It is Monday afternoon, and I’m adding some notes to what I published last week!

The Assignment

The presentation format should include about 8-12 Powerpoint slides, including screenshots of your website, and be presented in the voice of: “What I have learned about business English”. The emphasis should be on what you have learned in your two target languages, including, the professional business languages you have found on websites in your field and the professional business languages you have learned how to use in your blog entries when reporting on what you have found on the web. All the wonderful things you have learned about blogging, twittering, and the web should be discussed as they have contributed to this larger individual and course goal.

Keep Your Slides Simple!

So far, I’ve seen a lot of slides that are FILLED with text, and filled with text from my blog posts and not yours, that, as with Manon, I had to wait a long time until I hear what you have learned! This is not your fault! ALMOST EVERYBODY does this, beginning with Bill Gates …

Now, compare Bill Gates to the EXCELLENT VINCENT! final slide that Vincent presented us last week and tell me that what Vincent has done is 1000% easier to understand!

Now, before we discuss how to make this EXCELLENT VINCENT! final slide even better, let me tell you why, on the level of content, this slide is so EXCELLENT VINCENT! (got the message?): First, he has OUTLINED the things he has learned — outlined as carefully as he has chosen the EXCELLENT VINCENT! proverbs he has posted on Twitter! So, before you do anything else, do that: OUTLINE WHAT YOU LEARNED.

Once you have this outline, then take each point and explain what you learned to your roommate in simple, conversational English — and write it down right away! This is an old trick: you talk to somebody you know, you talk normal to them, and you write it down right away while it is still fresh in your head; in this way, you do something that is easy (explaining to a friend, something we all know how to do, no need for fancy university to do that), and write it down while you are still talking in an easy way and BEFORE you start getting nervous about presenting your work to anybody else or start thinking DUMB POWERPOINT THOUGHTS!

Remember your audience, me and your classmates, and remember how, when Manon and Vincent presented their work, EVERYONE was quiet — quieter than sometimes when I try to present you things! Your audience, your fellow classmates, are smart, respectful, want very much to hear you at your best — just like I do!

That I immediately started offering advice to Manon on her work last week was only because I suddenly realized that while you all learned to clean up and simplify your blog titles, blog entry titles, and categories, she forgot all of that when it came to Powerpoints: this is because we have all gotten used to BAD BILL GATES POWERPOINTS (see above, it is a forest of fallen trees after a tornado) and when we/you start to prepare Powerpoints you start building them like the BAD BILL GATES POWERPOINTS and not like YOUR NICE, SIMPLE, CLEAR, EFFECTIVE BLOGS! So, just like you learned how to make simple, effective titles and categories, start off with simple, effective statements about what you have learned — just like EXCELLENT VINCENT! has done!

The problem is, that all this bullet point glop is built into the Powerpoint application itself: Powerpoint makes it altogether too easy to keep adding bullet points, and then more bullet points … until you think that bullet points might actually be a good way to present things. They are not.

Here’s an explanation why, from the author of presentationZEN (If you want to read more about what this author has to say, check out his presentationZEN’s tips, beginning with “simplicity” (I have the book and will bring it Wednesday, but I think you’ll learn enough with what I am showing you here):

I hope you will recognize this advice … it is the same advice I gave you when designing your blogs! Keep it simple, direct, and to the point. Look at what Philine did: great title, great image, and they work together beautifully! Plus, her text engages the reader:

Now, I would improve this post by putting “more …” after “look at this:”, and then I would have discussed what this business of jobs in paradise is about: how it is a lesson for marketing, or whatever: but you get my point. You’ve learned A LOT in making your blogs …. carry this knowledge over to Powerpoints — even it means having to trip over your memories of all the other bad powerpoints that have convinced you to make more bad powerpoints yourselves!   

Now let’s see how Vincent did it:

This comes close! The image is direct, relevant, and even if a little brutal, it makes Vincent’s point and supports what he says. To improve it I, personally, would use a “before and after” format, because what Vincent did before wasn’t bad: he just did what he knew to do (and put in good effort, if I remember right!): he just didn’t know better (that’s why we are in school). UNLESS, of course, when he were to say, “I didn’t see the point (and did not ask for a better explanation)” or “I didn’t take the assignment seriously…” Well, if he were to say that, well, that’s not too good. But here, he says that it was not a failure and that he figured something out … and that’s all, at least in my book, that a teacher can ask for: that you learn from your mistakes and then go on to build a new, improved version!

Here’s a “before and after” comparison that is simple, direct, and to the point — and the point is what she learned how to do: how she moved one centimeter or meter forward in her understanding of what branding is, what her particular brand might be, and how to relate image and text. Her text would then best be about why she did it this way.

Not only that, at the bottom the slide suggests what might be done next. This should not only warm the heart of any designer and teacher — people whose professional interest is in exploration and improvement, but it also orients the viewer to a trajectory that invites the viewer to offer other suggestions for improvement.

Think about this for a second. How do you want your audience — and especially people like professors, examiners, or clients — to respond? You want them to respond sympathetically, and even better, you want them to offer you more advice, so that when you leave the classroom or exam or presentation, everyone is focussed on the problem and giving you, or helping you give them, suggestions for improvement.

So that, finally, to sum it all up: please DO NOT tell me all about me and my wonderful course (or for that matter, about my not wonderful course)! I do not need an introduction or outline of the course syllabus, because I wrote it (and made it up as we went along). I do not need an introduction to WordPress, you can find that online. Ditto Twitter. Although I have used checklists and referred to them, I don’t want you to simply check off that you did this and that. BO-RING! The ONLY thing that interests me is WHAT YOU LEARNED! AND, for every thing that you learned, I want either a screen shot or a diagram or some image that we can all look at to help us understand the 2-3 sentences you will say about it.

We have already looked at an example of learning about presenting lists of things learned, putting each thing learned on one slide, about learning about better titles, better images, branding, coordination of title and image, compare and contrast formats …

I’d love to hear about your learning something by any one or any one part of the assignments: that’s why I gave them to you. But really, I don’t need to hear the assignment, because if you start off telling me the assignment we lost time and your point of comparison is the assignment: all I can think of is: “she did the assignment” and “big deal”.

What would make me the happiest person in the world would be if you were to say something like: “after solving all this technical stuff I finally ended up discovering a website in my field that showed me all these things I didn’t know about that are important to me and my career.”

And then, “So I wrote about it, and this is what I said and how I wrote about it,”

And then, if you really want to insist on flattering me, you can say something like: “And I learned all this because I wanted to create a blog post to show everyone how I am learning how to use blogs to engage my field.”

Got it?

But as I will talk about in the famous twitter post that I’ve now written and rewritten four times, what would really make me happy is if you were to make a screenshot that looked like this

And where you describe how differently you posted on your blog or on twitter, including an analysis of the content. Here, as we discussed in class, you could talk about how you started off just writing nonsense about what you were doing, answering the standard twitter question, but over time, you found yourself asking for and receiving help, talking about your feelings, and connecting with others — while noting how you used the “reply” feature in twitter more and more often.

If you were able to do it — and prove it with screenshots from your blog or twitter — then you could really, really make me happy and say that, well, “I learned to use English where before I used either German or French to help me do my business,” because this is, after all, a Business English class, and the whole point was for you to learn how to use English in your business.

I hope this has helped!

And one more thing. If any of you want to change what you have prepared because of these notes and really need more time, send me an email soon and I’ll be pleased to move a couple of you to next week!

Thanks for reading the post! I’m looking forward to your presentations!

All the best,

Bruce

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Below is what I posted last week, unchanged.

The Goal of Your Final Presentation

The goal of your final presentation is to review what you have learned in this class as you would present it to others.

The presentation format should include about 8-12 Powerpoint slides, including screenshots of your website, and be presented in the voice of: “What I have learned about business English”. The emphasis should be on what you have learned in your two target languages, including, the professional business languages you have found on websites in your field and the professional business languages you have learned how to use in your blog entries when reporting on what you have found on the web. All the wonderful things you have learned about blogging, twittering, and the web should be discussed as they have contributed to this larger individual and course goal.

You want to show that your work here has been a success, and to do that you’ll need to identify many of the steps you made a long the way: offer us a record of your achievement! But of course, this is not to say “I’m great!”, but in substantive terms: “this is what I have learned.”

What Am I Looking For?

I am looking for evidence of progress towards your goal of identifying and learning how to report on and use the business English of your particular field. This is defined in two ways. First, this is the English you find on the websites you find in your field, what we call your “target language”, and which you report on in your blog. Second, this is the English you use in your blogs when reporting on other people’s blogs and blog entries.

This is not the place for me for you to tell me about all of your troubles with this project, or this course — that we do with an in-class course evaluation: talk about your troubles only as they led you to find a good solution and so should be evaluated as a credit to your hard work, intelligence, and achievement.

For your presentation, after you review what you have done in the way of learning how to find relevant websites and posts and reporting on them, choose one or two of your best blog posts and explain what you learned there: what issues, debates, and languages you found there and how this work has prepared you to use these methods in the future.

For instance, you might contrast the languages you found in the Bar Project to those you found on your favorite professional websites and put this difference in context. Briefly describe how INFORMAL, playful, and fun was the talk in the bar with the far more FORMAL and, I trust, conversational, explanatory, argumentative, etc., was the language you found on the professional site.

Discuss briefly the context: that we conducted an experiment whereby we were looking for active language use by native speakers and sought to engage them, but that the Bar Project mostly led us to fun and games, and how we then sought more professional language on the web.

Discuss how, once you began to find websites in your field, you began to evaluate and select them according to various criteria, such as their entering into discussions about current issues that you have learned to appreciate in your studies and how, as you tried to follow my advice on writing blog posts, you developed a structured way of reporting on them

Then, using your best blog post as an example or case study, move on to a discussion of the details of what you found and the way you reported on what you found.

Begin by explaining why you selected this post and not others; this might involve comparing your chosen post to another than you rejected.

Then explain what is important about the discussion in this post, and do so by putting it into the context of the issues in your field that you have learned to appreciate in your other classes and studies.

In your post, of course, you should also begin by putting the issue into context as well as explain what one is going to learn by reading your post.

