Google Search for "online teaching"

A Google Search this morning (online teaching), turned up a couple of interesting hits. That is, they were interesting enough for me to review and then tag them in Diigo, a social bookmarking system that I use for micro-blogging instead of Twitter. I've replicated the two tagged entries below.

The first, Starter.co.nz, I thought may be of interest to teachers of young learners, who can browse previews of available resources, and decide whether such a subscription service would be of value to them or their schools. So I posted it to the Classroom 2.0 group, as I was adding it to my list of Educational Technology items.

Home | starters.co.nz

A follow-on to the no longer active http://www.teachingonline.org/ site, "starters.co.nz is a web-based subscription resource for schools featuring over 1600 quality pdf, ready-to-use lesson plans including digital resources such as videos and websites that enhance and add depth to the lessons. / Our lessons are based on and cover all areas of the New Zealand Curriculum and are grouped for Yrs 1–4 and Yrs 4–9+. / starters is particularly useful for printing out easy-to-follow quality lessons for relieving teachers" (deck, 2013.02.03).

more from www.starters.co.nz 

- Not Cached - Edit - Delete -

Share▼ 

- Preview

education lessons New Zealand resources schools starters&strategies subscriptions teachers teaching videos websites

in group: Classroom 2.0

in list: Educational Technology

The second, from the Designing for Learning website, has an intended audience of university faculty members new to online teaching, or interested in imporving their online teaching practices. So I decided to post it to the Moodle4Teachers group, as well as two others to which I belong, and cross-listed in both my Educational Technology and my Faculty Development lists.

Designing for Learning: Ten Best Practices for Teaching Online: Quick Guide for New Online Faculty

On this page, Boettcher explains, "ten best practices for anyone just getting started in the online environment. Research and experience suggest that these practices contribute to an effective, efficient and satisfying teaching and learning experience for both faculty and students" (para. 2, retrieved 2012.02.03 ["Minor revisions May 2011"]).

more from www.designingforlearning.info 

- Cached - Text View - Edit - Delete -

Share▼ 

- Preview

activities communities discussions education feedback faculty groups hints learning online personalization practicessocial presence support teachers teaching universities

in group: LearningwithComputers, Moodle4Teachers, Classroom 2.0

in list: Faculty Development, Educational Technology

When I returned again to the Google Search page, I noticed Google also had spotted "49 [other] items in ... [my] Diigo Library." Please feel free to check them out, too, and if you have any favorites or hot picks of your own, please share them in return.

Two articles, one after the other: 1 + 1 = 0.5?

Toward the end of last year, two extremely similar articles about one study showed up in social media networks for language educators worldwide. Both articles splashed on sensational headlines to make it sound almost like the findings represented everyone in Japan – population: 127 million (2010 estimate, WolframAlpha). 

1. Nearly 90% dissatisfied with Japan's English education: survey – The Mainichi, December 3, 2012; and
• Arama, they didn't! LiveJournal, December 4, 2012
• 21st Century English Langauge Learners, Teachers and Administrators: Ajaan Rob Hatfield, Scoop.it, December 5, 2012
• TESOL Intl Assn, Twitter, December 5, 2012
2. Japanese highly unhappy with English education quality in the country – Ida Torres, The Japan Daily Press, December 4, 2012
• TESOL International Association, English Langauge Bulletin; December 12, 2012
• ELT Professionals around the World: Ian Butler, LinkedIn, c. December 15, 2012

Neither of those two articles cites the Rakuten Research study in a way that enables readers to find it easily. Nor do any of the other as-is social media representations of the articles shed any additional light on the subject.

If you're interested in reading either the original Rakuten Research press release, or the online report, both dated November 21, 2012; they're here:

• 楽天リサーチ、「日本の英語教育」に関する調査を発表 (press release)
• http://corp.rakuten.co.jp/news/press/2012/1121_02.html
• Apparently not published in English (press releases [2012])
• 日本の英語教育に関する調査 (report)
• http://research.rakuten.co.jp/report/20121121/
• PDF: http://research.rakuten.co.jp/report/pdf/english_20121121.pdf
• Though the filename seems to suggest that the PDF is in English, it isn't.

