Blogs

(Note to readers: Okie Funk will be undergoing maintenance over the next week. The blog will soon have a new look as well. The maintenance message will appear when the blog is offline. Please check back later if you get the message.)

The Oklahoma blogosphere should continue to relentlessly critique, criticize and respond to the corporate media here.

The state also needs a major initiative that would get fair, progressive news sites and blogs online in this state. Big donors need to step forward and help create larger, better sites that can truly challenge the right-wing press, such as The Oklahoman. The effort could take a few years before it culminates in real change or a return on investments, but it would be worth it.

I envision sites that will report news, especially political news, with balance and fairness in new electronic formats that appeal to all age groups. These sites would offer regular commentary that consistently challenges the dead, right-wing ideologies of the editorial writers for The Oklahoman and The Tulsa World. We also need to push for more wireless hotspots in the state’s two largest metropolitan areas and high speed Internet use in rural areas.

The corporate media in Oklahoma and throughout the nation is suffering from a lack of trust among its aging audience, dwindling subscribers and viewers, a declining advertising base and competition from the Internet. It’s time to press forward. For those doubters, Barack Obama’s campaign, with its brilliant use of the Internet, tells us all: “Yes, we can.”

How can we use blogs in the college classroom? How should we archive the best blogs in our culture? Who should rank blogs according to their academic and cultural validity? Should we allow only corporations to rank blogs according to traffic? How will blogs continue to influence academic and cultural discourse?

These are just a few of the questions discussed at this year’s annual MERLOT Conference in Minneapolis, which I’m attending this week, as blogs continue to change the ways in which we read and write.

As I mentioned in my previous post, MERLOT stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. The organization helps college professors and instructors incorporate new technologies in their online and onground classes in a variety of ways. It serves as a clearing house for technology-related learning objects and resources. It publishes JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching). It holds annual conferences that bring together educational technologists from around the world.

Blogs continue to change the academic landscape. An increasing number of college professors and instructors require students to blog as class assignments. Academics, in general, are increasingly using blogs to convey significant course and research material. Professors can lecture on blogs, for example, and then open up the discussion to their students.

One session at MERLOT this year was titled “Using Blogs to Enhance Course Writing Activities.” The presenter, Nima Salehi, talked about ongoing blogging projects in the classroom.

Students in one class were given a set of assignment directions that included this statement about netiquette: “All comments posted to blogs should remain polite, analytical and free of comments that might be construed as negative personal attacks. Disagreement with ideas in reviews should be presented within that context and supported by referencing other materials or examples.”

Wouldn’t it be great if we could get people within the political blogosphere to follow this basic netiquette?

I often use blogging both to lecture and as a class assignment in my online courses. The question I find most pressing is how you focus student blogs on course content. Many students coming to college think of blogs as personal diaries. But personal blogging is just one aspect of the blogosphere, which increasingly is home to a substantial academic discourse.

This leads to another pressing question. How do we archive the best blogs in academia and our current culture for future generations? I have had some interesting discussions about this issue with online instructors, librarians and information technologists at the conference this week. Many academics with an interest in technology still find there is a bias against blogs, but that is quickly changing.

So how do we sort through and archive the massive amount of material now produced by blogs? What blogs should be archived? Who decides what is important?

There are no easy answers to these questions, but this much is clear: Academic blogs and other intellectual web-based material is changing the way we understand and communicate knowledge.

(Okie Funk will be updated on a sporadic basis this week because I’m traveling and taking time off. I will get back to my regular schedule next week. Below are some excerpts from posts published in 2004 to 2006.—Kurt Hochenauer)

Want a real eye-opener to what is really the problem with the Middle East? Want to know the real reason young American soldiers are dying in Iraq? Want to really understand the anger and mistrust many Arabs feel towards our country?

Then take a drive through Dallas down I-35 in a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane. The Dallas HOV lanes, for those who do not know, allow vehicles with two or more occupants to use a special left lane to pass all those one-person occupied vehicles in the other five lanes.

I did just that a couple of weeks ago, and it was an almost surreal experience.