Be sure to review the advice I have offered you on my blog. I understand that I’ve discussed many, many things and done so in a conversational fashion, so that you won’t find a single page checklist to make your life simple. Please understand that I am not measuring you against a strict list: I am measuring you against the general framework as well as evidence that you have worked consistently and intelligently. When you do refer to my advice, be sure to offer detailed illustration of how you have used this advice to your advantage. In your case study, do not simply note that you followed my advice to describe, analyze, and evaluate a professional blog post, but do show me in your own writing the evidence that you have taken such advice to heart and used it to your advantage.

In respect to blog design, be sure to explain your choice of title, title image, categories, and blog entry titles as CHOICES that you have made, and offer one or two explanations of those choices offering the reasons why you made the choice that you did. Again, present this as a process of learning and discovery.   

Twitter

I’ll discuss Twitter in class today and add a comment here tomorrow.

The Presentation Itself

The night before your presentation, submit to me via email both your .ppt file the script you might follow to present these slides. The best way to do this is to write up your notes using the “View/Notes” feature of Powerpoint and to print them in the Notes view, as you see by the screenshot above. If you prefer, you can also create a file in your favorite wordprocessor where you simply number the slides and submit that along with the Powerpoint.

Be sure to name any files that you send to me as follows: “yourname, final presentation, date …” so I can store and find them easily. Also be sure to create a title page for your Powerpoint that includes this information as well.

That I immediately started offering advice to Manon on her work last week was only because I suddenly realized that while you all learned to clean up and simplify your blog titles, blog entry titles, and categories, she forgot all of that when it came to Powerpoints: this is because we have all gotten used to BAD BILL GATES POWERPOINTS (see above, it is a forest of fallen trees after a tornado) and when we/you start to prepare Powerpoints you start building them like the BAD BILL GATES POWERPOINTS and not like YOUR NICE, SIMPLE, CLEAR, EFFECTIVE BLOGS! … If you were able to do it — and prove it with screenshots from your blog or twitter — then you could really, really make me happy and say that, well, “I learned to use English where before I used either German or French to help me do my business,” because this is, after all, a Business English class, and the whole point was for you to learn how to use English in your business.

ps: I am seeing PPT files of 4-6 megabyte — sizes which take forever to load and print — and that’s something you will want to learn how to avoid. The problem is likely your image file sizes, that you dragged large files into your Powerpoint without resizing them to a minimum. The maximum size you’ll need for Powerpoint is 1024 pixels, so that you’ll likely never need a size bigger than 100-200k. Do this outside of Powerpoint. For more advice, Microsoft has some older and newer advice. If you are using Macintosh, the best solution I’ve found is to drag your images into Imagewell (cheap), resize to 1024 or smaller, before dragging into Powerpoint.

Many of you have responded vigorously and well, and it has been just wonderful to see all that English being put to good use! As we discussed in some detail last week, and which I will review here, you have been using Twitter to ask and answer questions, to offer observations and express feelings, to respond to the observations and feelings of others, to share sources and links, to plan and organize activities, and to comment on all of the above.

I’d like you to think about adding some comments on your use of Twitter to your Final Presentations in the next two weeks, addressing the question of how you learned how to use Twitter to your advantage, including, how it contributed to your learning and use of English, to the development of your communications skills, to your other academic work, and to the communications among friends and community.

I’m also writing this up for my other friends in the e-learning business as I think what you are doing is exemplary and will offer them a helpful case study. So, after outlining what you’ve done and might do next, I’ll talk about the curious and maybe unique place such uses of Twitter may have in using such technologies in the classroom. I put it here so you might see a little bit of the larger picture, know a bit better why your achievement is of some significance, and maybe offer you a chance to develop your understanding in greater depth. I’m also essentially outlining how one might go about developing a more comprehensive study of twittering, because the brevity of the form and precise dating and linking would lend themselves to a detailed analysis of group interactions. I hesitate to spell it out like this here, because in part in choosing our followers allows us to enjoy the feeling of a protected space, but as we discussed from the outset, all of this is public and writing in public is an essential part of what this “many-to-many” is all about.

How You Might Evaluate Your Twitter Use

As we have discussed, evaluations can take many forms and suit different purposes. So far, we have distinguished between “summative” evaluations, such as grades after an exam or end of course which you have merely to accept, and “formative” evaluations, including comments and quizzes which you can talk about to help evaluate what you’ve done and to the end of improving teaching and learning. The analysis which follows is intended to be of the “formative” kind, offering you advice on how to learn what some have done and what you might do and understand this activity’s meaning and significance.

As we discussed in class last week, one way to understand what we are doing is to conduct a content analysis of your posts, whereby you print out all of your Twitter posts, “score” individual posts against meaningful categories, and then stand back and observe how these posts may have contributed to your work and how you have learned how to use them, which likely involves examining how the content of these posts has changed over time.

The content analysis proceeds by “scoring” each post against meaningful categories, high-level generalizations, which allow us to assign them meaning and then view them in patterns. We started with Manon’s recent posts, beginning with the following:

For this post, we noted that the “@sysyphos” tag means that she is responding to another user (and by putting it in this way, with the “@” sign, means he will see it as a “reply”), and we noted that it takes the form of asking a question, so we called it a “query”.

From there we discussed its qualities, or “attributes”, and noting the word “please” we scored it as “friendly”, or “a friendly query.”

We discussed as well how the subject of movie-going was different from the many posts relating to our academic work, so we added “free time”.

And we then had a lot of fun tagging the last sentence, “I would like to see it, too,” as we saw this “expressing a wish,” “asking for an invitation,” and our favorite, “hitting on Andreas”!

Having Our Fun and Eating It, Too

As often in this class, we did our best to do our work with great humor while keeping the academic dimensions in mind and considering how these posts contribute to our work. We discussed how such exchanges signaled the building of a relationship that we expected might eventually lead to academic discussions or arrangements to meet where academic discussion might go on: that as we are working together the “trivial” aspect was likely one step away from more serious things.   

We noted how this business of creating categories and tagging is not peculiar to the web, but is part of the much more general problem of finding or generating good keywords, titles, sub-titles, etc., and that this is part of the problem of developing generalizations, hierarchies, logic, transitions, understanding, etc. — that in such scoring we were practicing our English in a potentially sophisticated way: that for us, every exchange, including the presumably superficial, offered significant potential for practice.

Thus, we discussed, with much laughter, how the category of “hitting on Andreas” led us to consider the problems of irony, which we defined as suggesting something other than what you say, and we discussed the sending of mixed messages and problems of ambiguity.

Maybe Sharing, Insider Knowledge

This prepared us for the second entry, which we characterized as a “response”, but whose content was likely “insider knowledge.” We also discussed the problem of broadcasting “insider knowledge”, because as soon as we begin talking about things not everyone knows about — that we often send messages addressed and relevant to less than all of our “followers” — we are often dealing with problems of including and excluding others.

As we noted at another time, when a larger group is presented with seemingly obscure references, their response may well be: “what is this about?”, and as the group is open, others may see themselves as being invited to join in … just like life! We did not judge this as “good” or “bad”, but simply noted the action and implications and set this against posts that are easier for others in the group to understand and that may even invite others, including those not directly addressed, to respond. But not all posts call for responses.

Reflecting Mood, Proverbs, Uplift, and Negotiating Conflict

We assigned this post to the category of “Vincent-like-proverb“, because he was our resident expert in such things. It offers neither a query nor a response, but simply presentes itself as a “reflection” or “expression” of “thoughts” or “feelings”.

We discussed its opposite weeks before, when talking about how best to comment on each other’s works, and when some of us started off using “must” and “should”, as in, “you must do this …” and “you should do that …,” and so basically bossing each other around like we all had to suffer for decades as students in public school classrooms, where the teachers herded us all around like, well, children. We discussed the obvious: how our context is different and that as adults nobody HAS to do anything. And besides, we talked about how off-putting it is to be told what do do until we build trust, and even then, there are better ways of saying things, as we learned from our studies of “The Language of Meetings,” such as saying, “it might be helpful to consider.”

We discussed how this problem is especially acute online, when we are mostly at home working alone, having lost eye contact, the support of classroom courtesies, etc. There, the normal conflicts can easily get blown out of proportion, even subtle cues can assume much larger meanings than they deserve, and so there is a whole literature on “flaming“, mobbing, and the dysfunctional communications that management Prof. Bob Sutton at Stanford has written about in his excellent little book, “The No Asshole Rule.”

But here fortunately, we have admiration, support, optimism … almost all of our twitter posts have been especially supportive, constructive, and fun! And I think what Manon develops here is the “nice rule”, whereby I asked everyone to start off writing a number of very nice, supportive posts, even if they appeared altogether too nice, and to keep being extra nice for a few weeks and until we learned how to use this format. It is not that we wanted to dull our critical edge, but to reserve this space for networking, cooperation, etc, and so develop our criticial conversations, instead, in richer, more supportive contexts such as the classroom.

I think we found that while Twitter can help build trust and assist in the small things that add up, like making arrangements to meet, asking for and giving help locating resources, etc., it is much too lightweight to support more difficult conversations, and I think the way to see that is to examine the dynamics of Twitter conversations.

Reading Twitters in Patterns

After 30 minutes or so it appeared that everyone understood the general method and was ready to apply it, so I then asked everyone to work with a partner and analyze the samples of Twitter posts (all are viewable at OurTwitters) and to look for patterns.

For example, in the scan from one of our work sheets reproduced above (and which we read from the bottom to the top as it was published), the writer offers in turn a link and advice, then requests clarification, and then expresses feelings, which those keeping score noted might possibly include both hopelessness and respect for hard work. Before we give this pattern a name, let’s see it again in the lines that immediately preceded it.

Here, we first see “thanks” for a link or advice, then an expression or report on feelings, than a request for help and a supportive response. Those seeking rigorous logic in such microblogging as Twitter will likely be disappointed: Twitters appear to jump from one theme to another seemingly without logic.

The question here is about knowledge creation, and we know that this can take many forms, involves a number of steps, and so may be assisted in a number of ways. If you believe that brainstorming early on in the design process can yield tangible returns, as Kathy Sierra discusses and illustrates with the image above, then the apparently random conversations we find on Twitter, and often broken up with all manner of chatter, may also be viewed as an especially fertile ground.