At best, both articles cherry-picked findings from a Rakuten Research report covering only 1000 subjects, parents of children whom the articles describe variously as "underage" (Mainichi) or simply "young" (Torres). The survey actually involved 1000 16- to 69-year-old men and women with non-adult children (report, ¶1). The prospective population from which those 1000 responses derived included approximately two and a quarter million subscribed monitors (report, ¶1) earning points redeemable for Rakuten services – a response rate of approximately 0.04%.

Networked Student - YouTube (2008.11.26)

Networked Student - YouTube: Uploaded by Wendy Drexler on Nov 26, 2008

"The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler's high school students." 

(YouTube description, link added)

The Networked Student (Drexler, 2008)

'via Blog this'

Which Google Docs for Beginners?

The presentation below recap's a pilot study I've undertaken to gather opinions regarding the most suitable Google Docs for beginning Google Docs users.

If you are willing to take part in the survey itself, please submit your responses, once, in a form you'll find here (opens in a new window). If you have questions or concerns about either the pilot study or the current survey, please post them in comments on this post. Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Quick Study of Blog Feed Stat's

When the ClustrMaps widget on the Writing Studio Blog started getting blotchy in locations other than Japan, I started wondering how all the blots came to be. Some, I knew, represented sources of comment spam that began showing up recently even though I've kept that blog out of Blogger listings (Settings: Basic: Add your blog to...: No!) since its inception. 


So today I took a look at FeedBurner Feed Stat[']s for both the blog headline feed and the blog post feed that I'd redirected through FeedBurner, respectively: 

• Headlines: February 25, 2007
• Posts: January 15, 2009

A difference discernible in spite of the disparate ages of the redirected feeds is in how the feeds get used. The Headlines go to FeedBurner Email subscriptions, and, although there also is a "Get Mailed: Posts" from FeedBurner gadget in the blog sidebar, too, the Posts, by and large, go into feed readers and aggregators – over the past seven to 30 days, mainly to Mozilla Compatible Agents (5-10), Google FeedCatcher (2-3), and PubSub (2 [unchanged]). 


Also over the past seven to thirty days, but for neither feed, have there been any hits (clicks on the feeds) from either Google Chrome or Internet Explorer browsers. Most hits have been from Firefox browsers; next most, from other Mozilla driven browsers.


The remainder of this post lists other findings as well as sources of this information, to which you may not have access (except in parallel locales relevant to your own FeedBurner feeds). 

The Writing Studio Blog: Headlines

Current

33 subscribers

Last Seven Days: Wednesday, March 31 – Tuesday, April 06

28 subscribers (on average)

"This number provides a general understanding of the size of your subscriber base over a time period" (FeedBurner Help, What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them? How does it look?).

Last 30 Days: Monday, March 08 – Tuesday, April 06

28 subscribers (on average)

• including 27 email subscriptions

All Time: Sunday, February 25, 2007 – Tuesday, April 6, 2010

• since adding Post Feed Redirect URL to blog Site Feed settings
• jumped from two to almost 30 in April 2008

18 subscribers (on average)

• 18 email subscriptions

__________
Source: The Writing Studio Blog: Headlines – Analyze (Google FeedBurner)

The Writing Studio Blog: Posts

Current

55 subscribers

• more than doubles average for Last Seven Days (below)
• almost triples average for Last 30 Days (below)

Last Seven Days: Wednesday, March 31 – Tuesday, April 06

24 subscribers (on average)

• including one email subscription

1 reach (on average)

"At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight." (FeedBurner Help, What is Reach?, What does it tell you?).

Last 30 Days: Monday, March 08 – Tuesday, April 06

19 subscribers (on average)

• including one email subscription

1 reach (on average) 

All Time: Friday, January 15, 2010 – Tuesday, April 6, 2010

• since adding Post Feed Redirect URL to blog Site Feed settings

16 subscribers (on average) 

• zero email subscriptions

0 reach (on average) 

__________
Source: The Writing Studio Blog: Posts – Analyze (Google FeedBurner)

The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity

Wesch (YouTube, 2009.07.16) presents "a brief history" and extolls a new age of "whatever" (33:44 min.), which as Couros (2009.07.21) suggests is well worth our time.

Odeo player test

The purpose of this post is to test scripts for embedding Odeo players for recordings that students made.

