Widening not Narrowing the Path: More Promises of Blogging for Urban Education Policy

May 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In my previous blog post, I noted that in the past few years, prominent K-12 education reform experts are increasingly using blogs to communicate their ideas. That is in addition to other avenues more typically utilized in academia (journals and books). I briefly profiled Bridging Differences, an education blog initiated by Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch which has evolved into a series of exchanged letters. I also visited Diane Ravitch’s new solo blog. I concluded by reflecting on the promises of blogs in bridging differences (especially in our very polarized education reform world) and in “writing to learn.”

For this post, I thought it would be interesting to peruse a few of the blogs representing much less global and “voiced” stakeholders in education policy debates: teachers and parents. As the blogosphere in urban education expands, an additional question I have is if and how local actors are taking advantage of the blog format. Excitingly, groundbreaking work on this question is taking place at the CUNY Graduate Center.

A colleague of mine in the Urban Education Ph.d program argues that online spaces, and blogs in particular, provide a new and critical venue by which to hear teachers’ voices, traditionally silenced by the policymaking process. She investigated daily classroom and school experiences via recent blogs written by NYC public school teachers. She thematically analyzed 14 public-facing anonymous blogs in years 2008-2012 to chronicle how teachers are living education policy. What’s even more fascinating was that she architected her own blog to do that thematic analysis; in other words, blogging served as both the content and as a methodological tool in her study. Dr. Kiersten Greene’s dissertation “Notes from the Blogging Field: Teacher Voice and the Policy-Practice Gap in Education” will be available online soon. For more information and to learn more about her blog about her own real experiences as a (now former) graduate student, teacher, and New Yorker, find her at opencuny.org/mediated.

Inspired by Greene’s work and given my own research interests in parents’ roles in decisions about schools, I briefly surveyed blogs focused on parents here in NYC and found the following six: http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/; http://www.parentvoicesny.org/; http://parentsacrossamerica.org/; http://www.nycparentsunion.org/; http://www.parentadvocates.org/; and http://edvoxny.wordpress.com/.

Each of these blogs features parents prominently or is written by parents themselves. They offer testimony and research on pressing policy issues such as school closings, standardized testing, and college readiness. They also provide information on how to get involved and be part of the conversation including signing petitions, joining rallies, and of course, attending events such as the upcoming mayoral candidate forums on public education. One observation I had in reading all six blogs is that the author’s identity is not immediately clear. With the tendency for more and more parties to speak on behalf of parents in the public school system, sites should make the answer to that question clear. I am also not sure how many parents are accessing these blogs. That’s research we need.

In addition to parents, community leaders, advocates, retired teachers, and students are also using blogs. Studies similar to Greene’s should help answer if and how diverse stakeholders are able to participate more fully in urban education reform conversations via blogs. This is all very new, and at the start of this communication path, we should also be asking how we can be sure to widen the conversation not narrow it.

Filed Under: Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Education, Teaching Tagged With:

Own It

April 5, 2013 By 2 Comments

I hate when people post to blogs anonymously.

There are several blogs I follow regularly, on topics ranging from Appalachian Trail Thru Hikes to Philosophy (admittedly, there are many more on frivolous topics than rigorous ones). Recently, I was attacked by another commenter who made gross generalizations about the posts I’ve made on the blog and concluded by saying she “was glad [she] would never meet me.” Who was this commenter who took it upon herself to defame my character (on a blog related to clothes, and in response to a post I made about not liking a new style of tank top)? Anonymous. It seems that these days it’s okay to throw punches and then run and hide. Ownership and responsibility have been relegated to the backseat, while cowardice is now riding shotgun.

xkcd: Wikileaks

The vast majority of published content is not a matter of life or death; it does not involve high-profile whistle blowing. In most instances, there’s no need for anonymity. Or rather, there should be no need for it – either you should attach your name to what you’re writing, or you shouldn’t write it. I’m not denying anyone’s First Amendment rights – you can write (almost) whatever you want. But that doesn’t mean that you should. (Keep in mind that you can eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in one sitting, but you probably shouldn’t.)

I have my students post and respond to weekly discussion board prompts. When discussing the assignment with the class, the following conversation ensued:

Student: “Do we have to include our name when we post?”

