Hey! Regardless of what my permalinks seem to tell you, that last entry was entry number 1000 here at Planned Obsolescence. It took me a little less than five years to get here, but it’s a nice week for the milestone, given my hopes for returning to serious blogging…

I finished up the looming-deadline project a full two days early, I’m happy to report, and am now turning to other phases of my summer work. I’ve got a zillion things I hope to accomplish, ranging from lots of MediaCommons stuff (with the goal of a fall launch!) to getting the new writing project that I began tinkering with over winter break up and running.

But there’s something else major that I need to accomplish, and PDQ: I need to start blogging again. I miss it terribly, but I was really only half-kidding when I suggested a few weeks ago that I’ve forgotten how to do this. I had a conversation about this yesterday with a blogging pal, who argued, as I’ve also said of myself before, that she looks at the world differently when she’s blogging actively—that so many more small things present themselves to her as worthy of being written about.

I’ve gotten far enough out of the habit that I don’t look at the world that way at all; nothing appears particularly worth posting. So for the next couple of weeks, I’m challenging myself simply to get back in the groove, by blogging the reading I’m doing, for instance, anything that will get the words flowing again.

Today, somebody figured out how to overcome my trackback URL randomization and leave me 20-plus spam trackbacks. All from different IP addresses.

Here marks the (hopefully temporary) end of trackbacks on Planned Obsolescence.

A big fat reward, however, of a type to be negotiated later, to whomever can devise a properly secure trackback technology.

It’s graduation day here in Claremont, and for the first time ever we’re holding the ceremony outside, where it promises to be 75 and sunny and breezy, rather than in the big auditorium, where it is invariably non-airconditioned, stuffy, crowded, and what my grandmother would have called “close.” Should be a glorious day, once I get myself dressed and out there into it.

And then tomorrow—tomorrow, I’m on a plane, headed to Louisiana to get R.

I’ve looked forward to this summer for sixteen years. And it’s finally here.

(This post brought to you by my new summer-based determination to return to blogging. This is going to require some stumbling initial steps, I think, as I’m pretty sure I’ve entirely forgotten how to do this. But I promise more in the coming days, and even a return to actual intellectual content.

Happy Mother’s Day, in the meantime.)

To say that I’ve been a bad blogger of late is to underestimate the situation pretty seriously.  There have been moments, over the course of the spring, when I’ve wondered if I was losing interest in blogging.  In fact, I think the paucity of writing here is driven by something related, but slightly different:  I’ve lost interest in myself, or in my thoughts, at least.  Nothing seems of sufficient interest, even to me, to bother writing about here.

The problem, as far as I can tell, is that this semester (like most semesters? unlike most semesters? I imagine the former, though somehow it feels worse this year) has been all about the expenditure of energy, with precious little in the way of battery-recharging, whether in terms of downtime or in terms of the kind of work that’s energizing rather than draining, the kind that brings new ideas and a desire to write about them.

In fact, what little time I’ve had to spend on my own work this semester has been spent taking an introduction to computer science class, which has been energizing in its own way, but hasn’t really been productive of stuff to write about.  Because… inheritance!  recursion!  exceptions!  Great stuff to learn, but I clearly don’t know enough about anything yet to have anything worthwhile to say.

But we’re very rapidly moving up on putting this semester to bed, so I’m hoping to get back to some new reading (rather than re-reading) and, even better, some new writing, very soon.

Grrr.  I’m having an utterly infuriating time with air-l, one of the listservs that I’m subscribed to, because my subscription was apparently set up from my actual technical email address (which has a login id composed of a seemingly random collection of letters and numbers) but my email client uses one of my more sensible aliases (the eminently reasonable kfitzpatrick) in the “from” field, which makes the listserv think that there’s a message coming from someone who’s unsubscribed.  Easy-peasy, I thought; unsubscribe from the random collection of letters and numbers, resubscribe from kfitzpatrick, and resend the message!  Except: my subscription for some reason now requires moderator approval, and the moderator keeps on not approving.

