• XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS (XenaCast)
• BABYLON 5 (The Babylon Podcast)
• FARSCAPE (The ScapeCast)

Information about the conference can be found at ttp://www.cmstudies.org/.

Send proposals of 250-350 words and a short bio via email to David Scott Diffrient (sdiffrient@msn.com) by August 10, 2006 for consideration.

David Scott Diffrient
University of Washington in St. Louis
Mallinckrodt Center
Room 310
Campus Box 1174
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130

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Back in Indiana

I got home late last evening having driven a rather circuitous route back.  Some pictures and some stories to come.  I have a full day of meetings on campus today and tomorrow...two different campuses actually.  So it will be the weekend before I can get it all done.

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Heading home

I left Pagosa Springs Saturday morning and drove the scenic route to Lake City where I spent last night, pictures to come...yes I know I've said that before.  Tonight I am in Pueblo, CO...aka hell.  Sorry folks but it's just unrelentingly hot...and brown here and was so the previous times I ventured through or nearby.  I don't like desert kinda hot...not my style. 

p.s.  Colorado can been described through three sets of forced choices...green or brown, mountains or not, and trees or not...yes there is some overlap though not as much as you might think.

Oh well I called hubby this afternoon and said, "If you didn't already know I love you then you better know right now cause the Rockies are in my rear view mirror."  *sigh*  Today is the first time since May 9 I've been below 6500 feet.  Oh well 400 ft here I come, I'm working on resizing pics this evening and hope to have some posted tomorrow night...assuming the day's driving goes well.

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Amazing pictures and a story or two

I have amazing pictures from my driving trips into the high country.  Sadly many are more than a bit hazy so PhotoShopping is required.   I may get a chance to work on some tonight before I hit the hay.  If not then I will work on them on the road back to Indiana.  I leave in the morning.

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The last week in Pagosa Springs

Hubby and I decided that I would extend my stay another week.  That allowed me to get additional work done as well as have a little fun.  I've been mostly working or hanging close to the rental house so some fun is due.  With the extension I will be out of here on Saturday, June 17, more on the planned drive home later.  While I am ready to see hubby and friends back in Indiana I can't say I'm ready to leave the mountains or Pagosa Springs, not sure I ever would be.

Over the next two days I will be doing some 4x4 exploring of the San Juan National Forest.  Tomorrow, June 13, will be medium length drives around Pagosa Springs.  I should have some pictures to share.  Then on Wednesday I plan to make a longer drive up into the mountains to some ghost towns and along Elwood Pass.  Yeah I know I said I wouldn't do this alone...well I changed my mind.  Hubby has my itinerary and I have my Colorado Search & Rescue Card and I will be on marked forest roads only, so if something unforeseen happens I'm covered.  Oh and I will be carrying the extra insurance on the rental car...just because I'm a worrywart.  LOL And I have a full ruck sack of stuff like food, water, and provisions...see previous worrywart comment.

I'm looking forward to the drives...what can I say I love the mountains.

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Indie Fest 2006

I took the weekend off and hung out at Indie Fest 2006, here in Pagosa Springs...well above it really since Reservoir Hill looks down on the town.

SATURDAY, JUNE 10

Eliza Gilkyson - I was late for the first set which is really bad since Gilkyson is one of the big reasons I wanted to attend this festival.  Her work is just amazing.  Check out her page if you like folk...or rootish music.

Terri Hendrix - I was new to Hendix work as a performer but found I knew many of her songs through other performers recordings.  I particularly love her song Hole in my Pocket the link is a sound bit not the full tune.

Clumsy Lovers - All I can say about this group is "OH MY GOD! They are energy in motion."  The only band I've ever seen that comes close to their energy level was this strange band that opened for Niel Young in Indianapolis probably 10 years ago.  They were frantic, often throwing themselves down on the stage and writhing while they played.  But unlike that unnamed, cause I just don't remember who they were nor do I want to, the Clumsy Lovers are really good.  I just checked out their website and the video doesn't even come close to showing you the energy these guys had on stage.  The director probably would have freaked.  LOL

Brave Combo - Another high octane band.  I told hubby that if the Greatful Dead and the Lawrence Welk Orchestra were to have an illegitimate child band it would be the Brave Combo.  this Grammy winning group is amazing.  Check out their website...I can't even begin to describe them except to say it was really fun and lots of dancing was had by all.

Eileen Ivers - I have known Eileen Ivers work for years, she is  a kick ass Celtic fiddler who can saw.  I love the music so for me it was the perfect capper to a great day.

SUNDAY, JUNE 11

Gandalf Murphy & the Slambovian Circus of Dreams - This is a wild band, they are a mix of rock and roll and folk with some bluegrass thrown in for spice.  I can't do them justice in words.  If you are an East Coaster or will be there in the future try to catch these guys.  This was their first experience playing in Colorado.

Selasee - American Pop, Reggae and West African, loved it.  I have a song of theirs on a World Music collection I bought last year.  It's for groving as only reggae can be.  This is a Boulder based band so I'm assuming they play somewhere on Pearl Street, though their tour dates don't show it.

Blame Sally - A great group.  Check out their video If You Tell a Lie, read the lyrics too. *w*

Public Property - Ok this was the only group I didn't like that much.  I have to say it's probably because they are an Iowa Reggae band...*scratching my head*  Iowa and Reggae.  Now in truth they were a very good cover band, I got into their Marley stuff.  But on their original stuff I couldn't hear their lyrics, not sure why they choice to do that but chose they did, as this was the only band that I couldn't hear them sing over the instruments.  But the crowd loved them, I think that may be because it was late in the day and Durango Brewing had had the beer flowing all afternoon.  Check them out yourselves and form your own opinion.

Ruthie Foster - I love when a performer so owns the stage they can be solo or nearly so.  Foster tours with her guitar and a percussionist, though she added bass for this show.  Man can she sing....shake your soul sing. 

As you can see I have a bunch of new CDs to buy, great stuff this.

Oh and...Go hear live music...and I don't mean the mega shows, I mean the small venues where you can really see and hear the performers and they can do the same with and for you.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Website Visualization

Ran across a cool website visualization tool.  Just plug a URL into the box and wait for the flowers to bloom on screen.  

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Posted by prolurkr at 10:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

CFP - Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future

Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
October 19-21, 2006

The Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future Symposium Planning Committee is issuing a call for posters that highlight digital humanities projects, tools or techniques or work in progress. We also encourage any college or university digital humanities program, center or group to present a poster that overviews their program. Posters may include a demonstration, traditional printed poster, or a combination of both. Wireless internet access will be available at the poster venue.

Short abstracts (250-500 words) should be submitted to the conference website before June 30, 2006. The proposals will be reviewed by the planning committee and successful applicants will be notified by July 31, 2006. The poster session will take place on the evening of October 20, 2006.

Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future, will assess the current state and future prospects of digital textual studies, with an underlying emphasis on how digital media might change our ways of
knowing or experiencing textuality. The symposium will feature an opening address by Jerome McGann, and presentations by Morris Eaves, Julia Flanders, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Kenneth Price, Peter Robinson,
Peter Shillingsburg and Martha Nell Smith. For registration details see the symposim website.

For more information about the symposium or poster session, contact Maura Ives.

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MacArthur Foundation Series

Ok, now I'm bummed.  My paper proposal wasn't accepted for the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media.  Oh well, I have another use for the abstract so that is cool, but it would have been cooler to get in the volume.  So who made it through review?

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May Advisory Committee Report

Another month, another report...a very short report this time since I've been writing most of the month. 

Posted by prolurkr at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack