My Other Blog is a Seminarium Blog

Much of my recent work is at Seminarium Blog, a group blog about pedagogy in religious studies (higher education). Seminarium is a creation of Fortress Education. I have added a page to Anumma, linked in my sidebar, pointing to my recent writing and vlogging at Seminarium.

I haven't walked away from Anumma blog, though I am definitely in one of those periods where Anumma is eclipsed by the rest of my writing life: Seminarium, scholarship projects, student assessment, administrative writing, etc. It's not my first fallow period here--as Anumma has evolved from solid Old Testament and ancient Near East studies, into "biblioblogging," into Hebrew Bible and higher education, and increasingly into digital learning--and, insh' Allah, won't be the last. Thanks for reading, keep me in your feed, and come visit us over at Seminarium!

Fear and Anger in DigiWriMo

Remember when we all used to apologize for "not blogging lately"? In those days, readers would have to click all the way over to your blog (uphill both ways, in the snow) in order to see whether you had posted anything new. So, we felt guilty if there wasn't always something waiting for them, to justify the trip. I think that, by now, we all know about "readers" and RSS feeds: as long as someone still kicks out a blog post from time to time, we can keep their feed in our reader of choice, and it doesn't matter if a few weeks pass between posts.

So this isn't an apology. What it is, is an observation, or a pair of them. This month is Digital Writing Month, and I am doing my poor best to write 1,667 digital words each day. (I won't get to the whole 50k-in-the-month: if I don't manage the quota for a given day, then I start fresh the next day without trying to make it all up.)

A lot of days this month, I don't succeed. One of the reasons I already knew about, but it's worth holding up for attention during Digital Writing Month. The other, I guess I knew that too.

Observation 1: If I do not write, it is often because so many other people have control over my calendar.

This is what Merlin Mann would describe as the bigger-picture "In box" problem: an In-box is anything in your life (not just email) where people can drop stuff that thereby becomes your problem. For contingent and junior faculty, it can be super frightening to say No to anything. When you're afraid, your whole life is an In-box: an ever-increasing list of items that are "unknown, ambiguous, or incomplete."

Observation 2: If I do not publish, it may be because I am angry.

There's a reason that so many bloggers in academia are pseudonymous. They are in a position to write freely, in a semi-ranting mode (or even full-tilt), about things that are happening now in their courses, or among their faculty colleagues, or in their administration, or among their institution's partners. We "nymous" bloggers aren't so free. For the most part, when something gets right under our skin, we need to process on it a while, to detach, before being able to write on it publicly. And anger doesn't compartmentalize: when I'm well ticked off about one thing, it colors the way I write about anything. Fortunately, I consider unpublished ranting Drafts to count toward my Digital Writing Month total.

I consider these reflections to be a mark of how good Digital Writing Month has been for me so far this November. We're all so busy, it's not easy to stop and pay attention. I've got some decisions to make about this In-box business and the things that bother me, and Digital Writing Month helps me see them more clearly every day, both on "good writing days" and on the other days as well.

Is there anything that Digital Writing Month is helping you to see more clearly?

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[Fear and Anger in DigiWriMo was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/11/14. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Digital Writing Month: My Plans

Today marks Day One of DigiWriMo (Digital Writing Month), in which I try to write 50,000 digital words during the month of November. DigiWriMo is inspired by the concurrently-running NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and is the brainchild of Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris of Marylhurst University.

So what are my plans for DigiWriMo? These:

• Blog posts like this one. Some blog posts I will publish, and others I will bring to Draft status and keep in the can. I also have a number of drafts already in progress that I can work at.
• Finish my self-paced online course. I am enrolled in the 10-CEU Professional Certificate in Online Teaching course (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and have been stalled on the last two projects of this course for months. So, now's my chance to treat it as a priority and finish up.
• Keep my SBL/AAR presentation in progress. This happens in only two weeks, but I'd like to do a lot of free writing on the project and see how that causes me to continue revisions between now and the day I present. Once it's been delivered, I'll record an a/v version for YouTube.
• I've had an idea for a biweekly newsletter, and have even drafted the first issue. I'd like to re-visit that first issue, then also get a bunch of features drafted for later issues. I'll feel better about launching that project if I've got several articles "in the can."
• Tweet a bunch, as usual and maybe more. Keep a hand in on the DigiWriMo Facebook page.
• Where possible, participate in events planned by the good folks at DigiWriMo.

