Liz Straus on Blogging Mojo and getting the Kudzu Out

Not sure that I ever had Mojo, in fact the only Jo I have is my middle name, but I do know what kudzu is. Kudzu can be found all over the south. A fast growing imported vine, it grows eerily overmuch of the landscape in southern states. Kudzu is aggressive and hard to control. It chokes out trees and other plant vegetation. Thanks to Liz Straus and her post on both Mojo and Kudzu, I found the motivation to blog after about a month’s absence. Kudzu can be found in Mississippi (and other places in the deep south) and that is where my mind and I were in October and November. My mother-in-law was seriously ill for awhile, recently died, and was buried on the 15th of November in McCool, Mississippi. So while late September,October, and November found my thoughts elsewhere, November is my blog’s birthday and I have some reflecting and related postings to write up as 2007 wraps up.

Liz says there are 10 ways to kill Blog Kudzu they are:

1. Step back from your blog and the blogoshere and remember it does not need you to survive.
2. Find security in the knowledge that your blog and its links will be there when you return.
3. Figure out someway to have an experience then blog it!
4. Get up and go somewhere.
5. Talk to friends.
6. Read, think, and make up stories to tell yourself.
7. Tell people you are a web publisher. Listen to their stories and think about how you might translate them.
8. Get advice from young children and follow it when you can.
9. Spend some time with you and enjoy your own company.
10. Read your blog archives and pick your favorites. Try to do it again.

The 11th piece of advice from a friend of hers, says to allow yourself to take some time off because you will work better when you return. Mojo has several definitions, I choose to use the one that connects it to magic. The photo of Kudzu was found on Wikipedia.

Thanks Liz!

Women: Overlooked and Not Missing

Started looking and reading late this evening, but I found a good blog post written by a woman on technology and that led me to another, which leads me to another, and so on and so on. So found several new websites and blogs today devoted to women in technology worth writing about.

Willow Cook of the TechSoup Blog wrote, that women aren't missing from the ranks "technology sector" they are just overlooked. Willow's blog post led me to Tara Hunt's ,Women Who Risk: Making Women in Technology Visible.

Hunt believes "that part of the answer to the question "Why aren't women in technology?" lies in our mistaking the answer to the former question, "Where are the women?" She then goes on to provide an impressive list of women in technology, their blogs names, and the companies they work at or founded.

Women exist in good numbers, so why Hunt asks, can't we be found? Some of her reasons include the following:

-Women choose family first
- Women are cloaked in invisibility ( she provides a personal example of this)
-Masculine measures of success don't fit most women's career paths

So here I am in 10+ months into my action research project, making the invisible, visible by starting a project connected to seeking and finding women in technology. Will continue to work on this as I wrap up between now and the end of the year, but more about that later.

aephoneia and Danah Boyd's Research and Writing

Wow. Just got through reading Danah Boyd’s powerful response to all the posts and hype that her essay, Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace, received since June 24, 2007. aephoneia, was one of the first high quality and “bleeding edge” blogs I came across when I started my research. Wikipedia uses the verb risky to define bleeding edge, a term usually associated with new technology. Boyd's research centers on new technologies and how teens communicate on social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, and others. The topics she blogs on and researchs are new. No one understands or has a handle on it all yet, but Boyd is savvy. Her research, knowledge of teen social networks is out on the web and viewable by all. Her presentations and writings have been featured in NPR, Wired, MSNBC, USA Today, Newsweek , and The O'Reilly Factor. She has been profiled in The New York Times and in Financial Times .

Since her June 24, 2007 essay Boyd has been bombarded with what she calls "critiques". In a July 25, 2007 post, Responses to: "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace" she takes criticisms received and responds to them all in an even toned, scholarly manner ─even the ugly ones. Boyd’s response paper outlined how she works and writes, defined methodology terms, vocabulary used in her research, and she did not hedge when describing the ugliness of what some critics wrote, or how she felt what they wrote. Ouch, hard to read, but so well written and so eloquent I read to the end. It appears that she plans to keep blogging.