Me: “Yes – your name automatically appears. You cannot post anonymously, or I won’t know who the post is from and won’t be able to give you credit for the assignment.”

Student: “You could assign us each a secret number or code that we use when we post so that you know who the post belongs to, but no one else knows.”

Me: *confused* “That just seems really difficult when you can just post your name. Is there some reason you don’t want to use your name?”

Student: “Well, you know, so we don’t have to worry about offending someone.”

And there we have the crux of the issue: we are worried about offending people. More accurately, we are worried about people knowing who made the offensive comment. We don’t want any fingers pointed our way.

xkcd: Listen to Yourself

Here’s my suggestion: if you’re that worried about what you’re writing – don’t write it. I don’t mean this simply as “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Indeed, I wholeheartedly reject the notion that we should say only nice things and avoid the unpleasantries of life. Controversial statements need to be made. They prompt us to think critically and question our assumptions – the very essence of philosophical behavior. Controversy forces us to examine, analyze, deconstruct, and reconstruct our own beliefs. It is upon examination of your opponent’s position that you often manage to strengthen your own. Know thine enemy.

Know thyself. If there’s one thing I hope to impart upon my students, it’s that you should be prepared to give good reasons and support for anything you put out there in the universe. You’re not entitled to unsubstantiated opinions; everything you put out there is subject to the follow-up, “why?” “That’s just what I think” is not good enough. Don’t follow blindly; don’t repeat without questioning; don’t just babble without thinking. Stop and consider the arguments grounding your position. Question every premise. What makes them true – if they are? Do the premises add up to the conclusion? Are there alternative conclusions that could be drawn from the premises? If you’re not prepared to take responsibility for what you say and defend it, then don’t say it. To be rather blunt about it – the world doesn’t need more bullshit. And when I see “Anonymous”, that’s exactly what I see – people who feel entitled to spew their opinions all over, but are not willing to own up to them. And that’s bullshit.

xkcd: Dreams

Here’s another lesson: stop worrying so much about offending people. You cannot control everyone’s reactions. There is a fine line between being offensive and intellectual academic discourse. Both are often controversial. The former is usually based on anonymous, unsubstantiated opinions – the latter on well-thought out and defended arguments. Inevitably, someone will be offended by what you say. But if you have a well-considered, grounded argument for your position, then you have nothing for which to be ashamed. I feel strongly on several ethical issues. While I think that I’m correct, and I’m willing to give a defense of my positions, I don’t want my students to take up the mantle just because I said so. I’d rather my students disagree with my views for intelligent, well-thought out reasons than take what I say as gospel. I’m not a preacher, and I don’t want a flock.

So what to do? Be informed. Ignorance is not acceptable. The world doesn’t need more baseless opinions floating around; progress is made through intelligent, informed discourse. What you say matters – so make it count. Own what you write. If you’re not willing to attach your name to it, don’t put it out there in the world.

I’ll leave you with a piece from the New York Times Opinionator Blog: On Questioning the Jewish State. It’s wonderfully controversial, and no doubt many people are offended by its thesis. But there are two things it isn’t – baseless and anonymous. This is what we need.

-Sophia Bishop

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, To Ponder, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

MUTUALISM- A Lab in Parts

January 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment

A few months ago I posted a brief interview with with Professor David Gruber, with whom I’ve been collaborating as a Writing Fellow at the Institute.  So, for those curious about this communication intensive science “experiment,” below is a timeline documenting the semester’s trajectory for one of the labs, including the final video the students created.  Even if you’re not so interested in the process, you might want to take a peek at the video (skip to the second to last entry) — it might be the best use of Lionel Richie I’ve ever seen!

Happy 2013 to all.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Pedagogy, Process, Resources, Science, Technology, Writing Across the Curriculum

Student Coverage of Superstorm Sandy

November 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When Baruch College re-opened after Hurricane Sandy left the campus without power for a week, several of the school’s journalism and photography professors asked students to recount their own storm experiences in blog posts and pictures. These assignments gave glimpses of the tumult in different neighborhoods across the city. Taken as a whole, they provided as clear a picture of New York City during and after the storm as anything I’ve seen in mainstream media.

