Spent the evening with my Kindle, a few cups of tea, and my most recent items from Instapaper. The highlights of my reading list for the night:
With any luck, what’s happening to blogs will also happen to fact-checking. As fact-check columns proliferate and become impossible to ignore, reporters will start incorporating their conclusions in their reporting, and will eventually reach the (shocking!) point at which they habitually start comparing what politicians say with what the truth of the matter actually is. In other words, the greatest triumph of the fact-checking movement will come when it puts itself out of work, because journalists are doing its job for it as a matter of course.
Felix Salmon – Will fact-checking go the way of blogs?
Cody Brown tweeted a link to this New York Times article earlier today about blogs and term papers. It’s a fairly shallow piece with many things I’d enjoy responding to, but I’ll pick one: the patronizing way the old guard portrays newer forms of writing.
Here are two quotes from that article. The first is from Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist for the American School Board Journal:
It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.
The second is from William H. Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review:
Writing is being murdered. But the solution isn’t blogs, the solution is more reading. We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.
Fitzhugh and Reeves aren’t engaging with the idea of blogs from an academic or evidence-based perspective. They seem to fearful of the new medium and seek to discredit it with all the tact of a gossip writer.
“We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives” is a great soundbite, but it is ridiculous. First, are we so sure there is something wrong with giving kids an outlet to write about themselves and their home life? Second, what does it matter what the output is if the learning that happens in the process of getting there is substantial? I think Fitzhugh and Reeves are far too concerned with the potential output of these blogs than they are with what kids may learn by writing in a medium they enjoy.
If you want to say that blogs have, through research, been the cause of decreasing critical thinking among students that is fine. Merely asserting it does not make it so, though. You need evidence to back your claims, just like the term papers Reeves and Fitzhugh glorify.
If, instead, you are going to characterize the only benefit of blogs as the fact that some are “interesting” and imply that “premise, evidence, argument and conclusion” are only achieved through dead tree term papers, then you are full of it.
These two would be better off taking Reeves’ advice and using premise, evidence, argument, and conclusion to analyze writing on the web.
Snapped while arriving in Port Angeles this afternoon. The drive back to Portland was pretty nasty.
While I’m heading out for the ferry back to Port Angeles I had a fantastic time at WordCamp Victoria. They put on a great event. Thanks Paul, and the rest of the organizing team!
With a cool video intro by Matt.
One of the fantastic things about working for Automattic is that I determine a lot of how I work. The schedule, location, and surroundings are all up to me. My co-workers are night owls, early risers, home office, and café types. Most importantly, we all work in the way that suits us.
Until October of this year I worked solely from my home office. In October Daniel and I started working mostly out of PIE, which is a great location. Over the course of 2011 my location changed but my overall schedule did not.
For a while now my schedule has looked something like this:
The problem is that I have been growing less and less effective at working this way. My efficiency, focus, and happiness have been slipping. So, I’m going to change it up.
While I’ve been thinking of changing my schedule for a while a chat with a co-worker a couple days ago and two serendipitous articles convinced me to try it now. I’m going to see how I get on working in 90 minute increments with 30 minute gaps.
This fits with how I naturally work when I work weekends. Those days I frequently do more in 3 hours than I do in an entire workday during the week. Granted, part of that is because fewer people are around. Still, I think it’s worth considering.
My plan for those 30 minute gap times is to do one of the following: read fiction, cook delicious food, go for a run, write something longhand to post here later.
My goal is to get back to where I was in early October, a time when I was far more productive. Hopefully this schedule and those breaks keep me sane while increasing what I do. After all, it’s what you actually make that matters.
