You’ve learned lots of grammar and done a lot of language games, so you know the basics, but any context outside the classroom is specific, and each of your business fields has its own special concepts, languages and ways of speaking and writing. By looking for relevant websites — websites used by people in your chosen field — you’ll be coming closer to your target English, and by writing about them you’ll be able to enter into a conversation with them.
Conversation is about communication, and we have begin to see this in our classroom exercises from the Language of Meetings. This excellent text introduces you not only to the phrases used in professional meetings, but to the STRUCTURE of professional encounters and how to negotiate them: how to solve communications problems like presenting, asking and answering questions, negotiating conflict, developing a consensus, etc., and where you learn to identify where you are in the conversation and the phrases used to negotiate the discussion dynamics, and especially, moments of conflict. In each section, we have studied diagrams that depict the roles we are to play whereby one student presents, another disagrees, a third offers a suggestion, and so forth.
The difference is between saying “I want to us to come up with the best ideas” and “I want to walk out of this meeting with a consensus.” For our websites, we will explore the difference between simply presenting our ideas and engaging in a professional conversation. As you build your website, as you write up blog posts you will certainly gain valuable experience in presenting yourself and the topics and ideas that interest you and others. But we are after bigger fish.
Blogging to Make Yourself Smarter
In his interview, Blogging is a way to make myself smarter, from the excellent Blogging Heroes book (which includes interviews with 31 successful bloggers), Chris Anderson, discusses how the routine, timely publication excerpts from drafts of his book chapters helped him to formulate his ideas,gain feedback from his audience, and, well, make him smarter. He says that by blogging about his writing the whole process transformed his research activity into something more open and far more productive than he’d experienced before. He writes:
… a blog is a scratch-pad, and a discipline to collect your thoughts, compose your thoughts, advance your thoughts, and do it ina pblic way that an amplify your thoughts by not only reaching an audience, but also getting feedback on your thoughts. Blogging is a way to make myself smarter (19).
This transformative dimension was the topic of the Harvard University conference, Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship. In the keynote lecture, Blogging and the Transformation of Legal Scholarship, Larry Solum discussed how blogging is associated with more general changes in the way law studies are written and published: nowadays, legal scholarship is shorter, less abstract, and directed towards current debate.
Engaging the Professional Conversation
The illustration above is from the Deutsche Bank 2005 study, Blogs: The new magic formula for corporate communications?, and if you look at it closely you will see that the map of different kinds of corporate blogs is also a map of the many different formal and informal communications that compose modern corporate life. It also should confirm for you how central blogging has become for modern corporate life and how relevant the blogging skills we will be developing may be for your professional future.
Another way of viewing this is illustrated to the left, from a paper on the development software for groups at IBM, published in the article Beyond predictable workflows: Enhancing productivity in artful business processes). Here you may be able to see how the simple presentation of an academic paper, or blog posts that are conceived as the simple presentation of research results, would fit in the model best as part of “Formal Processes” on the bottom right, but that group discussion, and the blogging and twittering that we are doing, are are associated with the “democratization of process” models to the left and at the tip, where the control of communication is decentralized and discussion forums, chats, telephones, email, and so forth occur among individuals and groups in various combinations.
Through use cases, we show that many business people are, of necessity, integrators of information technology (IT), but receive inadequate support from centralized IT. We maintain that productivity will be increased by better enabling users to select and integrate IT services as their needs evolve, promoting a shift that we call the democratization of process.
Considerable work in this direction has been done by instructors and students in universities the world over using blogs at every stage of the research process. An excellent illustration of this is to be found in the examples catalogued by Janet Stemwedel, Adventures in Science Blogging, which I have collected and sorted with meaningful titles according to type so you might survey them directly by clicking links on my del.icio.us website.
This probably enough for you to understand the general concept I am working with in this class. You might also like to view the short, very accessible Commoncraft video, Blogging in Plain English and then jump right in and start searching for blogs in your field by using the Google Blog Search engine, which you can learn about by reading Jonathan Dube’s post, Web Tips: Searching Blogs, where he explains the different blog search engines and how they work.