Track One



Track Two

Kumamoto Lantern Festival (2008.10.10)

Created from an iPhoto slide show [exported as a .mov file, uploaded to YouTube, and posted to a Blogger blog setup in YouTube

Notes:

• Blog setup in YouTube requires blog password.
• The YouTube video posting function affords text input (e.g.: the text above outside square brackets), but apparently not labels or tags.]
  

Balance, on all fours

Balance, on all fours, seems to be what keeps tails from wagging dogs. For educational technologists, these days, the balance and interplay of humanity and technology seem to keep coming to the fore. The technological end of things has been twisting my noodle since I chewed over Achieving Sleep/Network Balance (Ceraso, ELT Blog, 2007.10.21) in pab's potpourri (2008.01.28).

Call it a rush, or addictive, vacuous pressure to adopt more and more diversified web tools, join more and more diversified professional and social networks, hold further discussions - with more people, explore existing topics more deeply, share and try new ideas, compare findings, pool and package resources, ..., and what do we get?

Loud whooshing sounds as our lives evacuate online, or something graphically represented as an exploding head, for which Alan Levine suggests he is "lacking an easy answer beyond shrugging it off, unplugging, letting stuff slide, or just floating along til the groove returns." Nonetheless, he keeps contemplating "how much 'power' we acquiesce to technology tools" (CogDogBlog, Exploding Heads, 2008.07.22).

Without ever having tried twittering, I'm inclined to agree that doing it needn't make everyone who does micro-thinkers. Yet humans are creatures of habits, and Levine wonders, "If some of the most sharp and clever people I know and respect find themselves overly immersed in something like twitter, what does that portend for the many more people who look to them for guides?"

If collection and recollection of both data and thoughts becomes largely and ubiquitously mechanical and piece-meal, it may lead to flattening of the web, and bode ill for discursive thought patterns, coherent conversations, cogent analyses, and deliberative syntheses. When push comes to pull, which way will online educators be leaning - towards the flat, quick, and transient, or the deep, rich, and stable?

It comes as some relief to hear of folks abandoning twitter accounts before I ever got one. However, I felt a twitch of dismay yesterday discovering So Many Nodes, Not Enough Reciprocity (Yet) (Marielle, Authorship 2.0, 2008.07.03), about which I growled on the LTD Project Blog (2008.07.24). Marielle reminds us "not to get lost in a plethora of solipsistic silos, speaking without listening, [and] reinventing rather than building upon each other’s ideas and deepening the collective dialogue." I wonder how long it may take twitter-free digital immigrants to groove deep enough into the web for the rest of the world to hear the music.

Photo by Andrey Sukhanov (2008)
Creative Commons License BY-NC 2.0

Diigo bookmarking for Learning with Computers

To increase visibility of a Learning with Computers group discussion going on in Diigo, just one of several venues in which members of that group interact, I'm going to cross-post here a bit that I wrote there:

I'd like to offer some reflections based on observations and suggestions that other participants have made already. To those I will add a few of my own ideas about collective bookmarking.

Joao Alves (among others) urges us to adopt the "tags Diigo suggests...[, and]... agree on a special tag for the group like 'LWC' that we would always add to every bookmark we tagged" (message 5).

Recommended tags are a start, but I'm always curious about who recommends them, and what for. I suppose they represent collective practices that may be more spontaneous or less focused than ours. LWC sounds quick, and easy to remember, yet may be quite obscure to other Diigo uses who don't already know that it stands for Learning with Computers.

After many hours on screen, I prefer tags with greater visual definition than all CAP's, so CamelCase is my favorite for MultiWordTags. I'm not sure, however, whether Diigo defeats capitalization. If not, I'd prefer something like LwC.

Joao goes on to suggest,"Organizing tags in topics or bundles like in del.icio.us would be helpful to find the most relevant site about the subject we are interested in." Though bundles in del.icio.us are quite powerful in that they enable multi-purpose uses of individual tags, as well as consolidation of similar ones, I have a distinct impression that bundling may work better with single word tags.

Having done most of my bookmarking in del.icio.us, up to now, I've hardly ever felt a need to double or triple up on words, since searching for intersections or conjunctions between tag sets in del.icio.us is a given. I'm looking forward to finding out whether Diigo offers such powerful search options.