This is what I saw: truck after SUV after minivan after truck after SUV after car, with air conditioners at full blast, stuck in snail-paced traffic with one lonely driver at the wheel. Their zombie-like eyes stared vacantly at the bumpers before them.

Mile after mile, five lanes stuffed with vehicles, as I cruised passed in a tiny compact. Zombies staring into ugly highway space, stuck, idling, using gasoline but going nowheresville real slow. Meanwhile, I felt like a cheat and a fool, especially since I displayed Okie plates and a John Kerry for President bumper sticker.

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How dare I actually have someone in the car with me so I could pass all these good, warm-hearted Texans who love our troops the most of everyone in the country? Was this right? Was I going to get myself . . . kilt?

I saw not one bus much less a commuter train or any other form of mass transit.
I did see big, big, big vehicles.—”Texas Tea Guzzlers,” June 10, 2004

A shameless editorial today (February 22, 2005) in The Daily Oklahoman attacks the American Association of Retired People for its logical opposition to George Bush’s plan to destroy the country’s Social Security system.

In one of those weird twists of logic unique to the newspaper’s editorialists, the editorial calls the AARP “hypocritical” because it offers deals on mutual funds for its members. Titled, “Hypocrisy? AARP straddles Social Security furor,” the editorial cites a right-wing columnist, James K. Glassman, who hands the immoral newspaper its GOP talking points for the day.

The editorial cites the columnist’s argument that “ . . . AARP is talking out of both sides of its mouth, because while the organization is busy trashing Bush's private accounts plan, it offers its members investment opportunities in 38 mutual funds from which it receives a financial cut from each sale.”

There is simply no logical disconnection between AARP trying to protect the country’s main retirement system and also encouraging a plurality of investments for its members. The AARP is not taking an anti-investment or anti-business position in the debate. It is not taking an anti-Bush stance. The organization simply wants to ensure the solvency of Social Security.
In addition, the person writing the editorial had to be aware of these two facts: (1) Glassman is connected to the conservative think tank, The American Enterprise Institute, and (2) a group connected to the mudslinging Swift Boat liars are planning a coordinated and highly funded campaign to attack the AARP. Undoubtedly, the editorial writer deliberately chose to omit these two crucial details because The Oklahoman will not argue its positions truthfully.—“The Daily Oklahoman Attacks AARP,” February 22, 2005

Proposed legislation that ties the budget of state government to population growth and the inflation rate is apparently still on the political table in Oklahoma. The Republican-sponsored bill, modeled after the Orwellian-named Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR) legislation in Colorado, would gut Oklahoma education, especially higher education.

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Oklahomans would make a tragic mistake if they vote for this legislation if it does make it to the ballot. (There are some indications the bill is losing support.) Oklahoma is a small state with limited population growth. We even lost a congressional seat after the last census because of limited growth compared to the country’s average population growth. Under the proposed bill’s provisions, even a small downturn in the state’s economy might lead to, among other things, massive teacher layoffs, school closings, and higher college tuition. In addition, its impact on our state’s disadvantaged would be immeasurable.—”TABOR Would Devastate State,” March 29, 2005

Ignored and neglected, then and now, by the state’s powerful people, and especially the conservative right, Okemah (like much of rural Oklahoma) is a particularly noteworthy symbol of the nation’s contradictions, its cyclical miseries, and its inspirational but sometimes fraudulent mythologies. It becomes even more symbolic when one considers it is the place where one of the nation’s most moral sons first created a music that provided the inspiration for a populist movement that seized the country’s imagination and brought about decisive change through Roosevelt’s New Deal.

That moral son, of course, was Woody Guthrie. But where was Woody? I couldn’t find him anywhere. Dusk descended on the town. A mangy mutt crossed the street in front of me. Was that a coyote I heard howling in the distance? Was that an armadillo or possum that darted under a huge rock and down into a large hole? Did the young man walking down the street look at me strangely or was I just imagining things? A redigitalized Guthrie sang out from my car’s radio and into surreal Okemah, Oklahoma:

One Sunday morning
In the shadow of the steeple
By the relief office
I seen my people
As they stood hungry,
I stood there whistling this:
This land was made for you and me.

Woody Guthrie, I thought to myself, where are you?—“Where’s Woody?” October 4, 2006