To see this we might compare Twitter conversations to Sierra’s example, which she says is based on a highly-structured rapid prototyping activity derived from games developed by the thiagi consulting firm. Even a quick review of the many games you will find there and the advice on how to organize and evaluate them, suggests that Twitter may contribute to such important things as reducing fears of participation, offering experience in negotiating different points of view, offering opportunities to inquire of others as well as support them, never mind offering an audience for thoughts in general. Rather than logic, maybe the evaluative criteria for Twitter we should use would include things like creativity, conversation, and community.

Twitter for Life

Now I’ll write for the colleagues as I want to talk for a moment in more general terms and theoretical terms and speak of the implications for instructors interesting in working with Twitter.

Over the past semester, I have found that some of my otherwise hard-working students have less patience for the atmosphere of experiment and emphasis on “bildung” that many of us have long taken for granted and enjoyed in the universities and demand instead that our class be oriented to what they’ve come to expect from language classes, and in particular, structured language exercises. My concept was based on upper-division university writing courses with emphasis on the disciplines or professions, so I set them up to research the web for good writing in their target language, building their own blogs to report on what they found, and practice collaborative work by using Twitter. I found that most were unfamiliar with this otherwise standard university format, some were uncomfortable with the workshop format more generally, so we made a compromise whereby we spent one third of our class time in the traditional way, on the topic of the language of meetings using a textbook book of that title. Nonetheless, when it came to Twitter, discussion proved impossible until I implemented the scoring scheme outlined above and even then we remained within the puzzle-solving framework: open discussion on how were using the language and technology proved impossible.

This might well be due to the way I manage my classes, the way students view their education, or the way this institution is set up — I cannot say. But I can identify the limitations to my approach, pay tribute to the success of most of them, and on the same terms, offer a positive assessment of Twitter use.

I did not start with the empirical and evaluative frameworks we developed in our “scoring” exercise, because I had not found anyone having done anything like it nor thought of it; only after a month or so did I find the academicHacK article offering a list of possible classroom activities, and what that gave me a great boost, I did not find concrete advice on what I might do: we were having to make it up on our own. All I knew was that there was considerably research on the unique features of decentralized “many-to-many” conversations in the workplace, as illustrated above from an IBM study of groupware, and of course the work of John Seely Brown and others. While I cited that work I did not explain it in any detail. I offered only generally that Twitter’s “many-to-many” communications supporting small, spontaneous, and often changing working communications like the “activity-centered collaboration” modeled above.

The best I offered in any detail was an outline of how Twitter was being used in business as presented by Twitter maven Laura Filton, including reference to her Twitter for business links as well as her excellent Speaking and More section with videos of her lectures. While I felt I stood on solid ground by presenting Twitter as offering an opportunity for good language exercise, for improving group communications, and likely of relevance to communications in future workplaces, I could not offer anything like what the example of my students offers us now.

As I see it, the reason that the business examples are not immediately relevant is that business people are mostly concerned with developing effective corporate communications, public relations, and marketing, and the business Twitters I found are not especially interested, as we are, in learning. For many businesses, Twitter is cheap, fast, highly interactive, and for firms like Starbucks, whose success depends on constant re-invention, the feedback systems being built around Twitter are truly impressive. But our business model is different, and while I argued that Twitter-like communications was likely in my students future, I simply could not expect them to extract larger principles and apply them. Thus, their achievement here really is to their credit!

The Technologists Were Not Helping Us Much Either

We were also not being helped by the dominant technologist discourse, or talk, which to considerable extent follows Clive Thompson’s famous his WIRED magazine article from June 2007, where he invites us to see “Twitter as 6th sense” and in basically literary and futuristic terms. For example, he writes that while individually the posts seem so “stupifyingly trivial,” over time one develops “an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me…”

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

The thing is, while I think he’s got this right, such formulations really didn’t help me manage my class, nor can I see how they could really have helped my students. To be sure, I love this way of understanding of how we follow each other’s Twitter’s all day, what the author calls “proprioception,” and what I might prefer to call “being aware of others in my periphery,” because I think about this and like this all the time. One of the things I love to do when photographing is try to see all of the elements in a picture in some ideal or interesting proportion, and I make a game of it, walking through the city seeing how well it might be done, and sometimes my eye suddenly sees things all fitting together, as here.

This is to exercise an aesthetic sensibility, entertaining visual form with en eye, so to speak, to things like order, balance, harmony, symmetry, etc. — something written about very nicely these days by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. But when I am photographing my subjects are mute, so while the image gives you an idea of it, the better example is from dancing, because when I am dancing (something I do a lot of and write about here), not only have I to keep track of dozens of other dancers spinning around each other, navigating my partner and myself to stay free of high-heeled shoes spinning waist-high, but we dancers are constantly responding, imitating, and learning from each other — feeding off of the collective fire as we would add our own little bit of energy and form to it.

The dancers and soccer players in the class seem to understand this, they often look at me knowingly and as if grateful that someone discussed in public their secret lives, but such ways of explaining things are surely limited in classrooms of cultural and intellectual and motivational diversity. For example, I greatly admire the writing of my students in the field of logistics, but I have no mind for it, nor for mathematics and many of the other cognitive styles, as the cognitive psychologists would put it, so while colorful and fun, my analogies are limited in scope and appeal: I need better examples and better ways of illuminating the principles, too.

Better Examples: Small Group Support (thank God for the librarians!)

Maybe my students don’t need more than what I’ve given them, because they did just fine, but I think we need to find better examples. Let me introduce you to Molly Grubb, whose insightful Twitter? At work? Yes please. Microblogging’s possibilities for internal communication offers three distinct ways of talking about this technology and does so in a way that, with each step, we might see coming closer to our own.

First, starts off as if the problem were best understood as one of interface design and functionality:

• updates are short so easy to scan
• collective knowledge creation
• establishing weak ties conducive to building social capital
• short constant news stream keeps people up to date
• and so on…

It sounds like she is marketing a product to sell, doesn’t it? I think I know what she is talking about, for I sometimes talk like that myself, but as I evaluate different ways of talking about Twitter I now see it is terribly abstract. I know what she means about “building social capital”, but this is probably because I live with a social scientist. If we were working for a governmental or non-governmental organization and in the business of organizing people, I suspect we’d soon all be talking like that.

But our interest is not really the technology, but gaining practice with our English in conversation, online, and using English to present ourselves, research on the web, etc., and such specificity is essential for any instructor considering the use of Twitter in the classroom. We need something closer to what we did with it, such as, “share links, organize our studies and working groups, help each other …”

Molly Grubb’s second way of talking about Twitter might be closer to this, as she describes Twitter as a kind of tool for good social ends:

• allows for email congestion to be reduced (yay! )
• provides a tool for cross functional communication (isn’t it great when the left hand knows what the right hand is doing?)
• builds tacit organisational knowledge (you get to know each other, and the way others think)
• employee participation (paying attention to and recognizing people makes them more productive)

And I think therein lies the trick: note how the first half of each point sounds like a tool, but the second half, in parenthesis, sounds like people talking to people in the language they use over the kitchen table.

And it is with this second that Molly Grubb concludes: when she steps completely out her geeky shoes and starts talking about user and business and person needs and demands that we think about why communications are important to us. This engaging rhetoric suggests someone grabbing your collar by the office water cooler and demanding that you talk in everyday terms about everyday needs:

Isn’t it a good thing to allow employees insight into each other’s jobs? To develop internal networks across geographical boundaries? To engage in conversation with each other? To break artificially created silos? To engage? Microblogging is just another method amongst a myriad of possibilities to allow these things to happen. Some organisations are now recognising that employees use social networks as quasi equivalents of talking at the water cooler or wandering around to someone’s desk for a chat – and that social networks aren’t all playful banter and can facilitate meaningful conversation and knowledge creation.

It seems to me that, when it comes to connecting with people outside of our own professional or friendship circles, the most accessible and convincing voices are those that are practical, conversational, engaging, and by their examples carry the “ring of truth”.

I think this is especially true when it comes to learning new technologies, because at least then we don’t have to suffer the voices of brilliant designers and their marketing buddies trying to dazzle us with bells and whistles or the sometimes abstract and possibly self-interested agendas of the instructor!

Best, I think, is when my partner or office mate or someone else nearby who has figured out how to make this peculiar thing work takes the time to show me how to use it effectively to solve problems we have in common, talks to me in my own language, and is available for questions when I need him or her — because that’s what I think my students achieved here: the “early adopters” among them figured out how to use the technology and showed the others the way.

This brings me to my favorite example of the bunch I eventually found on the web, Mick Jacobsen’s post to his fellow librarians.

At the Skokie Public Library Twitter has become a nimble, extremely quick, and easy to use internal communication device. A small group of Skokie employees use Twitter to bounce ideas off one another, solve simple issues such as “how do I check something out to missing,” and even answer reference questions.

What makes me excited about this use of Twitter? First it came about totally on its own, nobody planned to use Twitter as a means of communicating. Second is the mass effect of Twitter. I can send a question to many and not have to worry about one particular person being away from their phone/email. The third is the chance of transparency (this is Tame the Web after all). Anybody who wishes can follow and contribute (like you if you want, and why wouldn’t you, lots of cool ideas are being discussed) to what is going on at the SPL.

I love how he knows who he is talking to, his colleagues, who we can assume have lots of experience learning and using complicated card catalogs and databases and accounting systems that somebody else figured out and made them use, and who presents as a wonderful thing a technology that helps them do what they, as public librarians really like to do — which is to be part of an open, dynamic, public service. What the librarians so happily describe is a technology that suits their purposes, including, sharing their work and feelings about their work with each other. Plus, it sounds to me like they like the fact that nobody dumped it on them and that they can “own” it.

Now that we are at this level of experienced users we can begin to model how it is that only half of our class got deep into Twitter, and to do that we can refer to a standard model of technology adoption, illustrated above, and put it as a research question, particularly as I want to ask it of my students in the coming weeks.

So now I return to addressing my students.

Were you among the “early adopters” who began Twittering right away, experimented with different kinds of questions and comments, and whose Twitter posts changed significantly — as we discussed in class last week — over time? Or are you among the “early majority” who waited until others showed the way and then followed them? Or are you among the “late majority” who waited until Twitter use became so widespread that the way to do so was long established, and/or until you felt you had no choice, offered minimum posts, did not really “follow” the others, and did not experiment much beyond answering the simple question “what are you doing”

I’m pretty sure that with the exception of just one person, at least in theory, every single one of you played the role of an “early adopter” and showed someone else the way: say a few words on how you did so. And I’m pretty sure that, possibly with the exception of just one person, at least in theory, someone else helped you find your way: say a few words about that. If you can answer both questions, well, I think that your answer should explain to you the beauty of this application and how you set up the supportive framework that led to this experiment’s success.

