Audio extravaganza

Necessity is the mother of invention! Intrigued by Alisa's introduction of BlueGrind, I've been thinking about doing a comparison. I used the whole intro to Thing #17 because I had to re-record it anyway.

Here's my audio intro about wikis:

Here's the BlueGrind version:

If you're curious, here is the text of the first two paragraphs:

Now that you’ve learned a bit about wikis, now’s the time to jump in and play around with them. Don’t worry. You’ve got boots! And friends! If you’ve never used a wiki before, it’s a little scary. We’re so used to thinking about our writing as personal – a part of us -- that many people are afraid to change anything someone else has written.

Sometimes we’re also too busy to undertake what could be a huge task if done by just one person. Even if we have helpers, we may find ourselves spending as much time coordinating work as we do completing it. Or I may have the germ of an idea (what Wikipedia calls a “stub”) that I’m willing to share, but I don’t have the energy or time to flesh it out. My mom used to tell me to finish in style, but that’s not necessarily true in wiki-world. I can start something and count on others to finish it up. Or I when I stumble across something half-baked, I can finish it up. It builds positively on division of labor.

First, the BlueGrindGuy can't handle contractions. (He also can't handle the word "del.icio.us"). One of my reasonings behind using audio was to get more personality into what I was providing as text. I don't think the BlueGrindGuy does it.

Having said all that, I can see using BlueGrind as a proofreading tool for students. In fact they might find it kind of fun. Something more to add to my initial exploration of audio as a writing tool which I began with the sine curve late last fall. [Note: quite a few of the links don't work in my two sine curve pages. I set up a blog for the sine curve a while ago, but I haven't posted anything there yet. Aha -- a project for this fall!

Social networking in the political trenches

As you may know, we have a different kind of "primary" operating this year. It has quarterly deadlines, and instead of votes, they tally dollars. Tonight is the end of the second quarter, so if you are politically active at all, I imagine you have received telephone calls and email messages asking for contributions. I certainly have.

So I was poking around in several candidates' websites (no partisan politics here), and I was really surprised to see how many of the candidates make use of social networking tools: blogging, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and a variety of mash-ups. The point is to get citizens involved in the campaigns, to help them find like-minded neighbors for discussion and party-building. The upside: there are a lot of things I will do online (although I have gone door-to-door and done my stint in phone banks), especially here in Arizona when the temperature gets above 100 degrees. The downside: well, people will speak up, and those ideas might not be exactly what the candidates and campaigns had in mind. This is especially true when citizens have all the new press tools -- digital recorders and cameras -- and can post their recordings, pictures and videos to social sites, with or without editing or commentary. So I know it's risky for candidates, but the ups must outweigh the downs because all of the campaigns are heavily into social networking tools. Just look at the website of your favorite candidate! (Remember that most of these sites have RSS feeds, so you can set up a folder in Bloglines and subscribe for updates; you can keep political messages out of your email but still have access to them whenever and wherever you'd like.)

In addition to the official campaign messages, there are many, many political commentators in the Blogosphere. You can use Technorati to find the most popular, or you can find one or two blogs that you like and examine their Blogrolls or their del.icio.us links to see what they read and who follows them. If you feel strongly about a particular issue (a clear source of motivation), you can search for others who care about that issue also. I mean, sometimes it's really important to keep up with the opposition, no matter how difficult those posts may be to read.

I think social networking tools provide a whole new spin on some key political terms like "grassroots" efforts and a free press. So here's where blogs (and many other Web 2.0 tools) provide more than opportunities for play. The press is free to s/he who has one, and we all do now.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

Hammer for what...?
Originally uploaded by ponanwi

. . . and when you have a blog, everything looks like a writing topic. Maybe this is just because I teach writing. Do artists see the world as color or shapes, biologists as a collection of living organisms, chemists as chains of reactions, mathematicians as numbers or geometric shapes or trigonometric functions? Or is it just me?

I've been trying for years to get students to see the world as a rich source of things to describe, reflect upon, analyze, or just mention. Sigh. They just don't get it. It isn't because I read a ridiculous number of daily newspapers and weekly magazines, listen to NPR, watch the evening news, and follow a number of web sites. The most interesting topics come from just watching what happens around me.

For example, I went to Starbucks this morning, and as I was getting a refill on my Venti Black Sweetened Iced Tea, the man in front of me bought the last chocolate donut. I'm sure it's part of Star Training (a term I learned about when our son, Andrew, worked for a short time as a barista), but there was a chorus of "no more chocolate donuts" among the workers . . . first the guy who served up the LAST chocolate donut, then echoed by the girl at the cash register, then repeated in unison by the two folks working the drive-up window, and then capped off by the last barista. It was cheerful and funny, especially because the customer turned away from the counter, leaving the LAST chocolate donut (now his) on the counter, only coming back for it when I commented that now everyone in the store knew he was the guy who had bought the LAST chocolate donut. I suppose it seemed more musical to me because everyone had previously been singing along with "Mr. Sandman" which had been playing over the sound system a few minutes earlier -- perhaps from a CD that was for sale?

Now I suspect that these are both conscious Star strategies, and I suppose if I asked the right people, I could confirm that. Do other businesses pay this much attention to store climate and culture? Does it make a [big] difference in sales? Is a happier, more cheerful sales force a more productive one?

Gosh, it's great to have a blog where I can explore these ideas!