Writing about: Blogs in the guardian, 05/05/05, every nightmare begins as a dream

Well, I’m in the Guardian today – hello to anyone who’s come here from reading the article there.

Here’s the full detail of the questions I answered for Jim. I stand by what I say here, although in reflection my tone is more negative than I’d intended. You can see my posts discussing these ideas in more detail here and here

As you’ll probably discover, I’ve sent the same basic questions to Dan Lawrence and Helen Ryan.
You know they’re a couple, right?

By the way, are you part of the staff at Warwick? Or part of the student body? Or a bit of both?
PhD student. We’re in a kind of limbo. We’re full students, NUS cards and all, but we’re paid to be here, rather than the other way round. Most do a bit of teaching, although in Chemistry, we generally only do lab demonstrating. Anyway, here they are…

1. When did you start your blog? Had you been blogging before?
I started about a year ago, and no, I’d never had a blog before.

2. What did you expect from blogging when you started your Warwick blog? Have your expectations met? What’s surprised you most?
I was interested to see if any productive work was done with them. I thought it was a strange thing for the university to invest so much resource into. I came to it feeling rather cynical, but decided to throw myself into it anyway. I saw the potential for group interaction very strongly – I’d never seen anything quite like that before.
I’m not really surprised by the way that the project has gone – more on that later.

3. Has the blog helped with your academic work? Or is it more of a social thing?
I try to use it for my academic work where possible, when there’s a need for reflection or record. I’ve taken to writing to-do-lists on it, although that’s just for convenience. It’s definitely a social space, and although cliques do form, they’re not exclusive – it’s very easy for newcomers to get involved.

4. Have Warwick Blogs affected the wider real world culture of the university?
No, I don’t think so. The number of people who have interacted in the real world due to some event on blogs would qualify blogs as one of the smaller student societies here.

5.Whose Warwick blogs do you read – is it people who were already friends? Or have you become friends with people after getting to know them via their blogs?
I’ve met a small percentage of the people whose blogs I read. There are occasional “blog socials” arranged, although I haven’t made it to any yet. I also read the blogs of my co-workers.

6. What’s the general feeling about the blogging project? Browsing around, I ‘ve noticed some unease about how useful they are, or rather some irritation/upset over abuses of the system (e.g. anonymous comments etc) – is this just a phase that will pass, or does it indicate some larger problems with the project?
It is early days for WB, but there seems to be little interest on the part of the university in assessing how the thing is going. They’ve started this thing, but seem to have lost focus on what the original idea behind it was. That’s the impression that I get anyway. The freedom of speech of the bloggers is being compromised by the university’s Acceptable Usage Policy for WB, which is (compared to most blog sites) draconian. The blogs admin appears to suspend student’s blogs on some very shaky reasons, and they are essentially untouchable. There is no information regarding the admin is, how they reach their decision, and who to appeal to if you disagree.

7. Does you blog help at all with PDP? I know you’ve raised some concerns that early hopes that the blogs would allow for ‘guerilla PDP’ haven’t really been met yet… do you think blogs are just very different from the whole PDP idea or might they be able to work with it in some way?
A vanishingly small proportion of the people who blog write anything reflective at all. If the idea was “that if we get students to start blogging, they will gradually start to do PDP” (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/elearning/workshops/presentations/blogs/) then it has so far not happened, a year in.
I have never seen an answer to the question “Why on earth should I publish my private reflections?”. I don’t think that a public forum is really the place to be as honest with yourself as you need to be to gain from the kind of reflection required for useful PDP. There are “private” entries on blogs (restricted to just the author), but I’ve never written one. If I wanted to do that, I’d use a diary.

8. Will you continue blogging once you leave Warwick?
Probably. I’m undecided at this stage. I’m extremely unlikely to carry on using Warwick Blogs, anyway.