The Beauty of Being a Follower

Whether we are learning languages, technology, or whatever, often the most interesting of all students are not the leading edge “innovators” and “early adopters”, because by definition they pick up and run with new things on their own; for them, learning seems to come naturally, teaching them is hardly work at all, and so their success, while exemplary in respect to outcome, might actually be of little credit to the instructor or the course lucky enough to have them.

What made our use of Twitter interesting and a success, I believe, was both the intense sociability associated with it and the fact that for most it did not come easily and so had to be shown by example and use governed by intelligibility and acceptance among peers. It was almost a parallel universe, because we certainly could not talk about it in class, but by the end of the term the answer to the question of “what are you doing” was answered in your terms: you were answering and asking questions, offering and responding to expressions of mood or feeling, and offering and thanking for links and other resources: you “owned” your Twitter, as we say.

Individually, as in the tango, the beauty of the “followers” is the true test of leaders: the whole business works when your partner looks good. At the same time, “following” is every bit as vital, creative, and essential to the business as leading, and the leaders are completely dependent on the followers. Socially, “following” provides constant opportunities for everyone to help everyone else, and that means, when confronted with new conditions, opportunities to learn.

And as it happens, Twitter puts “followers” at the center of its application design: you build your website not simply by 140 character posts: you build it by clicking the links that feed the comments of others onto the very same stack of blog posts as your own: “authorship” is here, constructed literally, as a collective enterprise: Whatever you say is immediately put into a context of others.

I. The language of blog design: titles, sub-titles, categories, and keywords.

We needed first to figure out how best to address and use the web: how to find, analyze, and talk about websites that are immediately relevant to your professional purposes, including what people in your field were talking about and how they were doing so.

We needed to learn how to find these conversations and report them, and that means learning not simply Google, but identifying our professional interests and building an online tool designed to support use. We did this through language, first, by building our “tree” or training and interests, elevating those interests into high-level generalizations, and from that designing Categories that, in WordPress, might easily be found in the right-hand column as the eye first sweeps across our blogs: these Categories remind us of what we are looking for, and writing about, and why.

More generally, working with titles, sub-titles, categories, keywords, tags, and so forth, is everywhere and fundamental: abstraction, and the development of content hierarchies and navigation structures, is as essential to using the web as it is to writing and reading books, articles, and newspaper — except maybe more so web use is typically fast and furious.

In concrete terms, your learning how to set up, design, and administer your own blogs was not simply a burden, but the very means by which you could learn how modern websites, and blogging websites are design: what their underlying structure is, and upon that, how they might be customized to suit your purposes. This is not simply a matter of learning where the “shift” key is on typewriters and that it makes letters big, but that coherence follows from graphical cues and an understanding how web pages begin, proceed, and end and how their design is aimed towards coherence.

In this context, “Business English” is not something cut apart from where it is used, but like any other language use, is profoundly structured by its context, including, as here, the design of a page, the choice of words used, how navigation and links bring you through the elements and on towards your understanding.

II. The language of blog entries: description, analysis, and evaluation.

Second, we have mostly succeeded in our initial apprenticeship to design of blogging entries themselves, typically including:

1. An announcement of the post’s major purpose and issue and whatever we need to say to engage ourselves and our readers,

2. A reference to other online sources, including a description, an analysis, and an evaluation of these sources,

3. And the use of report structures and other phrases peculiar to professional ways of talking about what others are saying or doing.

The problem here is the design and writing of informative blog entries in a structured and sophisticated manner. This outline suggests a template, a collection of tools to be used in a structured way to examine and reflect on professional blogs in your field.

III. The language of professional conversations: blogging in the performative dimension.

What we have now to concentrate on is entering more deeply into the the relevant professional conversations in our respective fields, including, a) learning what experienced practitioners think are the relevant issues, and b) identifying how they go about talking about these issues.

To do this right it means, first, finding relevant websites in your field. For some of you, this means setting aside your idea of an authoritative website that presents “the facts” to find instead those websites, primarily blogs, where professions are discussing relevant issues. By issues we mean discussion of problems over which reasonable people in your field might well disagree and do so when meeting at professional conferences, and nowadays increasingly, online. Many of these things are timely and depend for their meaning and import their relevance to issues of the day; hence, you will want to find websites or blogs that are current and conversational. This in itself poses a challenge, but an important one for those wishing to develop their autonomy and mobility in their careers — careers which, by all accounts, will likely require that you switch jobs as many as 7-12 times before you retire, and thus, where looking ahead will be a matter of survival.

By paying attention to how people talk about these issues we mean, first, your describing how a blogging post or other web source is structured, then analyzing its content, then evaluating it, and that means, writing THREE paragraphs on each dimension in turn. It also means identifying the relevant concepts, bodies of knowledge, key terms, and the literal phrases your professionals are using and noting these things, self-consciously using them, and calling your reader’s attention to them.

How also means learning the rhetorics of professional conversations, including things like adopting specific authorial voices and tones and points-of-view and imagining who you are talking to. To learn this I’d suggest the following exercise: that you and a partner explain your blog post in the same tone that you use to discuss professional work more generally, and without leaving your table, that you write down notes reflecting how you spoke to each other. In the field of writing instruction, this is called the “talk/write” metaphor, whereby one walks/talks through a conversation and writes while the “voice” of that conversation is still in the head: that we need the visual cues from real people to develop precision and tone and that we can carry those cues with us to our writing when we do it immediately thereafter.

Your goal here is to learn how to talk/write like professionals in your field, so when you write job applications and finally land an interview, you will talk “normal” to them: you will be using the relevant concepts, phrases, vocabulary, etc., for your particular field. If you would like a simple survey of how differently blogs may be used to develop and support professional conversations, you might consult my collection of natural science blog links, and where I’ve offered titles that will quickly offer you a general survey, and by clicking the links, detailed examples. I’m sorry I have not yet done this in business, but you will get the idea.

By “business English”, then, we mean the English that is actually being used, even and maybe especially by non-native speakers in a context of international finance, trade, etc., to get their jobs done — something the internet is very good at reflecting.   

IV. The language of micro-blogging.

Finally, from those of you who have been using twitter I’ve learned a great deal about micro-blogging and would like in these final weeks to bring everyone else along because I’m convinced of its benefits: that those using twitter have gained valuable practice in using English to connect with each other and so establish protocols for sharing information, advice, humor, and good company.

This is not trivial. You will recall my argument that twitter is in your future as business persons, and where I referred to Laura Fitton’s Twitter For Business, and where you will find an extensive bibliography of articles on how twitter is being used in businesses all over the place. The problem with using this example is that we are in a different context. The better examples, however, are right here within out group: all you have to do is look at the most active of the twitterers in our class and look at how their twitter posts have changed over the past two months, for the most part, from simply reporting on what they have done, to nowadays developing much more frequent and more pointed and direct references to other peoples thoughts and activities, especially using the “reply to” and “retweeting” links.

Example I. Teaching people a lesson

Posted by Seth Godin http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

David writes in to point out that banks are losing a fortune on foreclosures because many frustrated homeowners are trashing the houses before they leave. This dramatically diminishes the value of the home and leaves scars all around.

Why not, he wonders, offer the homeowners $1000 in cash if they leave the house in great condition?

I can hear the objections already. “What! Why should we pay people not to break the law!” After all, if you do it this time, if you bribe people to behave, then you’ll have to do it every time…

Every time? How often, exactly, do you expect to evict a person?

It’s very easy to set up policies and procedures designed to give people what they deserve, to set a standard, to teach a lesson, to make sure they understand who’s boss. And I think that for parents, this is an excellent idea. Bribing your kid leads to spoiled kids who don’t get it. But businesses aren’t parents and customers aren’t kids.

“I can’t let you in, because you didn’t follow the procedure, and even though you’re never coming back here again, if I let you in now, without having followed the procedure, you’ll think that you can ignore the procedure the next time you do business with someone else…” It sounds stupid when you say it that way because it is stupid.

You can extend this all the way to how you hire people. Is penalizing a 40 year old by not giving her a job a way to teach her a lesson about studying harder for the SAT when she was 17?

Instead of worrying so much about establishing good habits among transient customers, perhaps it’s worth figuring out what works best for both sides and doing that instead.

1) Find the report structures: how does the writer signal the difference between what David says and what he, Seth, thinks about it?

2) Write one sentence summarizing the problem and solution.

3) Write 1-2 sentences outlining the argumentation: (solution, objections, arguments pro and con).

4) Write 1-2 sentences explaining HOW Seth “takes down” the objections, and what is his tone of voice?

5) What is the moral, the higher-order lesson Seth offers?

Example II. Doing Business In A Financial Crisis

http://marketing-interactive.com/news/9871

A little worried about the global financial slowdown? Not too sure about how to get the best bang for your marketing buck? Well Marketing understands and is here to help. In the following pages we present a basic guide for brands in Asia for 2009, talk to those who have survived recessions before and outline five strategies that marketers and agency professionals can use during a time of crisis.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the world was coming to its final days, an apocalypse even. Everyday we’re reminded of how bad things are by news of another round of sackings, another currency crash, another fall of stocks or plummet in consumer confidence, sales and ad budgets.

But the world goes on and consumers and companies will continue to survive. Many great brands have actually been born during the darkest economic times. GE was founded in the 1870s, Disney in 1923-24 and Microsoft emerged in New Mexico in 1975. Even Apple’s revolutionary iPod was founded during the American recession of 2001.

So what are we getting at here. The lesson is that despite the toughest of times and we’re certainly in the mist of one, some companies can not only ride out the downturn, they can grow and flourish. And the advice from powerbrokers across Asia’s marketing and advertising industries, is for brands not to make knee-jerk decisions but to have a plan, be smart, sensible and make calculated decisions with your marketing dollars.

Cheuk Chiang, CEO of PHD in Asia Pacific, says the key thing is to focus on benefits not price, adding that companies must remain relevant and differentiated from their rivals.

“The key thing is to focus on the consumer, who is looking for value above all else,” he says …

6) Write one sentence describing the problem and how this article says it will go about solving it.