Awhile back another woman with high visibility in the blogoshpere, Kathy Sierra, posted on harassment and death threats that she was received online and quit blogging. Ellen Nakishima’s, (April, 2007) provocative article, on the darker side of women bloggers who"gain visibility in the blogosphere" detailed some of the ugliness of in the cyberworld and the sexual threats used to stifle some bloggers. It is worth going back to and reading. Other good articles related to Sierra's experience and cyberbullying are, PBS Teachers: Participate in Stop Cyberbullying Day and Is it time to crack down on the blogsphere?

Kartoo a meta search engine that maps

Kartoo is worth the time you will spend looking at results presented in a highly visual format. Still can't say that I understand all the ins and outs of using it, but love seeing results presented in maps. This was also fun to chart. Looking at the chart it appears (again)I am a little behind the buzz in learning about what Kartoo is and what it does.

Posts that contain Kartoo per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

My searches, using key words brought me by a genie look alike, were mapped by relevance and larger sized items indicated importance. Using keyword search, women bloggers, Kartoo brought me 16,000,000 results in pages of visual maps that went on and on.

Another key word search using, women bloggers research, provided me 8, 5100, 000 results with the most relevant items sized accordingly. Found MotherPie again on the first page of this Kartoo search. It is fun to search this way and as my mouse moved over the mapped images linking lines connected to other images and information on images was presented in text on the left navigation.

If you are interested in seeing search results presented in something other than a long list of items, check out Kartoo. Oh, and once again it appears that when you are actively looking for information the "truth is out there". Women are blogging and their numbers are growing.

Women In Art: Learning how to post a video to my blog

This is harder than it looks and was only able to get the video to work on the second try. If you enjoyed this video you may want to see other art videos by a director named eggman913.

Stifling Women Bloggers

This posting is connected to my dismay over reading about the harassment that women face in the blogosphere. My intent was to write and post my thoughts and opinions on technology, higher education, and leadership, but increasingly I find this project like going through the "looking glass" and my thoughts and opinions shifting as I learn more. It appears the blogosphere is mirroring many of the same iniquities, prejudices found in the real world and Internet harassment includes death threats for successful women bloggers like Kathy Sierra.

Ellen Nakishima’s, article is filled with scary eloquence on the seamier and darker side of what can happen to some women bloggers as they "gain visibility in the blogosphere" (April, 2007). The Washington Post article, Sexual Threats Stifle Women Bloggers, is full of information guaranteed to promote use of pseudonyms for women and they may"censor themselves" or use "private forums and closed comments" while blogging. Nakishima and the people she interviewed believe this will "make women reluctant to join in online -- undercutting the promise of the Internet as an egalitarian forum". Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post) a blogger who gets a lot of press and traffic of said, "anonymity online has allowed "many those dark prejudices towards women to surface."

So, in the blogosphere people are writing about the lack of women bloggers and the harassment of women bloggers. Here is another medium built for and by all that appears to be serving some more than others and allowing some to frighten and silence women in a brand-new way. I probably should not be at all surprised there is carry over of these kinds of issues from one medium to another, but I am.

Women's Voices on Learning Objects and Learning Objects Repositories

In my first search of women blogs connected to learning objects and learning objects repositories found an article by Diane J. Goldsmith on Assessing Learning Objects: The Importance of Values, Purpose, and Design. It was unusual to read a woman blogging on learning objects and issues surrounding their use in education and I hope to find more over the next year. Besides citing some of the energetic male discussions surrounding the use of standards to create learning objects (Downes, 2006:Norman, 2006:Wiley, 2006), Goldsmith (2007) proposed there is opportunity in integrating assessment principles into developing learning objects.

While the discussion surrounding learning objects is focused on definitions, standards, context for use and reuse Goldsmiths’ (2007) article discusses learning objects and connects them to faculty values, purpose of LOs that is connected to what the objects might assess. She poses a set of questions to frame developing LOs and ask faculty and development teams to consider:

1. Why should a particular learning object be developed?
2.Who are the stakeholders? Users?
3. How will one know if the learning object is successful?
4. What determines success?
5. How can the cost of developing a learning object be justified?
6.What is the intended purpose in developing the learning object?
7. How can assessment of the learning object be factored into the development process?
8. If the object is published to a learning objects repository (LOR) how will data be collected on its use, reuse, and outcomes be assessed?

Finally, Goldsmith (2007) asks faculty and developers to consider what they will do with the data they collect and how any need for improvements will be communicated. This article also provides a list of assessment models for learning objects that included, MERLOT, the University of Wisconsin, Connecticut Learning Consortium, Center of Academic Transformation, AliveTek, and Wesleyan University's LOLA project.