Mary Hillis points out: "... [Y]ou could simply use quotation marks for "lesson plan". Maybe this is another advantage of using Diigo" (message 4), and Joao agrees: "... [Q]uotation marks are very useful to write tags that have 2 or more words. I have always appreciated this feature in Flickr" (message 5). The use of quotation marks to demarcate exact phases may be common to Ma.gnolia bookmarking as well.

Earlier on Susana expressed preference for using nouns as tags (message 3), a preference we share to some extent. I tended to use plural forms for countable nouns. I still do sometimes hoping that bookmarking tool search engines will recognize the word noun as a subset of the category nouns more readily, perhaps, than they recognize the word nouns as a derivative of the tag noun.

If such search parameters aren't available yet, they should be. Otherwise, generic web searches for exact quotations and partial character strings may more than suffice for finding content for which interpretation into special terminology is unnecessary.

I've also experimented with a greatest common denominator strategy that works, I imagine, rather like a bundling strategy for similar tags. Take, for instance, collaborat, a tag I tend to favor in de.licio.us to capture the essence of collaborate, collaboration, collaborative, and collaborators. Nevertheless[,] I realize that tags such as collaborat, like the tailor-made one Susana mentioned, edudiigolwc, call for awareness-raising, if not public definition and explanation, in order to be of use to wider and wider groups of bookmark browsers or connoisseurs.

Tag clouds added to blogs, for instance, or provided in group bookmarking tools themselves, for example: de.licio.us and Ma.gnolia, are means of raising awareness. Yet Diigo, as options for individual commentary, comments earmarked for groups, and discussions like this one illustrate, affords ample opportunities for explanation in situ to those wish to elaborate for the benefit of a community such as the Learning with Computers cohort. What a pleasure it is!

(How should we use the tagging system to better organize our group bookmarking, message 6, 2008.06.24 [JST])

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The Learning with Computers group venue @ Diigo is public. Please feel free to share comments here, or join us there.

Quick Captures from Eduspaces

With free services, I gather it's better not to keep all of your eggs in one basket. Now that I've decided to opt out of forced migration from Eduspaces.net to EducatorsCentral.org (a projected TakingITGlobal service), and thanks to limited investment in Eduspaces over the past couple of years, it has been relatively easy to self-migrate those bits of content and resources that I had concentrated in Eduspaces to other free services, before my Eduspaces account gets deleted:

1. Profile information (c. 2006):
   
• Self-description,
• Interests, and
  
• Skills; and
  
2. RSS feeds (5) to:
• Eduspaces communities (3):
1. Blogs, wikis, and social software for teaching and learning,
2. Communication and Collaboration Online, and
   
3. eportfolios;
• CiteULike: Tag socialsoftware
• Wordpress blog: EdTechPost
  

Proceeding in a small pieces loosely linked fashion, I have updated and relocated the RSS feeds described above. They are now in a temporary PageFlakes page (currently private),

The Eduspaces community links (above), also updated, will probably break down by the second week of March 2008, due to the service migration detailed in a previous post (Any Elgg users out there?, 2008.02.14). The same goes for the hot-linked keywords listed under interests and skills in the profile information that I've cut and pasted in below (Who am I...).

It may be possible to update those links once the actual migration from eduspaces.net to educatorcentral.org occurs, by replacing all of the domain names in the link URLs. However, I plan not to rebuild dozens more links - at least not anytime soon.

Who am I?

An educator and a learner, a parent and a child, a colleague and a friend.

Interests

collaboration, community, culture, development, education, language, learning, moodle, open source, portfolios, reflection, software, teaching, technology, tools

Main Skills

collaboration, communication, facilitation, learning, reflection, teaching

What gives for RSS?

Thanks to continuing stimuli from the Blogging for Educators workshop, it has dawned on me (or is about to) that RSS feeds will soon replace most, if not all, cross-links as conjunctive interfaces among: blogs, webpages, and wikis (and whatever else is out there that serves up RSS feeds). The transition from links to feeds may delineate moves from Web 1.x to Web 2.n.

As long as display space is available on your home page, for instance in Flock (a browser [thanks to Mary H. for turning me on to Flock a year or so ago]), Google or Yahoo! readers, PageFlakes, or a host of other RSS feed aggregators; links will serve only a subordinate function: Click and see, instead of see and click.

