Another great blog to add to your blogroll is Tiara.org. There, Alice Marwick covers social technologies from a feminist perspective. Awesome stuff. She frequently posts excellent reading guides and recently posted about phenomenon of participatory culture by bands. I experienced some nice synergy when I ran across another post on participatory culture by danah boyd. Why haven't I been reading her before this?

Whether it's something we like or not, writing seems to be a common theme among academic bloggers in all disciplines. I admit to a personal fascination with the topic, so maybe I just tend to notice these posts more than others. What I find especially interesting is the variety of the approaches and strategies different people take toward writing. It's not all process, though. Check out what bloggers are writing, reading, and thinking lately.

The best teachers I've had all shared the ability (and good sense) to make connections between research and literature and the lives of real people. Even in my field, which is ostensibly all about the user, sometimes exciting theory and shiny new technology can make us forget about real people outside the profession. It's great to be reminded of the reasons people develop their research interests and the impact that research can have. Pink Cupcake recently learned of one researcher's inspiration.

As usual, the academic blogosphere has had plenty to offer in the last week or so. Here's my latest round-up of interesting posts by academic bloggers. Despite being a regular Chronicle reader, or maybe because I'm a regular Chronicle reader, I always enjoy posts criticising it. The Little Professor offers the funny-because-it's-true How to Write a CoHE "First Person" Essay: A Handy Multiple Choice Guide. My favorite is #6. At The Paper Chase, Lisa responds and adds a couple of points of her own. Finally, Jason at Pattern Recognition points out the recent Chronicle article about the future of scholarly communication is "woefully behind the times."

For some of us, summer is the slow season, when we can catch a breath and take a break from the hectic school year. While my teaching load is light, I've been catching up on readings that have been piling up in various forms: printouts, stacks of journals, a whole shelf of "to-read" books, and folders of documents.