This article is a good one for people looking for information that goes beyond the debates about defining what a learning object is or is not and whether or not the whole notion of learning objects is dead. I favor two simple definitions for the term learning object, the first is the Southern Regional Educational Board's (SREB, 2005) definition of learning object (LO), "a LO is any digital resource that can be used and reused to support learning". The second is New Media Consortium's (Smith, 2004) definition that connects LOs to materials grouped in structured, meaningful content contributions that are tied to measurable education objectives.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering... I believe that the promise of learning objects to improve teaching and learning is still very much alive.

Making my way through blog lit

While wandering, reading, and reflecting on blogging am working to ground myself in what is known about blogs. Worked my way this evening through the PEW’s (2006) Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers and some eye-opening statistics. Some of the blogging statistics I found of interest in the survey (n=7, 012) included

1.Majority of bloggers are well educated, 37% of the respondents had college degrees compared with the 27% of the Americans with college degrees
2. Well over a third, 38% of bloggers are American knowledge based professionals compared with 13% of the American knowledge based professionals in the workplace
3.Bloggers are overwhelming young, 84% of the respondents were under 50
4.Rather even in gender, 54% of bloggers Male and 46% are female
5.57 million people read blogs and 12 million keep them
6.Older bloggers are a minority, only 16% of respondents over 50 blog
7.51% of bloggers have less than a year’s experience

Could the lack of women bloggers on topics such as; education technology, higher education, and leadership be linked to numbers of women with college degrees and considered knowledge based professional in the workplace? Maybe there just are not that many of us to begin with, let alone enough of us in numbers to make a dent on the Technorati’s biggest blogs in the blogosphere.

More pondering on women bloggers

So, here I was thinking I had noticed something about blogging that others hadn't and decided to start looking around to find out why there weren't more women bloggers. Since beginning my search around the blogspere and my first baby steps at blogging have found that I am not the only person wondering why there aren't more women doing this. AND, of course have found out that I am about two years or more behind other folks who have pondered on the same. Steve Levy, blogged about this on MSNBC, Chris Nolan asked the question and then listed 10 reasons why she thinks women don't blog. She also listed some reasons why she believes women are behind the curve on all this. Nolan's #1 on the list is that more men are techies and her #2 is that "men prefer to link to and to read men like them".

I like to read and will link to others writing about education technology, higher education, and leadership. Although, I'll look for both men and women have expertise in these areas and are articulate, but mostly will look for women bloggers who have the same interests. I suspect that as a woman I too will prefer to link to and read women like me.

Where are the women bloggers?

This is a question I asked myself and men bloggers I knew a few months ago. Since then I learned that many women are blogging and on topics that I am interested in. Interestingly, a woman named Lisa Guernsey was wondering the same thing in Telling all online. It's a man's world (isn't it?),(March 2003). I had the same thought as Lisa when I started looking at the blogs in fall of 2006(Gee, am I behind the blog curve!)

As I poked around and read blogs in late 2006, I just wasn't finding the kinds of blogs on topics that I wanted to read written by women. So, I sent emails to the two Minnesota bloggers I knew, Barry Dahl and Al Essa and asked them to send me the names of women bloggers they tracked.

One of the names I got was Glenda Morgan a woman whose excellent research on course management systems informed my dissertation was blogging.It appears I am tracking Morgan again as I continue my research and look at best practice in education technology, higher education, and now blogging.

All of the bloggers above pointed me to other women bloggers and am finding others along the blogging trails, but more about that later.

Teachers blog to vent, to learn

Found this information about how K-12 educators are using blogs in a recent ASCD Newsletter. According the a Houston Chronicle news article,teachers across the nation are using their own blogs to vent frustrations and defend public education, but they walk a fine line with administrators when airing school business in public is concerned. Houston Chronicle (1/29)

My foray into blogging is all about learning right now, although I may do some venting later on. In reading this article and looking at the links it provided to educator blogs I was glad to see women bloggers listed. One of the things that got me started thinking about a blog of my own was that I was not finding many women who blog about education technology, higher education, and leadership.

Am finding more and more women bloggers on topics I am interested in as I look around and will use my blog to lead others to those I find.