7) Write one sentence identifying the first strategy’s key concept in a word or phrase and explain it.

Explain how this article addresses you: describe one representative passage, analyze its rhetorical strategy, and evaluate it by reflecting on how you feel when you are being addressed in this way.

Example III. Mobile the Key to Internet in 2020: Pew Expert Survey

Brian Quinton, http://promomagazine.com/mobilemarketing/news-/mobile-key-internet-1219/

Mobile marketers can hope that 2009 really, really will turn out to be “the year of mobile.” But a published forecast from the Pew Internet & American Life Project skips over that when-does-it-arrive guessing game and looks at what we’ll be doing with our handsets 11 years from now, in 2020.

As depicted by predictions from some 600 of today’s most influential Web seers, by that time mobile phones will finally be our primary means of connecting to the Internet. We’ll also be accustomed to directing those devices by touch interfaces, voice commands and air-typing—and possibly by mental commands. And being easily and everywhere connected to the Web will blur the line between professional and personal time, potentially adding to stress and posing a challenge to family and social life.

The Pew study, conducted in tandem with North Carolina-based Elon University, represents the third time the group has tapped Internet gurus for their prognostications. Nearly 1,200 Internet experts, analysts and enthusiasts were presented with detailed paragraphs laying out eight possible scenarios for the Internet and its impact in 2020 and asked to “mostly agree” or “mostly disagree” with the projections. While the respondents could answer as briefly as they wished, they also had the chance to send back long responses explain their answers to each scenario.

For example, 77% of expert respondents agreed that by 2020 “the mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world” to get to the Internet. However, three out of five respondents (60%) disagreed that by that time lawmakers, courts, the tech industry and media companies will have solved the problem of copyright protections and stopped the piracy of intellectual property. 9) Write one sentence reporting on the claim the author claims about the uniqueness of the Pew study’s approach.

10) Write 1-3 sentences reporting on the significance, major technological innovation, and likely social impact of mobile phone use by 2020

11) Write 1 sentence explaining the survey methodology.

12) Write 1-2 sentences critically evaluating (this time in a negative way) the survey results in the last paragraph

13) Write a paragraph explaining how the writer has structured his essay in these first four paragraphs. Explain each as a step or stage in a carefully organized sequence and what this beginning leads you to expect in the rest of the article.

Before I can give you a final grade, we all want to be sure that we understand what the criteria might be and that you’ve had a chance to receive meaningful feedback and do something about it. Since I can’t possible devote the 30 minutes or so it would take me to evaluate your work in detail every week or two, I want to train you to help each other; in the process, you will learn a lot about web design and how to offer constructive criticism to your peers.

This is a worksheet. Together we will revise it. For the present, we are going to offer each other a formative evaluation: evaluation for use, something we can talk about and learn from. In class today we will practice using it in pairs, and over the weekend I would like you to examine your partner’s site in more detail: today is to test our method, adjust our criteria, and prepare for the homework.

Working in pairs, discuss each of the points and then apply them to the one-page screenshots I’ve provided for you. If these pages do not offer enough, well, that’s a problem of your site design: a well-designed site should have enough to answer almost all of these initial questions on the first page and without scrolling down. The more detailed questions of longer blog posts you can answer when you are on the web.

For each question, create a new paragraph underneath the evaluation criteria for your answers. For each response, write one or more full, complete sentences as you would offer them in conversation. The tone and style of these sentences should be that of advice: that is a) Descriptive, b) Analytical, and c) Evaluative. Use phrases such as: “This is what I see …,” “It works or might not work like this …,” “My impression is … it might be helpful to consider …” Please do NOT use the strong modal verbs, including, “you must …”, “you should …”, because your purpose is to ask for and receive supportive, constructive criticism. Do use helpful phrases, like, “You might try …,” and again, “It might be helpful to consider …”

Paste your comments into the Word file, use a descriptive filename using the format: “Alex by Manon, 10jan08.doc” convert it to .pdf, and upload it to our Google Group. Please do this by next MONDAY 12.1.09, 10pm. On Tuesday 13.1.09, also print out the evaluation that has been done for your website and find and print out one more from the others that you think is interesting. Bring all three to class next Wednesday, 14.1.09

If you are one of the three people who have not sent me links to your blogs, please do so this evening! If you really don’t want to do a blog, then please follow the very same advice and create a blog-like file on Word and share that with your partner; for the present, simple join one of the other pairs and evaluate one of their blogs.

Evaluation Criteria

I. Purpose

What is this blog’s professional purpose? From the blog design, titles, and presentation, list 6-10 adjectives that you feel might characterize the person who has written it.

II. Titles

What does the title (and sub-title) suggest to be the blog’s content and purpose? Review the blog and suggest 2-3 titles that you think might be more appropriate or interesting.

How descriptive are the category names (and are they on the first page), and how broad and deep do they reflect the writer’s interest? After reading the blog, suggest 2-3 better categories.

III. Themes and Layout

Without scrolling, can you read enough of the first article or two to get a good idea of what the writing will be doing in this post and this blog? What are your first impressions from this first article? What will you learn by reading this post and this blog?

IV. Navigation Structure

Do the blog entries extend more than one paragraph (does the author use “more”?); if you printed out the first page, how many pages would it produce? Should it be shorter?

How “busy” and easy-to-navigate is this blog? Offer 3-4 suggestions for making this blog easier to navigate and more attractive: don’t be afraid to reflect your own taste, but be sensitive to what you think might be the author’s intent, but if this intent or the design of it is a problem, don’t be afraid to ask “why?” and suggest alternatives.

V. Content.

Now that you’ve done the exercise on blog writing and have a better idea, at least in theory, of how to write a blog review, rewrite one of your blog reviews, and copy and paste both the original review and your revised review in a word file, write a brief introduction outlining your revisions and what you have learned, name the file “YourName, Revisions 19jan08″, convert it to .pdf, and upload it to our Google Group by 10pm Monday, 19 January.

The Importance of Titles

Let’s start at the top of Marlene’s excellent post on Monet, beginning with the title and noting how it is direct and to the point: no long sentences here, but the proper name: “Claude Monet”. This is excellent, but no matter how good it is we can ask “why?” and how she might improve on it.

The problem is how best to engage your reader and bring him or her to your post’s topic. Here, the topic might be Monet, but that’s quite general: we might better find a title that reflects her specific interest and the one thing that this article has to offer its readers. To find that we list her points, including, the point about her interest in painting, in the atmosphere and how it brings the painting and viewer to life in this particular painting, how the dots in Monet work, her recollection the garden visit, and the juxtaposition of photo and Garden.

Hmmm! Is this splitting hairs? Isn’t the first thing that comes to mind enough? Sure, but the question in the educational context, as we have a few moments to work on our method and understanding, is: what’s in a name? How might we do things differently and maybe better? And now that we look at the details, we find five or six aspect of Monet, or her interest in Monet. So now the question is: is any one of these points more important than the others, and if so, might we improve on the title by being more specific?

Identify Your Interest

Let’s look at the second thing she does: she next justifies her writing of the blog post, and by extension, its claim on our attention: excellent! That’s often a good thing to do, because if you can’t answer it you’ve probably got no business blogging. A list of the reasons includes that he is famous (hmm, there are a lot of famous people), that he is one of her favorites (ok, but in the category of “nice to have”), and then that he uses a particular “dotty” method (it’s starting to get interesting to me), and then she says the answer is in the quote that follows … hmmm: now we’ve got a promise!

Are we back to splitting hairs? Well, sort of, but then, the devil is in the details, and right now we’ve got this narrative that running right along and trying to deliver us to this great quote. It sorta works, because we are telling stories. My advice is: write like this, then start asking more detailed questions — shoot first, ask questions later, as we say. Write bla-bla-bla to get the mind and juices flowing, and then edit after you’ve had a coffee or slept over it and so might better revise it as, in the writing, you’ve figured something out.

Cite and Link a Web Resource

Now we get to the quote, and it’s not bad! But what does it mean: how come she presents this quote without further explanation, as being completely self-evident? Hmmm! Well, we do this all the time: we often leave it to the poets or artists or others to say it better — think of all those wonderful aphorisms older people have offered you with a smile: why re-invent the wheel when there’s so much wisdom already?

The answer to that is: if we look at this quote, it sounds great, but, a), I’m not really sure what the author means — this quote is out of context — and b) I’m not sure what the blog writer understands by it: again, she’s presented it to me and then dropped it. Well, until she INTERPRETS this quotation I can’t say that I know what she reads, knows, thinks, or thinks about it. So, Marlene, here’s another thing that needs to be done with quotes: they need to be interpreted. Marlene: can you write one sentence putting this passage, or rather, what you like about it, into your own words?

Analyze What You’ve Learned

Now we can move on to the next important step. Once you start to figure out what interests you, this being the web, the next thing to do is find someone who thinks like you and connect to them and lead your viewers to them. You can skip around like this, impressionistically to use the relevant metaphor here. And that’s just great about the web: I remember having to do all my research in big dusty research libraries that had books, you know, card catalog, elevator, row upon row of books, lugging the books to a table, writing down the notes in my note book …. Now you can find things with Google, link, and talk about it! And blogs sometimes being rather loose things, you can sorts of skip around linking this and that.

You can also try to be more logical about it, and if you are writing for someone like me and my friends, well, expect me to look at it closely and carefully. And one of the most important logical operations you can do in blog entries like this is to go from a GENERALIZATION, like Monet’s painting being about light and feeling, and your interest in that, and then search through the web for people who have written about it so you can go into more detail.

For instance, to make the logical connection with the preceding quote, you might treat the “surrounding atmosphere” as the GENERAL description and, by introducing Stevens with the important detail, announce you are moving to the PARTICULAR, like this (I am making this up): “by atmosphere, Monet meant something very specific: as Prof. Stevens has shown, he meant this special fall light, with moisture bouncing the light all around, and not the clear winter light that is much sharper and more blue — as he discussed on his website …”

Discuss What You’ve Learned

Really, the passage reads nicely as it is, but if you want to think about it a bit and tighten it up, revision is the way to go. Because here, in the last paragraph, Marlene makes a little detour into the reception of Monet’s painting and then the role of the garden paintings in the oeuvre, before returning, in the last sentence, to the problem of the painting and the place. It is fun to think like this, but some might find it to be running all over the place. I mean, if you are going to introduce the pairing of a photo to a painting, the first thing I want to see is a screen shot, and next to that, Marlene’s discussion of what is to be learned by that: I don’t like finding this topic introduced at the end and then dropped. Similarly, like many, I am interested in the impact of a painter like Monet, as she announced at the paragraph’s beginning, but she drops that, too. Then in the middle there is this talk about the garden — I love gardens! — but “of course” tells me nothing, and I’d like to know about its “importance for Monet” … what did he do there, according to Mr. Stevens, and what are we to think of it.

