Month: January 2012

Twitter cares? Some more sources

In the process of doing research for my article on twitter and care, I found some sources on using twitter in health care. I’m fascinated with and somewhat troubled by how online technologies (in particular, twitter and smartphone Apps) are used for (marketing) self/health care.

Here are just two that I found and that I’d like to put BESIDE/S by research on twitter and feminist ethics of care:

1. Hashtag Empathy
2. Take Two Aspirin and Tweet Me in the Morning: How Twitter, Facebook and other social media are helping to reshape health care

questions about group think

It seems like lots of people that I read on a regular basis are talking about the problems with groupthink these days. The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Brain Pickings have all had posts about it in the last couple of weeks. I want to write a lengthier post about it soon. For now, here are some questions that this focus on groupthink raises for me:

Why is everyone talking about “group think” lately? Are there underlying motivations for discussing it? What do they mean by groupthink? How do you write it, groupthink or group think? What are the differences between group think and “crowd sourcing”–a la Cathy Davidson’s valuing of it in Now you see it? What is the role of the individual in the creative process? How does/should that individual relate to a group? What are all of these criticisms of groupthink saying about the individual and/vs. the group? What is my creative process? How does groupthink cause problems for group projects? What are some alternatives to group projects? (How) does my dialog assignment speak to and/or reinforce the problems of groupthink?

Okay, enough questions for now. I’m thinking of using the new “aside” format for wordpress to do some “asking question” exercises. This post was my first experiment with it.

The trouble with footnotes

When I was in graduate school, I loved footnotes. Yes, I’m a big nerd. I loved reading author’s asides and contextualizations of their arguments. I also loved following the trail of their sources to new sources and new possibilities. I remember first reading bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center and being disappointed (even as I loved her ideas and writing style and recognized the politics behind her decision) that she didn’t have footnotes. How could I see where her work comes from? What shapes her understanding of her claims? Now, having spent so much time blog writing, my love of footnotes has been replaced (has it? well, maybe not replaced but joined?) by an equal or greater love of links and parenthetical and italicized asides. (okay, maybe I have too much love for parenthetical asides. Ha!)

Do footnotes belong in blog writing? I’m in the process of posting parts of a “academicky” article on this blog and I keep asking myself this question. Nerd that I am, I feel compelled to do some research on the (I’m sure) numerous ways that others have weighed in on the point of footnotes (in all writings, offline and online). I think I’ll start with bell hooks and page 81 of Talking Back.

I’m slowly learning HTML

I started blogging in the spring of 2007. Pretty early on, I decided that knowing just a little html was useful for fixing my own problems and having a greater sense of how blogs work. Of course, “knowing just a little html” meant that I learned the code for creating links and italicizing <em></em> and bolding text <strong></strong> and that was about it. At this point, I should mention that I feel fairly strongly about the value of learning at least a little about how blogging works behind the scenes. Knowing just a little allows you to experiment more and doesn’t make you as dependent on trusting/relying on the technology. It can also make you look like (more of) a fancy expert (than you actually are). Since 2007, I’ve developed 19 course blogs and co-developed 3 personal ones. (wow, that’s a lot) and I have learned a little bit more html code…slowly and gradually. I’m contemplating making a more serious effort to know the language this year. Still not sure. Anyway, I thought I’d post the most recent code that I learned from STA.

None of this code is earth-shatteringly awesome, but for someone like me, who wants to experiment creatively and critically with blogs but isn’t a html/web developing expert, this code is useful. Maybe it’s useful for you too:

Creating notes (end/footnotes):
Marking note in text: <a href="#note1"id="note1linkback">*</a>
Marking note at end: <a href="#note1linkback"id="note1">*</a>

(I use “note1” to describe the note, but you can use whatever text you want (I think) as long as you’re consistent. Maybe “totallyawesomeandbrilliantthought1”?

To make the text smaller, since it’s a footnote/endnote, just wrap the entire text above with the html for small: <small></small>

I’ve been trying out this new code, on my recent blog posts on “twitter cares,” like this one.