Much of this work was published on Blogs@Baruch course blogs, many of which are viewable outside of the class and some even outside of the Baruch community. But the stories received further exposure when the faculty editors of Baruch’s student-written online magazine, Dollars & Sense, put together a package of photographs and excerpts with the help of Schwartz Institute Multimedia Fellow Emily Johnson.

By culling vignettes from blog posts and packaging them with photographs from Professor Fran Antmann’s Basic Photography class, Dollars & Sensewas able to create a relevant and moving multimedia package.

I’ve heard from several people – both inside Baruch and out – who said they found the students’ work to be heartfelt and compelling. This response is a tribute to the hard work of the Dollars & Sense faculty editors, professors Joshua Mills and Carl Rollyson, as well as the students who shared their stories.

It is also further reinforcement of the value of open blogging platforms outside of the classroom.

Historically, school assignments have been treated as transactions between student and professor, rarely if ever seen by even a third set of eyeballs. As more and more professors use course blogs to teach students not only about writing but also about the responsibilities and values of having their work available for all to see, those students are hopefully finding opportunities to use their best work for professional development purposes — or even just a bit of self promotion.

While almost all of the Sandy coverage published in Dollars & Sense came from class assignments, the attention it received shows how coursework can — and often should — reach beyond the classroom walls.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Writing Instruction

Reading Kids and Dogs

November 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For the first time, I am simply going to post a link to another person’s content: Madeline Gabriel’s post, “Should You Share That Cute Dog and Baby Photo?“ on her blog “Dogs and Babies.” But of course, since I am an academic, this “simple” redirect will be followed by a few points of analysis.

“peaceful and companionable”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Art, Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Non-verbal Communication, Reading, To Ponder, What if . . .

Pastor McRemus’ Sermon on Academics, ctd.

October 29, 2012 By 2 Comments

At the request of the author, we have unpublished “Pastor McRemus’ Sermon on Academics.” All of the comments were unpublished with the post.

The author writes:

It was only speech. It caused no actual harm.

To be clear, this was the author’s decision and the author’s alone. We will be deliberating internally about any changes in policy to come about as a result of this episode.

Filed Under: Academic Integrity, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY, Education, Language, Liberal Arts

Multimedia and Blogging in the Classroom Strategies

October 25, 2012 By 3 Comments

While I was preparing for a Multimedia and Blogging workshop, I came up with a list of strategies that professors can use to incorporate multimedia and blogging in the classroom:

1. Scaffolding:  Professors can use blog assignments to build up students’ skills in preparation for more formal assignments. As a form of low-stakes writing, blog entries can make students’ thought processes and inner debates more apparent.

2. Modeling:  When professors give students a blog or multimedia assignment, it is very helpful to model a successful example of the assignment, perhaps from a past semester.

3. Give Students Roles: Rather than treating blog comments as a free-for-all, why not give students specific roles? For instance, students could be asked to be Peer Reviewers of other students’ posts, or one student could be asked to post a Summary of topics that most often came up over a week’s worth of posts.

4. Set Expectations:  When professors give students an untraditional assignment, the expectations for fulfilling that assignment should be even clearer than those for a traditional assignment. Be clear concerning the style, tone, and format that you expect. Also, including a grading rubric can be helpful.

5. Awareness of Student Population: Professors should plan for the learning curve that they can expect from their students regarding the technologies involved in course assignments. Some students may need some individual assistance, and it would be wise not to overburden students with too many platforms in one semester. That being said, Baruch’s student population is quite tech savvy overall.

6. Learning Goals, Learning Goals, Learning Goals:  Learning goals come first, and the technology follows. Blogging and multimedia assignments must be driven by and fully integrated into the course’s purpose.

7. Use Media Repositories:  The U.S. Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and other institutions offer free and well-documented repositories of media. Working collaboratively as a class with a set group of primary sources can give students invaluable experience.

8. Ask Students to Critique and Curate Sources: An annotated bibliography can turn into a media-rich online annotated bibliography. Before students write their research papers, have them post an annotated bibliography online. If the annotated bibliography can contain popular as well as scholarly sources, then it might present a good opportunity for students to enunciate the differences between a wide variety of sources.

