Trying to gear up to read one more article about social movements, especially those opposing the evils of neoliberalism. I'm kinda burned out on reading - I've been doing it since about 10 this morning, with breaks for meals and chores and 'The Simpsons.'
I think blogs have natural attrition rates. Some that I started reading several years ago have petered out when their owners found writing to have become a chore rather than a pleasure. Shane, our inspiration here at UThink, wonders if the pressures of the semester will result in diminished postings to the personal blogs. It's interesting to see so many class blogs this semester, but a bit sad to see so many posts because "it's required."
Enforced sharing with the world (or a subset of it) has always felt coercive to me. One of the biggest shockers of my freshman year in college was reading my admissions file. My most demanding teacher wrote that I didn't contribute much in class, which was a pity. This says something about perception, since MY take on it was that I was usually one of the first to speak up, and only sometimes held back to give someone else a chance.
Here at the U the model for graduate seminars is to have to email a summary of the week's readings, with some questions for discussion, to the instructor and classmates a day or two before the class meeting. This is multipurpose. First, the instructor can check to see if you've really read the stuff (although it's not terribly difficult to fake it once you get the lingo). Second and most usefully, it's good practice to get in the habit of writing about what you've read. Third, the instructor can gear discussion around difficult or debatable points (the cynic in me says it saves on instructor prep time, too, although that may not always be true since it takes a lot of time to read through the dreck that everyone produces).
Which brings me to my final point: writing because you HAVE to, not because you have anything valuable to say, is wasted effort - for you and for your readers. It's why publish-or-perish has led to a proliferation of academic journals, most of which are filled with truly forgettable material. If academics only wrote when they had something burning to share, there would be a lot less to read, and its quality would be markedly better.
Posted by otto0114 at October 3, 2004 09:59 PM