I think the problem I have here is conceptual: that Marlene is now writing at one moment reflection on her preferences and at another indicating that there are other writers, when what I am after is something more disciplined: that she starts with her reflection and then stays with it, including using links and other web pages to help discuss her reflection.

Why am I justified in making this demand? Well, I have these expectations. If I open a phone book, I expect to find an alphabetical list. If I open a mystery, I expect to find a dead body and then a long round about way until I learn whodunnit. If I start reading a blog post, well, I expect it to be like other blog posts of its kind, and these are: informative, opinionated, timely, topical, leading to other blogs and websites, conversational … the things that the the many writers offering advice on good blog posts discuss in detail — as I have started to bookmark under the tag bloggingtips.

Explore the Professional Conversation

But what does all this talk about paragraph construction have to do with blogging as such? Well, most of what I’ve said thus far is standard advice to writers, about defining topics, developing the controlling metaphor or thread, re-organizing things in editing, and so forth. So, you can see blogging as just a fancy, high-tech was of writing.

But there are at least two dimensions here that make blogging special. First, there’s all this easy researching of relevant sources on the web, the dragging and dropping of photos, the linking, that makes writing as expansive as an according: one’s writing opens up and fills with life-giving air because it is part of something larger: the context is open and public. We write differently online. Second, we are doing this very public thing: we are thinking out loud, interacting with each other, and working together. Marlene can make a change, or not, and everyone can see it, too. It is even vastly efficient. I just spent an hour, not counting eating tea and Christmas cookies brought in by the cute 11-year-old girl who lives next door, and normally I wouldn’t, and couldn’t, do that for all 20 students in class. But if you all read this and take it seriously, reflect on it, and use it, well, this is a very good deal: it mean’s I’ve spent three minutes on each of you and you’ve each gotten the benefit of an hour’s thinking! But best of all, if you all read and comment on this by class on Wednesday, we can show up in class talking about what we’ve learned from each other, including, how differently we see blog entries, how Marlene did it and how she might do it better, etc. Blogging makes smart!

Usability and the Conversation

From the technical point-of-view, “writing for the web” is a branch of technical writing and is primarily concerned with accessibility and legibility. Pioneered by Jakob Nielson, this approach is devoted to usability studies, including detailed observations of human-machine interactions, and is concerned with offering advice on industrial design to industrial designers, for machines, websites, and writing for the web. On the Writing for the Web page of Sun Microsystems you will see how detailed observations of how fickle, fleeting, and fast web users scan and click their way through websites (instead of reading them thoughtfully as those of us in the social sciences and humanities do our reports, novels, etc.) supports much of the advice I’ve offered you thus far: that you write significantly shorter sentences, paragraphs, and articles but publish them more often; that you use titles, sub-titles, quotes, images, and links to guide that fickle reader’s eye, etc.

So I’ve put “usability” advice on one side and now will put “conversation” on the other as I draw on the different advice of academic writing teachers. Where the usability people worry about how web pages look and are read, the academics typically worry about rhetoric and thinking. Where the last post brought your eye down the page and across the text to the other page elements, like the usability people, this post will walk your through blog entry texts itself, including the special rhetorical figures and constructions that I recommend you adopt. I’ll conclude with reference to the warrant for this approach in the advice university writing program instructors typically offer for the writing of academic literature reviews. Essentially, I am suggesting that when we academics and business professionals write for the we we will want to take into account both camps — both those who are worried about the overall design and human-machine interaction as well as those who worry about the rhetoric and argumentation as academics have long done and continue to do regardless of technologies.

Who are you?

As with relationships, the first steps are everything: so let’s begin with some beginnings.

What if you were to introduce your post by writing a sentence explaining why are you talking about this topic, and thereby justify you claim on your visitor’s time and attention, but also, as advice to you, maybe like this:

I found something interesting …

or this:

I was looking for help understanding my topic of …

What is the difference?

I think you’ll agree that the second sounds more focusses, more like a researcher. Now you tell me: if you were to memorize and use these two forms, which would you choose? Depends on your purposes, right? OK, what if our purpose is to train professionals. Well then …

I’d like you to see the problem of beginning a blog entry as a more general problem of language use: as a problem of setting up and addressing a communications problem. In your blogging, at least in your blogging for this class, you are after some very specific things: a) “blogging to write”, meaning gaining relevant language practice, and b) “blogging to be professional”, meaning, using the technology to gain knowledge of your field and engage it.

A Social Being

So, we’ve been studying the “language of meetings”, let’s consider the “language of professional blogging”, understand by this the building of online communications and community, and move on to this:

We were talking over coffee, and the subject of x came up, so I went on the web …

This formulation integrates the indications of browsing and focussed searching within a larger framework of the conversation, and by using it, presumably, it implies eventually reporting on what you know: it sounds like you are part of a conversation that you want to continue with others.

Now here’s the kicker: let’s rewrite this to insure that we are treating what we find as part of a community, and moreover, that we are doing so in a critical way, too, maybe like this:

… And I found a number of websites and blogs and even a twitter hash tag leading me to an ongoing conversation on the topic …

Cool, or what?

Making Promises

What I discovered was a goldmine … which I think might interest those who …

I love this formulation, because it both reflects the writer’s enthusiasm as well as developing a contract with your reader — sorta like the stories of “1001 nights,” as described in Wikipedia:

The main frame story concerns a Persian king and his new bride. The king, Shahryar, upon discovering his former wife’s infidelity has her executed and then declares all women to be unfaithful. He begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning. Eventually the vizier cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins (and only begins) a new one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion, postpones her execution once again. So it goes on for 1,001 nights.

OK, so maybe the writing of blog posts is not exactly like sleeping with virgins and then killing them, but with a mouse click your reader’s, bored, can move right along to someone else, for all practical purposes sending your webpage into oblivion, so there you go: like all writers, you have the problem of winning your reader’s attention.

In the passage I made up above, I think this claim has two parts.

The first is expressive but maybe merely decorative, you dazzle yourself and your reader by making an outrageous claim: “What I discovered was a goldmine … ” Philosophically speaking, this is bullshit, as you are making a claim that is simply not true and attempting to win your readers with this false claim, but rhetorically speaking, insofar as your readers have a sense of irony and so understand that your know full well you are saying something that is not literally true, you are on safer ground — as long as you deliver the goods.

This is what you do in the second, qualifying part, where you say, “which I think might interest those who …” and thereby identify, address, and presumably, speak in terms of a known audience — people, presumably, who know what bullshit is and is not.

Speaking Professionally

I like the big “pie in the sky” claim because it is fun, probably not too far from the truth, and because then you end up committing yourself to delivering the goods: from here one needs to explain and argue this or that is a big deal. And the great thing about identifying your audience is that by searching for your professional peers and learning what they are talking about you get to enter into the conversation and likely quickly develop one or another insight or opinion into what is being said

A great example is Marleen’s comment on my last blog post, where she responded to what she thought I was doing by asserting a more general principle:

Moreover, as I am a marketing person, I think also, that blogs should be attractive, originally and fancy.

which, like all larger claims, she is obliged to support and does:

For example, this blog is one of the first in a top media and marketing ranking: http://www.problogger.net/. But, the design and organization is terrible and by seeing it, I would switch immediately. On the contrary, this one: http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/ traps my attention by its original design, even if the graphic needs getting used to.

As I wrote there, this way of responding does two very important things: first, she immediately supports her larger claim, and second, does so with examples I can examine for myself. This is most definitely the way to go!

Reviewing Websites Critically

Now I’d like to suggest how we might review websites on one level deeper, and by “reviewing websites critically” I mean not simply making a judgment of how good or bad they are, but with a descriptive, analytical, and evaluative dimension that opens them, and you, up to your readers.

Our primary references for doing so here includes such academic writing center websites as that at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and others I’ve bookmarked on my i2learn website, and for this entry, I’m working with the UNC Book Review handout.

This handout explores the following principles of good academic book reviews, which I will then apply to Marleen’s comment as well as my own:

First, a review gives the reader a concise summary of the content. This includes a relevant description of the topic as well as its overall perspective, argument, or purpose.

Second, and more importantly, a review offers a critical assessment of the content. This involves your reactions to the work under review: what strikes you as noteworthy, whether or not it was effective or persuasive, and how it enhanced your understanding of the issues at hand.

Finally, in addition to analyzing the work, a review often suggests whether or not the audience would appreciate it.

Applied to Marleen’s review cited above, we may see how she offered a strong reaction to the websites she found, strongly preferring one to the other, but did not offer any significant description or analysis that would help us learn what was to be found there — independent of what she thinks about it — and so we do not find an accurate guide to the other sites, but instead, have to negotiate her strong opinions. Hmmm! I’ll confess, that although I’m a big boy and usually capable of standing my own ground, I didn’t challenge her directly on this, seeking instead to offer a timely and generally supportive reply. Hmmm! Web site reviews, and commentaries, involve interesting politics, eh?

But now that we can refer to the higher authority of academic book reviews lets look at what we mean by description and analysis and how we might do so in the very short, succinct way that the usability experts advise.

To describe the http://www.problogger.net/ website I’d say that it is a standard 3-column magazine format designed to include many different kinds of information, including one-third blog, one-third advertisements, and one-third surveys, videos and so forth.

After that I’d offer an evaluation that supports Marleen’s taste — for without specification that’s all opinions can be, but the expression of mere preference — with reference to higher criteria. I’d say that while I like the new magazine styles for the sophisticated ways that they can manage complexity, this particular blog screams at you with all manner of advertisements, links, and surveys — most of them mere automatic collections of links — that I simply can’t find my way, can’t develop a sense of proportion, and so don’t want to go to the trouble of finding my way through all this noise and am turned off.

In comparison, I’d refer to the Revolution Lifestyle and other such cool, well-organized sites to show how complexity can be managed to produce an inviting, and in this case particularly soothing, coherence.