9. Work in a Lab Setting: Setting one or two classes aside for lab work can help you to work with students and give them feedback in real time.

10. Build a Critical Vocabulary: In-class discussions, modeling, and the online sharing of student work and the professor’s comments can all work toward building a critical vocabulary, both in terms of disciplinary knowledge and the competent critique of various types of sources.

11. Scale Your Expectations:  Dramatically switching topics (from gender issues to environmental issues, for example), assigning many untraditional assignments on top of traditional assignments, and using many different types of technology are all sure ways to frustrate and overburden students. Sometimes less is more.

As I think about the literature and composition courses that I’ve taught, these are the major mistakes that I’ve made:

1. Expecting non English majors to understand and effectively incorporate academic articles, especially without any in-depth class discussion.

2. Assigning too many small assignments.

3. Pacing the course too quickly and/or expecting to cover an unrealistic amount of content.

4. Not including enough specific guidelines on untraditional assignments.

5. Not thoroughly pretesting technology.

Those of you reading, what is a teaching mistake that you or someone you know (without naming names) has made? It may or may not involve blogging and multimedia.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, EdTech, Feedback, Low-Stakes Writing, Media, Teaching
October 4, 2012 By 12 Comments

I fucking hate blogs, but I’m obliged to do this 5 times for reasons I’ll explain later. So, for my first one, I thought I’d just introduce some questions.  No one’s watching, so if you’re bothering to read this, you might as well be honest with yourself (though seriously, don’t bother).

We’ve heard a lot of nonsense here and elsewhere about who’s to determine taste, who’s to say Mozart’s better than a McDonald’s jingle, blah blah blah. Typical, but let’s leave that off till next time. For the time being, let’s just talk internet:

We say it’s good that everyone has a chance to express himself. Why? Think about it for a minute. Why is a democracy of expression good? Why is everybody having the right to talk and feeling perfectly comfortable talking necessarily good? Might blogs be harmful?

Is it a good thing for everyone to speak his mind at all times?

Now suppose you heard two melodies, one from a great symphony, one from a commercial jingle. You then were asked to name whether the first was Beethoven, Schubert, or Brahms, and whether the second was McDonald’s, Modell’s, or Verizon. Which do you think you would have a better shot of identifying?

That is you. That is what you are.

Same thing with two sentences. Is the first by Milton or Keats or Wallace Stevens. Is the second the motto for sprite or pepsi.

That is you. And yet you write.

            Or, would you be more capable of explaining the ideas of Kant, or Schopenhauer, or Heidegger, or describing Modern Family, or American Idol, or Lost? And are you more familiar with those shows or our political system? our economy? I think you get the idea.

            Two questions now: What percentage of the population is like you? And, do you think you arrived at your sterling identification skills freely? I.e. did you choose to know what you know?

But hey everyone, express yourself, right? Everyone does. Who can sift through all this shit? How much shit there is! And who can sift through it all?

Why is this a problem? Well, suppose there’s something really good out there.  Who can sift through all the stupid shit and find the good things?

Oh, you’ll find it! But will you? Maybe you couldn’t even spot it if you saw it. Remember what you’re like, from the questions above.

And what happens when generations of people like you express themselves, and other generations listen? When whole generations are drowned in the flood of your slavish inanities? Won’t they become more like you, but even worse? How will those people identify anything? How will they make anything? How will those who make exist among them?

Doesn’t it just all turn into white noise, billions screaming stupid shit at once?

Does anything get through the white noise? Does a melody sail over it? Does the white noise accompany a melody?

If it does, do you think that melody will be Mozart, or the McDonald’s jingle?

I repeat, did you choose to know what you know, to like what you like, to think the things you write about?

Do you think your incessant talking makes you free?

Now I only did this because it’s mandatory for me in order to get my fellowship check—believe me or don’t, I don’t care. Why do most other people write blogs? Here, I’ll answer my own question; I think it’s generally a safe rule that people with the least to say cannot stop talking.

Later tools,

F. Scott FitzStalin

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Culture, Golf, Internet, Language, Liberal Arts, Literacy, literature, Music, Writing

Blogs@Baruch Milestones: Part 1, Active Directory Integration

September 14, 2012 By 1 Comment

“Milestone,” cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Dandelion And Burdock: Link.