Publishing directly from Mind42 (beta)

Backup your template regularly!

The more involved that you get with your blog, the greater the chance is that you or the blogging service that you're using will mess it up radically. So here is a bit of advice to myself as much as anyone:

Backup / Restore Template

Before editing your template, you may want to save a copy of it. Download Full Template....

(Blogger: Settings: Template: Edit HTML)

You do want to backup your template before you radically change it, don't you?

Tip of an information iceberg - telling questions

In an interesting elgg weblog, Christopher D. Sessums points out a "provocative" animated presentation about the Facebook:

Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?

(http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/)

Sessums follows up with telling questions, then reveals another layer of the story, a blog post archived on a Common Ground - Common Sense forum, dated August 3, 2005, with a whack of other references to follow up.

In comments on Sessums' weblog entry, Frances Bell cites Facebook terms of use and asks another telling question: "If user content had already been reused or republished, what meaning would expiry of license have?"

Though this may be just the tip of an information iceberg, is it not too late to steer clear?

Class-Based RSS for Reading & Writing

This post begins by recapping Parry (2006) and continues as a virtual dialog digesting and reflecting upon larger chunks of Parry's article (a Blogging for Beginners workshop task-related reading).

Recap

Laying the groundwork of an argument for class-based RSS feeding, Parry (2006) points out need for learners to make effective use of two distinct sets of analytical reading skills, especially in online venues: "one, the quick analysis to find what is worth reading, and the second, a switch to slow analysis to carefully consider what has been found" (Parry, 2006, Helping Students to Become Better Readers to Become Better Writers, paragraph 3). He argues that RSS supports the first, and saves time for the second. Rather than provide an RSS tutorial, Parry points out a number of other guides, and concludes by claiming "RSS alters the transmission (reading and writing) of digital knowledge, and thus is critically important to any classroom instruction which requires digital composition, but especially projects which involve blogging" (Parry, 2006, Conclusion).

Three Large Tender Morsels for Digestion

To require students to write papers and then post them to a blog or website misses the point. In fact, this often results in frustrated students, because understandably they fail to see the relevance of such writing. Instead, productive classroom blog projects focus on teaching students how writing for the internet requires a different type of authorship—again, an important lesson in how context shapes meaning.

(Parry, 2006, Why it Matters for Student Writing, paragraph 1)

The point Parry makes about relevance to learners is a point well taken. Simply transferring learners' papers to blogs won't necessarily foster awareness of or engagement with blog audiences. However, if they're first time bloggers, and one of their initial tasks is to introduce themselves, blogging a previously written piece of introductory writing may serve to bootstrap inter-personal communication by almost immediately supporting commentary from group, class or community members. Blogging a prepared piece of writing at course onset also may provide a baseline, or sample, and serve as a proto-portfolio component, indicating learners' initial interests and writing abilities.

... In order to be successful authors in this space, students need to construct content that takes advantage of the iterability and citationality that the web offers.... This type of citation and appending comments to citation is crucial to becoming critically engaged readers and writers.

(Parry, 2006, Why it Matters for Student Writing, paragraph 2)

Granted, there is a lot more opportunity to experiment in writing spaces such as blogs than there is almost anywhere but in wikis - "Weblogs on steroids" (Tomei & Lavin, 2007, cited in Wikis and websites and blogs, oh my! B4B message 319). Nevertheless, starting with a prepared text at first (say something already composed in a notebook or with a word-processor) could provide learners with a ready-made platform for experiments with the kinds of web-based functions that Parry finds advantageous.

... By using RSS, you can syndicate all of the students blogs; every student in the class will get the class “newspaper” with headlines and synopsis of each student's writing, allowing them to scan all of the posts at once, and then decide which ones are most relevant, and select them for close reading. Furthermore, RSS can facilitate commenting, as most blogs will allow you to syndicate the comments to a specific post, so that students can post to a blog and continue to follow up on the comment thread. Again, this will help students to realize how writing for the web is a matter of continuous conversation rather than static paper design.