Now, I don’t think I need to examine her second example in any detail to get to this post’s main point: that without explaining why and how she developed these responses, it is difficult to see her comments — though on inspection I share them — as more than opinion. Again, here opinions are in this case ones I share: the problem here is writing in a professional way: one that opens opinions up to a discussion of their evidence, assumptions, and reasoning.

The Remedy? Better Note-Taking

The remedy, the tonic I’d recommend for addressing this problem, is to develop a checklist of things to look for when reviewing websites, and to do that I think the way to go is to rewrite the academic’s advice (and balance it, as I have learned to do by reading Nielson and others, with reference to the peculiar features of the web). Here’s what the UNC Book Review handout says to do:

What is the thesis—or main argument—of the book? If the author wanted you to get one idea from the book, what would it be? How does it compare or contrast to the world you know? What has the book accomplished?

What exactly is the subject or topic of the book? Does the author cover the subject adequately? Does the author cover all aspects of the subject in a balanced fashion? What is the approach to the subject (topical, analytical, chronological, descriptive)?

How does the author support her argument? What evidence does she use to prove her point? Do you find that evidence convincing? Why or why not? Does any of the author’s information (or conclusions) conflict with other books you’ve read, courses you’ve taken or just previous assumptions you had of the subject?

How does the author structure her argument? What are the parts that make up the whole? Does the argument make sense? Does it persuade you? Why or why not?

How has this book helped you understand the subject? Would you recommend the book to your reader?

I’d suggest that you try to use these questions in the manner of a checklist — simply hold them up to the website under review and see how you might answer them — make brief notes of your answers, and then chose 2-3 things (not everything) that seem most relevant and can be written about in 1-2 sentences.

And finally, when you report on a website, be sure to use the report structures we have discussed in class: how the author claims, reasons, suggests, etc.

I hope this helps!

In this post I will talk about how your blog design — including the strategies you use to search for relevant blogs; how you describe, analyze, and evaluate them; your choice of blog theme, and the way you title and display categories and recent posts in your sidebar, and headers, sub-heads, bullet lists, quotations, and links — involves not only care in word choice, arrangement, style, but also sets up, influences, and basically controls the kind of writing that you do, the presentation that you make, as well as the use your users might make of it.

By Design We Mean, First, Structure

It is important that you choose a WordPress theme, a graphic design, that might please your readers, but in blog design we mean first the blog’s underlying structure, its content, and behind that, how you and your viewer’s might find it and do something with it.

I’m inviting you to think about your writing is not simply ideas all dressed up ready to go out, but about how, in very practical terms, the application, graphics, content, practices, and effects all work together to bring your visitor to your work, you, and beyond you — out in the professional world you and your blog are part of.

As suggested by the figure on the left in the illustration above, many of us have been brought up to see the problem of presenting our work as one of impressing the shit out of everybody, but nowadays many reject this view and, as in the figure on the right, see the problem in terms of helping others do whatever they are trying to do.

I think this is easy to demonstrate. If you drew up a list of the dozen websites that you use, and find most easy to use and useful, I’m sure websites like Google will be at the top of the list. If we were to think about why they are so easy to use we’d likely start talking about the simplicity and clarity of their design. If we were to think about why they are so useful we’d likely start talking about how they help us find whatever it is we are looking for. Not only that, I’d suggest, we like them not because they “give us the answer”, but offer us a number of ways of helping us get at our answer.

Think for a moment of how you use the web to find whatever it is you are looking for. Mostly, we do things like searching, but we spend a lot of time browsing, and as we browse we are constantly following signposts, ending up in dead-ends, spring from one discovery to another: we are constantly evaluating what we read. And often impatiently so: we want to find what we need and not find what we don’t need. Our favorite websites are those that are easy to understand, that make it easy for us to see what is there, and that help us figure out and find what we are looking for.

Think for a moment about how when visiting blog the visitor’s eye comes down and across the title and most current post and struggles to gain some perspective: landing on a web page is to land in a field, a forest, a house, … or a swamp. We like websites, I think, that are like well-ordered houses.

Welcome Your Visitors As You Would To Your Home

Let me lead your eye through my page, because when we are talking about design we really do mean leading eyes and cursors and mouse clicks in a way that helps viewers get what they want, happily so, and then allow them to move on happily to whatever their next steps might be.

On this blog, I think our eyes come down the blog title and most current post and then head on over to the list of categories and recent posts before going back to that current post or choosing among the others. On reading my posts — and I mean the posts that report on things and not the long lectures like this particular lecturing post — my viewers are invited to follow the post title, a related image, sub-heads and text, and then click links to move on to whatever it is I am talking about. When I think of my visitors, meaning nowadays you, I think I am writing just enough to send you off to explore the web, write something up, work on your website, and in the process, find your way in your disciplines or professions.

I’m thinking and writing in a sweeping motion here, self-consciously so, because I think it is important that you think of your visitor’s experience as a 30-second or 3-minute episode, a narrative, better, a story. In this way, I want to lead you to think beyond the technical stuff as quickly as possible and on to thinking about the content, practices, and effects. As with most everything else, you want to keep your eye on where the value lies: here, in helping you and me do what we are supposed to be doing, which is thinking and writing about interesting stuff in our fields.

Sophie set up her new marketing blog, illustrated above, rather quickly as she finally figured out that her marketing stuff didn’t get along all that well with the culture stuff she also likes to write about, and so she built herself a second blog. Let’s look at how it works.

Notice how the title and image work together to help you learn immediately who is writing it and what it is about, and notice as well that the current post and the categories are consistent with the title and suggest a no-nonsense, professional blog. Wow!

Now, a number of you are like me and enjoy setting up more humorous or ironic or cryptic names and images, and of course we write about things other than business, but I’m inviting you to see up at least one blog for your business and to be sure that you are making it easy for your readers to know who you are and what your blog is all about.

She’s written up some excellent posts, no question of that, and that’s the point of this whole exercise, but for the moment we are looking at how she is delivering us to them, because once you get the form down, you’ll know better how to fill it with content: her design reminds her of the reasons she set it up in this way in the first place: after a dozen other classes and activities, one minute looking at the blog reminds her of what it is she is supposed to do here: it is a well-ordered house, it welcomes her back home.

She has chosen an image that has enough white in it for her title, a sign that lets us know where she is going, and a diagonal in that sign that parallels the eye that falls upon her blog, from upper-left to lower right, in the same way that we Westerners skim and read text printed on paper, generally, in a diagonal.

And in this falling, in the one glance that we all basically make on reading the first half of that very top of our blog, we take start off with that most general of all blog elements, the title and header image, and then the most specific of all blog elements, the most recent post. What a contrast, what drama! And we are not making this up! It is sorta like seeing, at one and the same time, the entire planet and one, and only one, of the people on it. Yikes!

If that’s all we were given — and there are some blogs designed that way — it might be too much for us to figure out: it would be as if she had welcomed us into her house, skipped introductions and small talk and a tour of the house, to launch, right away, in the hallway, into a long, detailed, and maybe convoluted story — when we still have our coats on, might be tired and appreciate sitting down, and might also like to negotiate a conversation about some interest in common.

Fortunately, that’s what she gives us in her right-hand column: her categories, which function as nothing less than an overview of her house as a place where there are a number of different kinds of conversations and from which we might choose.

Look at how the professionals do it. The illustration above is from one of the category or “topic” pages and where you’ll see that there is a strong diagonal from the title image on the upper left, past topic overview and sub-topic overviews, to the list of all topics (and the advertisement). As soon as you have more than a handful of posts, which you will in a few weeks, you have the problem of managing complexity, and the standard solution is to set up a hierarchy whereby you start from the most general blog title, then offer the major categories or topics, and then start grouping your blog posts within those categories.

In this way, the visitor we’ve discussed we want to empower, is given both a meaningful overview and a real choice: the begins not by screaming at you, but inviting you to enter in an orderly way, get acquainted, and choose the topic of the conversation. And note that this happens immediately, without any need to touch a mouse and scroll down the page: the designers are not making us work; our hosts want us not to have to lift a finger.

Blogging To Think And Write

In designing your blog in this way, not only do your visitors learn what it is that your blog is all about, but by choosing key words, arranging them in hierarchies, and subordinating details to them, you are structuring your own thought processes, and writing as well.

Consider the lessons for your writing offered by the clear, strong, meaningful titles and equally clear, strong, and meaningful topic sentences with which these articles begin in the illustration below from the list of articles on design.   

These first sentences address the titles, explaining what they and the article that follows are about. And by using the “more” feature of the WordPress wysiwyg editor you can break your articles into small, bite-sized pieces that your viewer’s can quickly survey, too, before choosing one or more that might interest them. Blogging design and usability, then, depends on your mastering an important component of any good written work, the abstract: it involves your summarizing your article in the most succinct form possible, and since you are in the business of entertaining your fickle visitors — people who know how to use Google as well as you and will do so in a second — you do well to write abstracts in as inviting a form as possible.

The key to developing your reader’s interest, for web application developer Mark Bernstein, lies in your explanation of how and why something is meaningful, interesting, and important.

People are fascinated by detail and enthralled by passion; explain to us why it matters to you, and no detail is too small, no technical question too arcane. Bad personal sites bore us by telling us about trivial events and casual encounters about which we have no reason to care. Don’t tell us what happened: tell us why it matters. Don’t tell us your opinion: tell us why the question is important.

I think this is a key insight, because many of us started off thinking that blogging is about people shooting off their mouths, offering all manner of stupid opinions. Bernstein offers us something else — something that is likely especially relevant for those of you finishing up your studies and heading off into the job market. He is inviting you to share with us what you have learned, in the deepest sense, after your three or four years at the university: that something that is not only about the world, but about you — about what you’ve found to be of such interest that you want to be part of a community of people sharing it.

I think this business of developing professional community is what makes this business of blogging so completely fascinating and an especially important place to be working on your English. This is not the English of mere classroom lessons, but the English used by those you hope to be working with and as it is used to talk about your work in the best possible way: as something worth doing.

Hands On: WordPress Design Features

On setting up your website, among the first things you’ll want to do is choose a theme, and let me suggest that the way to do that is to compare the “Simpla” theme to those right next to it and consider how simple designs give your titles and abstracts room to breathe.