This past summer saw a number of important milestones for Blogs@Baruch, Baruch’s online publishing platform, which we at the Schwartz Institute launched in 2008 as part of a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative. Initially, the idea was to give faculty members an option for teaching on the open web and to offer blogs as occasions for more student writing, particularly for low stakes assignments. In the spirit of WAC, we argued (and still do) that any opportunity students have to write and to receive feedback, is potentially an opportunity for them to grow as writers. Many faculty members did embrace B@B precisely in this way, but it became clear shortly after launch that the system would evolve in ways we didn’t expect. In addition to course blogs, B@B now hosts a broad range of sites including department and program websites, community resource sites for faculty, Z*Port, an e-portfolio system and professional network for MBA students (launching soon), publications (including the Writing Center’s iMagazine, Baruch’s award winning Dollars & $en$e, and the College’s alumni magazine), student projects, the Colege’s last strategic plan, online CVs, and many others.

Early in the summer, we broke 10,000 users and now there are almost 12,000. By all accounts, this makes us one of the biggest and most active academic online publishing communities anywhere. In early August, after about a year of development and planning and all kinds of back and forth with our colleagues at BCTC, we successfully added Active Directory (AD) integration to Blogs@Baruch. This means that Baruch users can now log into and publish on Blogs@Baruch using their Baruch IDs — the IDs they use for all of the College’s other web services (except for BlackBoard, which requires users to open a CUNY Portal account). Users no longer need to create local accounts to use B@B. And finally, as of a few weeks ago, B@B users can now log in to the system using a quick link on the Baruch College homepage — from the same drop-down menu they use to access a number of other essential services including the student information database, the e-roster system, student, faculty and staff email services, Blackboard, and the CUNY Portal.

So why and how is all this important?  In this post and the one that follows, I’ll try to make sense of these milestones as they relate to the history, development of Blogs@Baruch as well as to the political and institutional implication of its growth and wide scale adoption at Baruch. First, Active Directory:

While AD integration provides a valuable bit of convenience for users, it is significant in several other ways as well (Luke Waltzer, who ably took the lead on the AD integration project with Tom Harbison and Craig Stone, has already reflected on some of these here, as did Jim Groom in the context of University of Mary Washington’s UMWBlogs).  First, this was a very heavy lift that took lots and lots of planning and preparation and an unprecedented collaboration between the Institute and BCTC, which spanned most of the last year. One major challenge was to associate all the unique local accounts with existing Baruch AD accounts. We were able to accomplish this relatively simply thanks to a tremendously useful plugin created for this migration by the one and only Boone Gorges, who was extraordinarily helpful throughout this entire process.

Part of what was valuable about this long process was learning how to work with BCTC. Of course there were bumps in the road, miscommunications and the occasional clash of personalities, but, in the end, we managed to figure out how to work as a team and succeeded in doing something which, let’s face it, is very hard to pull off. That we did manage to pull it off, speaks to the dedication, patience and perseverance of the people involved and bodes very well for future collaborations, of which I hope there wil be many.

AD integration in WordPress at colleges is still a fairly rare thing though becoming more common. While desirable, it is a serious bear. Many institutions, especially those whose instances of WordPress have lots and lots of sites and users opt to not bother with it, partially because the tools for associating local WP users with AD accounts didn’t exist until now. When we first started experimenting with blogging in the curriculum in 2006, AD integration was initially a precondition for BCTC’s full support of the project. After playing around with the only available and very buggy AD integration plugin and after having been pitched by a now defunct Silicon Valley firm which offered to provide AD integration on an enterprise scale for approximately $30,000 for 1,000 users, we recognized AD integration as cost prohibitive and decided to move on without it. Now, not only have we achieved AD integration at very minimal cost but, thanks to Boone’s hard work, have now developed and shared tools that enable other institutions to do what we did with very little or no cost at all.

There has been some talk lately (see the posts by Luke and Jim (as well as the comments)) about the political implications of integrating open source projects like B@B and UMWBlogs, built on free software and borne of an edupunk spirit and a will to democratize ed-tech, with an institution’s official authentication system. I intend to spend some time on this and what it means to finally be able to access B@B from Baruch’s website in my next post. To be continued.