What’s aggravating about this is that the conversation taking place, the one I wanted to throw my two cents into, is one that I really, really care about:  using blogs as an instructional tool.  And I’ve been feeling all squelched and stymied, and thinking, boy, I wish I had a way to get these thoughts Out There, into circulation.

Hey, wait!  I have a blog!

So here’s the thoughts.  The conversation begins with a post by a senior-type scholar of internet studies who raises the following question about class blogs:

I have Google Alert set to identify anything online that mentions my name. (I want to know who is talking about me and perhaps learn from their comments.)

Recently, I have been disturbed because Google Alert keeps popping up Blogspot entries that clearly come from class blog entries.

While I am happy that folks are reading my stuff, I am aghast that their entries are on the web for all to read.  (Altho I smile that they say nice things.)

I know that I don’t post my students’ term papers on the web [I only give ‘em to Turnitin;-)], but this strikes me as an even greater invasion of the students’ privacy. Shouldn’t such within-class stuff be password protected?

Something about this message really got under my skin; it seemed to me a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of a class blog.  There’ve been a number of good responses to this message that have come across the list (which I’ve had to go read from the air-l archives page, because I’m still not subscribed), but I really wanted my response out there.  So here it is:

While there’s definitely something here that demands to be considered, I’m not sure that it falls within the realm of ethics.  For the last several years, I’ve had almost all of my classes blogging, in public venues that are purposefully not password-protected.  I do, however, have a series of frank conversations with my students about the value and the consequences of doing intellectual work in public, and I think such conversations are necessary.

For instance, I have my students use screen names under which they blog, and we spend some time talking about why—talking about the durability of data on the internet, and the ways that Google and the Internet Archive can make things they’ve written publicly available long after they’ve forgotten them.  And I tell them that I want them to be free to take risks in my classes without having to worry that some future employer will google them in the process of a job search and discover some boneheaded thing that they wrote in my class.  For some of them, this conversation causes the light bulb to go on over their heads, and they head out and google themselves, to see what can already be found.

But we also discuss the value of doing this kind of intellectual work in public, of writing for an audience that is larger than just ourselves, of genuinely engaging with a broader field of folks working on the same issues.  And everytime something like this happens—a student posts a question about Scott Rettberg’s “Kind of Blue,” for instance, and Scott Rettberg himself pops by to respond—it absolutely electrifies the class, conveying in ways that no amount of talk from me will that they really are engaged in a conversation among scholars.

So yes, I think students’ privacy concerns need to be a subject of conversation, and I think that students need to be given some reasonable means of protecting themselves.  But I think the benefits of such public course blogs far outweigh the risks, and I think the discussions of those privacy concerns are themselves really productive for students to engage in.

Perhaps after I finish with this week’s four department meetings and two program meetings. Not to mention the departmental social event, and the conference call, and the two one-on-one meetings, and the lecture.

And then there’s that little teaching thing I do sometimes. Today, we wrapped up Gravity’s Rainbow. Wednesday, it’s on to Underworld. And then there’s the other class.

So yes, I do intend to start blogging again. Right after I manage to get myself “caught up” (or so I’ve heard it called), and also get “a full night’s sleep” (ditto).

I’m apparently on something of a hiatus, at the moment. In part it’s due to the issues I last wrote about (I’m too busy for much of interest to happen, and what of interest is happening, I can’t write about), but it’s also in part due to the fact that these days I seem to have the attention span of a gnat. I’m hoping to be back here, on something more akin to my regular posting schedule, shortly.

I’ve honestly just been too busy even to contemplate blogging, much less to write anything. (Or even read anything; I’m about as out of touch with bloglandia as I’ve been anytime in the last five years.) I’m hoping to get caught up enough to produce something of value here soon.

A bit belatedly, a post mostly serving to bookmark for myself Scott McLemee’s IHE column growing out of the MLA blogging panel, with a very interesting conversation (both in the column and in the comments) about gender, academic blogging, stardom, and anonymity.

I’ve been working up a storm, and the big blogging project I’ve mentioned several times is actually beginning to take some shape.  I’ll hope to post some bits from it for discussion as they become available.