Log on to your WordPress blog’s administrative panel, go to the Appearance/Themes section, click to page 5 and “activate” or install the “Simpla” theme and the others as you see here. I think you will immediately see that the “Solipsus” theme to the right is “busier” or “noisier,” and that might be ok, but you want to be careful about the “noise” as well as professional tone that your design and typography convey. You might also try the “Unsleepable” and “Pool” themes as they are wide enough to offer visitors lots of text, but simple and orderly enough that you can quickly see what the site is all about. You probably want to stay away from big fat headers that take up a lot of space, thin columns that don’t let you see too much, graphics which scream at you reader, and colors that burn the eyes like red pepper and our distant aunt’s hot pants.

This is the problem with the Jimdo websites some of you started off with: they are filled with so many graphics, colors, and advertisements that it can be difficult for visitors to find your content. In comparison, look again at Sophie’s blog, where you’ll likely see all that blue and white as very cool and relaxed … and I’d even advise her to take out that search button, because it is not necessary when the categories are designed well and you’ve not yet got 100 articles, because without it the eye has one less piece of furniture to trip over on its way to the content.

Choosing Titles and Categories

Titles and sub-titles should be short, descriptive, and to the point: no serious business person has time to figure out riddles, metaphors, and cryptic expressions. In our class, I still can’t remember who “Carpe Diem” is without looking it up in my notebook, but there is no doubt who belongs to “Sophie’s Market Research Site” nor what this site is all about.

The place to change titles and sub-titles is reached by going back to that dashboard column on the left and clicking the “Settings” tab (it is below “Appearance”, where we have just been playing with themes). The Settings form will open up, you type in your blog title and sub-title, and then “Save” to put your choices into effect.

You have then to “add” some widgets — little machines that arrange your posts for you — by clicking “add” and then dragging them into a meaningful order. Nowadays I start of with Categories, then add Recent Posts, and then maybe the Blogroll or links. You can move things around as you please. I also happen to like installing an “rss feed” to my twitter posts on my homepage, but not my professional website. Be sure to “save” what you have done, and then go to “View Site” to see your work.

What We Mean By Structure

To understand why we distinguish between structure and design you might for a moment consider a brief explanation of how database-driven websites work. Those widgets that you dragged to your sidebar and installed each contain a piece of logic behind them that is translated into a command to the database, like, “go to the table of posts, get the six most recent posts, and sort them chronologically with the most recent on top”. When these post titles and links are returned to the browser, the browser then consults the “theme” and follows its directions for type color, size, and location. Thus, by moving that “Recent Posts” element in your template you have changed your blog’s structure. The browser then “pours” the content into the template, and by selecting a theme you have told the browser how to dress it up. Dressing up your work is easy, you have only to flick a switch: choosing good titles and figuring out their relationships, that’s the hard, but most important part.

Categories and Fine Tuning.

What should your categories be? I’d suggest that you start by asking what sub-fields of your profession interest you and simply list three or four of them and make everything fit until you get a better idea of how you want to present yourself. Don’t worry about major decisions right now: just choose a few category titles that make sense, because you can, and should, and will, change them when you see how your blog is shaping up as you go. As with anything else, you are basically building as you go and adjusting titles and design as suits your purposes. We want to get this blog up and running in an hour or less, so just choose some titles and worry about making things perfect later: nothing you do here now will unchangeable nor stay that way forever: that’s the nifty thing about this technology, it is so fast and flexible!

It’s just great that most of you have already done most of the assignment already, but here I post it so you can find it easily and so be sure to catch up on all the details.

Blogging Assignment.

As we discussed, your homework for 7.1.09 is to post THREE additional website review (for a total of six) on your blogs so I may review them and give you a mid-term grade. My evaluation criteria will include the following:

a) Content.

That at least three of them are in your chosen professional field and suggesting that you have taken the problem seriously and demonstrated your apprenticeship to your discipline. As we discussed with Guillaume’s excellent post Wednesday, a good blog post is not simply what you already know, but best, something that you have just learned and want to share with others: the post should be about a discovery, something new, something that is timely and relevant to others: something that will bring people back to your blog in a week or two because they see you are curious, discovering neat stuff, and write in an interesting way: we are blogging not simply to learn something for ourselves, but to share with others and engage them.

b) Structure.

That each entry includes a summary; a clear identification of a relevant issue: a description, analysis, and evaluation of the reference; and a brief discussion of at least one thing that you think is interesting and important; and that it be written in the spirit of inquiry and learning (“I found this interesting website dealing with the issue of xxxxx and where Iearned yyyyy …”). It is important to identify a standard structure, a template, so that your blog entries are consistent, have a clear identification or parts, and so are easier to write and understand.

c) Form.

The entry should include a descriptive and hopefully interesting title or heading; that each section includes a sub-heading in bold type; that there is at least one short (1-2 sentence) quotation from the original site in quotation style; that there is at least one link to the site, and best, a second link to another source for further reading; that there is a screenshot measuring either 360pixels or 480 pixels wide (yes, learn how to resize screenshots for the web!). As we discussed, (sorry you were not there, Armelle), putting your posts in lots of wild colors is distracting: you want your viewers to be able to understand what you are saying and how you are saying it easily, including, headers that stand out from the rest and are descriptive, entries that are well-organized and follow a clear structure. Colored type is actually a problem: use mostly black, and if you want something to stand out, make it either bold, italic, underlined, or quoted: reserve color for your screenshots or photos.

d) Navigation.

That each entry includes your name on it, or a nickname, as well as an “About Me” section; that there be a Blogroll or Links section including links to your Twitter site (and even better, a display of the RSS feed with your most recent posts); a link to my course blog (http://englishforpros.wordpress.com/), 2-3 links to other classmates and 2-3 links to other websites in your field, and a link to our del.icio.us site (http://delicious.com/fhwnightfighter).

e) A self-evaluation post.

As we will discuss on 17.12, I would also like you to publish a self- evaluation post telling me what you are learning in this exercise and what you plan to do next.  This is not simply “I am only doing my homework and hope to get a good grade and will do whatever Bruce tells me to,” but rather, as you are well-trained professionals in your fields, a work-in-progress where you are showing how you are asking thoughtful questions, going onto the web to find answers, and reporting on what you have found. I don’t want to see evidence of genius or that you know everything: I do want to see evidence of curiosity, learning, and dedication to your field of study. Please remember that our starting off with a very personal “about me” was strategic: by writing about yourself you make the blog personal as well as list/diagram your interests, both personal and professional: from now on, your job is to create a professional blog: something a future employer and colleagues will want to look at to know who you are, what your are interested in, and what you know. Be sure to consult one or more of the three websites I’ve collected under http://delicious.com/fhwnightfighter/bloggingtips.

Comments and Twitter Assignment

Also for 7.1.09 I want to see evidence of your building your network and community, and that means two things: writing comments on each other’s blogs and keeping up an active Twitter micro-blog.

Writing Comments.

Writing comments is an art, and the best comment is where you both compliment the blog post you are writing about AND raising a question or comment that will lead your chosen blogger to respond to you intelligently and warmly: you want your comment to result in this person remembering you as paying serious attention to them and to click on your blog or twitter, learn more about you, and someday, ask you to join their team in the workplace or over a cup of coffee: you comment not simply with ideas, but to the end of building your professional and social connections. So, find some nugget of truth in what someone has said, and as you see I am doing sometimes, simply go on the web and find something else on your chosen blogger’s topic that you want to share and which your blogger will thank you for sharing.

Writing Twitters.

As you know, I am rewriting my entry on Twittering, so please check that again next week and maybe even over the holidays: in any event, be sure to “follow” me as I’ll post updates on my twitter site, https://twitter.com/just4you, and be sure to “follow” each other, by posting your twitter blog, if you haven’t done so already, on: http://delicious.com/fhwnightfighter/twitter. So far, the scenario is this.

You start off by simply learning how to note your observations and post them in 140 characters or less, and to start many did like me and observed some crazy nonsense like drunks in the u-bahn, sofas piled over a fence, and massive piles of meat on a table. Once you do that the whole business of selecting, noting, posting, and seeing your post along with others will begin to work on you in strange and mysterious ways, and I think the best way to proceed is to identify twitter postings by types — recognizing that there is a genre to this communications technology — so that after the “personal observation of wierd things” you move on to “what is this meat on the kitchen table,” and variations that basically mean “who am I?”. Or maybe you’ll move right away to reporting on an interesting website you’ve found and want to share, using the tinyurl service of course, and saying “nifty, huh?”, or commenting on someone else’s post with a site or observation that sets you into a dialogue.

Remember my discussion of “speech acts”, the “I do” that gets you sugar in your coffee and the “I do” that gets you married? Well, think of this twitter as any number of observations, references, comments, responses, etc., that do the following things: give you an opportunity to pay attention, confirm whatever it is you are talking about, gain the courage to post on the web, learn from others, and now the kicker: start building your community and networks, so that soon you are part of something: language, this twitter language, is about DOING, from discovery to sharing to giving pitches to setting up deals. It is limited but fast, timely and not a database, personal and professional: it occupies a unique niche — something about the pace of modern life, the overwhelming flood of emails, our attention to signs and symbols and meaning everywhere: things I wouldn’t photograph but would twitter about, things I wouldn’t email but would twitter about, and it’s about making the private public and it is not simply exhibitionistic at all — just like, if you allow me, how we don’t dance alone: we go out to clubs where there are scenes, we dance this often quite intimate thing in public. — OK, now the revealing joke: we say that tango is BETTER than sex because: 1) you get to do this for hours at a time, b) you do it wearing your best clothes and in killer heels, c) you do it with multiple partners, and d) you do it all in public!. So there is something special about this public business, this many-to-many form, where in a second someone can invent a hash word and suddenly 200 people in a room are sharing messages, as I noted last night, at a professional conference: everyone has a laptop and wlan and knows how to use it, 200 people come together for three days, suddenly they are organizing themselves, and the technology helped them to do this in a very powerful way.

Your job, now, is to learn the technology (simple), the appropriate English (also a question of simplicity and relevance), figure out the legal topics, build your own support network, and once you get the hang of it, you’ll take off … finding confirmation for your observations, leads for your research, and the whole time, gaining practice in using English for business. So, respond to the Sisyphus query for baby pictures, worry about Janine’s pile of meat, follow links to interesting websites, ask about a research question … let this practice grow on you … and show me evidence of it and we will all be happy!

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.