ENG505 Response(s)
to
1) In Blogging as a Form of Journalism, I was curious about Paul
Andrews use of the word “moral” when he says “professional journalists too
often dismiss those who don't work for traditional media…when the truth is that
the most vital and moral dispatches on the Web are being created by amateurs.” Is he saying this because of the apparent transparency
of blogs? Because they are less mediated
(I hesitate to say categorically unmediated), because video/pictures don’t lie
(except they can)? I wasn’t sure—what do
you think?
2) Engberg,
in Blogging as Typing, forcefully brings up
the idea of responsibility. If you blog
false numbers then in essence you are acting unethically. Does it matter? Potentially it could. I like that he talks about journalism as
teamwork—it’s not just the raincoat-suited loner out in the rain on a dark
night getting “the story” nor is it the pajama-clad dude at his keyboard. Now, I’m not crazy about his condescension
either, but I think he makes a good, ethical point about thinking about why
you’re blogging and your responsibilities.
These shouldn’t be afterthoughts because bad things do happen, whether
as seemingly inconsequential as a friend’s hurt feelings, or as big as
potentially swaying an election through faulty data. I worked at public opinon polling firm, and I
we definitely dealt with exit poll data as potential dynamite.
3) Arms’s Quality Control
identifies tenure as a basic problem (and he’s not the only). It’s also a can of worms, as anyone doing non-traditional
work (whatever that means) knows.
Academe moves at a snail’s pace—I had only to consider the looks on the
faces and the questions thrown at a recent English Department job candidate who
gave a presentation about New Media and multimodal approaches to teaching
composition. The resistance is palpable.
I think Arms puts it simply and eloquently when he says that “The slow
and deliberate process of peer review means that papers in the published
journal are a historic record, not the active literature of the field.” The problem is that in many academic fields,
nobody minds the dinosaurs.
Arms’s discussion ties in
to what we were discussing last week about Wikipedia. I am not convinced that it is “bad” and
should never be used, even as a scholarly source. The problem is not that students use it, it
is that students use it without, as Arms advocates, reading the “internal
clues.” This takes research, and that’s
sort of the point. Wikipedia could be
used, if a student can justify its use.
I believe that it is perfectly adequate as a starting point, it just
cannot be the only point, but that can be said of any source, even scholarly
ones. I see my job as teaching students
to investigate and to know why they are using material, whether their own or
someone else’s regardless of where it came from. One of my founding teaching philosophies is
precisely about ethics. I thinks it’s
unethical of me as a teacher to simply ignore or dismiss what my students are
bringing in to the classroom. If I don’t
approve of something, then I need to justify why just as much as they need to
justify using it. Again, I come back to
that bind that students are in (bleeding heart—moi?)—living in one world and
learning in another.