(Parry, 2006, Why it Matters for Student Writing, paragraph 3)

The third and final bit of Parry that I cite above (Why it matters..., para. 3) seems based on an assumption that learners within a group, class or community have individual blogs - as opposed to simple posting or commenting privileges on a group or class blog, and at least commenting if not also posting privileges on one anothers' blogs. To extend the newspaper analogy, it seems educators then need to assume two inter-related roles: first, as editors and publishers of the learners' stories through RSS newspapers; and second, particularly in case they are teaching learners of English as an additional language, teachers of newspaper reading skills.

References

Parry, David. (2006). The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom. Retrieved January 26, 2007, from http://blogsforlearning.msu.edu/articles/view.php?id=6

Tomei, J., & Lavin, R. (2006). Autonomy Arising from Community: Experiences with Weblogs and Wikis [Keynote (trademark) presentation]. Kumamoto University: January 14, 2006.

A Broader, Older Swath of IP Resources

If you're interested in exploring intellectual property rights in some breadth, if not depth, below are a few more pointers to round out those in a previous post about Aussie copyright concerns. These are from three collections:

1. A working bibliography on disk (entries lacking annotations, for resources currently accessible):

Downes, Stephen. (2003). Copyright, ethics and theft. Journal of the United States Distance Learning Association 17(2), 51-62. Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/ED_APR03.pdf

Downes, Stephen. (2006). A Patent Dilemma. Innovate 3(2). Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=399

Lessig, Lawrence. (2002). Free culture [Flash media recording]. Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html

2. Bookmarks on del.icio.us (not necessarily annotated, either):

http://del.icio.us/pab/copyright


3. Another place I'd look, Educause.


If you discover any articles at Educause (or elsewhere) that you find particularly easy to understand and applicable to our work (educational blogging), please don't hesitate to say which and why in a comment related to each.

Australian (& others') Copyright Concerns

The message extracts below pose some hard questions about copyright laws that I wrote in reaction to the 08 Nov. Internet Industry Association (IIA) news release cited in the message. I got a pointer to the news release from the Teach and Learn Online Google Group.

New Copyright Laws Risk Criminalising Everyday Australians [news release]...

That article quotes Peter Coroneos, Chief Executive of the Internet Industry Association (IIA) saying, "The US Free Trade Agreement does not require Australia to go down this [onerous] path, and neither US nor European law contain such far reaching measures" [as the Australian parliament enacted].

Is that [the IIA's] assessment of current U.S. law accurate?

The risk scenarios here [on the IIA website] are quite illuminating....

Do you think the U.S. Congress will follow suit? [What about other countries?]

Cheers, Paul

PS: Here is a related podcast, if you're interested, ... [in which Brian Fitzgerald interviews the IIA's chief executive].

Personal correspondence
November 30, 2006 17:28:04 JST
Re: Australian intellectual property law

EVO: B4B Database and Identity - A Cautious Approach

The following are snippets from email that I'm representing here as a cautious approach to construction of online identity:

When I first browsed the b4b database about a week ago, there were entries in it whose "names" were a jumble of letters and numbers, followed by no more information whatsoever.

So I decided to approach the database ever so cautiously. It wasn't until yesterday that I discovered all of the entries included at least a nickname and some other information.

... I recommend the same course of action to students and teachers with whom I work, basically: "Provide no more information than is necessary until you know what's really going on in any online environment."

... Though I may be failing miserably, I do want to be able to keep the extents and locations of online identities to an affair that I can manage on the whole, rather than one needing updating in all of the particular instances.

(personal correspondence, January 23, 2007)

Vectors into anonymity, blogospheres, genres, literacy...

Thanks to a pointer from a colleague who shall remain anonymous, in a message entitled "anonymity, privacy, blogging" (personal correspondence, January 12, 2006), I discovered a Borderland post On Anonymous Student Blogging, but not immediately.

There had been a fault in the link that I followed, so I skipped across to another post, Blogs and Genre, in which Doug refers to blogospheres (re-)defined by John Evans (Are There Three Blogospheres (Revisited)?). Between the two of them (among other commentators), blog genre definitions emerge that hinge as much upon audience definitions as upon content, if not more so.

It's going to take a while to explore all the ramifications of that serendipitous sidetrack. Hopefully further explorations along those lines will reveal gems to share or ideas to implement perhaps sooner rather than later in a workshop on Blogging for Beginners. In the mean time, this post may well serve as a stepping stone for anyone hopping by.