So there are my first 400+ words (including Markdown markup), toward a daily goal of 1667+. Are you participating in DigiWriMo (or NaNoWriMo, or any other WriMo)? What are your own plans?

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[Digital Writing Month: My Plans was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/11/01. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

If You Move Your Blog

By all means, go ahead and change your blog location. I've done it twice myself with anumma.com, first from Wordpress.com to Squarespace, then from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6.

But seriously, keep your links intact. I mean, you wanted me to link to your posts, right? And bookmark them? And suggest them to others?

If you find yourself saying something like this:

Please update your bookmarks, favorites, feeds, links, etc.

At least forget the euphemism, and say it like this:

I have broken all your bookmarks, favorites, feeds, links, etc.

Please delete all your bookmarks, favorites, feeds, links, etc.

After all, we were close once, weren't we?

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[If You Move Your Blog was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/10/03. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Re-thinking My Creative Commons Licenses

I'm rethinking my copyrights.

Bethany Nowviskie wrote recently that she is dropping the "no-commercial-use" specification—the clause that prevents people from making money off her work—from the Creative Commons copyright she holds on much of what she makes. Briefly, she concludes that, if she is already making the content available for distribution, and requiring that the work be attributed to her, then the "no commercial use" clause only functions to slow the work's dissemination…and thereby to limit the dissemination of her name and ideas.

Creative Commons offers six kinds of license (scroll down). All six require others to grant you attribution for your work. To select a license for what you make, you have to decide whether others may re-mix your work into derivative works; whether others may use your work for commercial projects; and whether those using your work must license their work with the same license you have chosen.

Recently, I was collecting photographs from Flickr to use in a recorded presentation. In this case, the presentation is to be published on our school's web site. While we won't be "selling" the images, and the purpose of the presentation is educational, we are putting the video next to an Admissions link: not very different from how an overtly commercial site might wrap the images in clickable advertisements. Therefore, I had to restrict myself to Flickr images employing Creative Commons licenses permitting commercial use. You know, that thing that I myself don't allow for my own Flickr images. And I thought of Bethany. If someone wants to use my Hebrew learning images, and is willing to grant me attribution, do I want them to be frightened off by the fear that using them in a tuition-based context will violate my "non-commercial" clause? Even if they're used in a work published for profit…well, look, I do make some stuff for private distribution and (hollow laughter) potential profit, but if I've made something for open distribution anyway, I don't lose anything if someone incorporates it into a non-free work, and I gain by their attribution.

This weekend, in response to a Prof Hacker post, I was experimenting with making my syllabi available on GitHub for other teachers to "fork" (duplicate in whole or in part to re-mix into their own "branch" syllabi). I began to attach a "CC BY-NC" license (allowing distribution and derivative works but forbidding commercial use), when I thought of Bethany again. Almost anyone creating syllabi is making them for a course that charges tuition, a commercial use. I want my colleagues to use the work without fear, as long as they grant me attribution.

This blog is a different story. For one thing, I do not want the content re-mixed, because words taken out of context combined with attribution sounds to me like a recipe for abuse. Also, the most common commercial use of blog posts—scraping the RSS feed and surrounding the content with ads—is unethical: posts tagged "Education" wind up scraped onto sites that plug the worst of the for-profit-education scams. Here at Anumma, I'll keep the "CC BY-NC-ND" license, allowing distribution with attribution but forbidding re-mixing into derivative works and also forbidding commercial use.

But, the GitHub syllabi (on which I will write more soon) are available for attribution alone, and once I've had time to sit on it a bit, the Flickr images are likely to follow.

What are your copyright practices for your own open work? Do you agree that a "no-commercial-use" license is unnecessarily chilling for educational use?

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[Re-thinking My Creative Commons Licenses was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 20121/04/23. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]