 

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, BLSCI, Technology, Writing Across the Curriculum

An Audience for Shenzhen: part two

March 6, 2012 By 1 Comment

Last time, I wrote about the increasing popularity of stories about high tech factories in Shenzhen, China.

In this post, I will examine the audience for the early peaks in the US news coverage of the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen.

Frequency of US Google searches (above) and news stories (below) on “Foxconn”

As is visible on the chart above, the first major spike hits on July 22, 2009. This coincides with broad news coverage of the first reports of what would be come a more familiar story: suicides at Foxconn. In this case, a worker committed suicide over a missing iPhone prototype.

Prior to this sensational news story, the most significant coverage in US news outlets was the discussion in 2008 of a Shenzhen nightclub fire and Shenzhen overtaking Honk Kong as China’s innovation capital. Before 2008, the biggest story—which pales in comparison to either the 2008 or 2009 coverage—was the 2006 announcement that Apple would manufacture the new iPod at Foxconn in Shenzhen and the ensuing PR “problems” wherein Foxconn froze “assets includ[ing] apartments, a car and bank accounts” of Chinese reporters publishing articles about the working conditions in Foxconn factories.

Close-up of US Google searches and news stories on “Foxconn” for the year 2006

This was covered predominantly by tech blogs and foreign-language (i.e., English) Chinese news sites. AppleInsider, Macworld, CNET (the Asian edition), and bit-tech.net, while of varying influence in the tech community, are not generally picked up by major US news outlets. The story by the Shanghai Daily (an English-language Chinese paper) was picked up by British sources and reported on FOX News, but overall ignored by non-tech US news sources. The blow back against Foxconn’s actions received slightly more coverage in the tech sections of papers like the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is the audience where Mike Daisey encountered the story of Shenzhen.

Daisey describes these kind of tech blogs as “news sites, which, I should specify, have no actual news in them. They’re instead filled with rumors about what Apple will do next, written exclusively by people who have no fucking idea what Apple will do next, but, for some reason, I find this soothing.” This is an audience of rumor-driven, speculators who are soothed by even the slightest hint of possible future technology.


My Favorite Book Destroyed
Creative Commons License photo credit: William Wilkinson

The audience for these “news sites” comprises specialists and amateurs—from the Latin amare, to love. Daisey never explicitly draws the connection between being an amateur and its etymological root, but he does admit to loving Apple technology. While I am reprinting the relevant section of his monologue dealing with his love of technology, the written word does not do justice to his delivery. Go see his show or listen to the segment on This American Life. His section on love of technology is a brilliant paean to in the tradition of the Classic Greeks. Suffice it to say, Mike Daisey proudly counts himself right in the heart of the amateur technology community, the very audience for these tech blogs.

I love technology, I love everything about it. I love looking at technology, I love comparing one piece of technology with another, I love reading rumors about technology that doesn’t exist yet, I love browsing technology, I love buying technology, I love opening technology—even when it’s in that bubble packaging—I love it. I love the smell of a new piece of technology—that sort of burnt PVC smell when you run electricity through it the first time?—I love that.

And of all the kinds of technology that I love in the world, I love the technology that comes from Apple the most.

Because I am an Apple aficionado, I am an Apple partisan, I am an Apple fanboy, I am a worshipper in the cult of Mac. I have been to the House of Jobs, I have walked through the stations of his cross, I have knelt before his throne.

–Mike Daisey, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

Besides love of technology, this early audience has specialized knowledge, what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “specific capital.” Technology aficionados understand, purchase, and discuss technology at a much higher rate than the general public. This behavior allows them to renegotiate their position in the global market of ideas—or what Bourdieu terms the “field of power”—and trade their specific capital—understanding and following bleeding-edge technology—for other forms of capital. These various forms of capital include social capital, where they are held in higher esteem in specific social groups; economic capital, where they make money off of future tech trends; and, in Mike Daisey’s case, cultural capital, where he converts his fanboy cache into a work of highly regarded performance art.

In the third installment of this piece, I will look at how Mike Daisey’s audience for his stage monologue shifted as the location of his performance changed over time.

Filed Under: Art, Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Culture, Internet, Media, Technology
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