I do trainings in how to use blogs in higher education. Why would a faculty member want to use them, how would they use them, and what are they good for? I am, probably, the biggest advocate of social software on our campus and people flock to the trainings. They are interested. They want to know not only why it is good for classroom use but why they should use them personally and/or professionally.

I have found that academicians are often on the fringes at conferences - especially technology conferences - even though we often lead the way in what tools are used and we are the ones giving this information to new generations. Because we don't typically have the big $$$ and are necessarily concerned with making the big $$$, we are regarded as odd in the corporate world.

I think that the corporate world is missing out, though. We are great resources in understanding how and why technology is a hit or a miss. We are, afterall, in the thick of it and working with their audiences.

dawn m. armfield shares her writings and photography at life inchoate. She also has 4 other blogs she keeps up on a regular basis.

Great post!

There are many many different kinds of bloggers, and we give it a shot to have all kinds co-exist at BlogHer. Obviously with the announcement of BlogHer Business we are interested in branching out into subject-specific events, but I think the blogging community is also well-served by the cross-pollination that can occur at one big mixed-up event!

This post illustrates that beautifully.

Hmmm. Perhaps '07 should include a series of sessions based on your theme of "What xxx bloggers can learn from yyy bloggers, and vice versa."

Elisa Camahort
BlogHer and Worker Bees
elisa@blogher.org/elisa@workerbees.biz

Leslie,

Atleast you FOUND other edubloggers there!! I found one knitting blogger. (yes lots of bloggers who knit, but not knitters who blog about it). No one else from the hobby-sphere. I was so alone! (though meeting you was a high point!!) Still trying to figure out how to get the word out that it's worthwhile to attend. Guess I need to blog about this a lot.

We crafty/gardening folks all seem to be content to stay out in our own not-so-little worlds... where a wider exposure would be quite cool.

So, YES, Elise. Maybe the theme of BlogHer 07 should be what we can learn from each other.

Debra
A Stitch In Time
Deb's Daily Distractions

Lindsay, Marianne Richmond wrote a great piece on DOPA yesterday and it's in posts of note - everyone go read it, link it and love it here: http://www.blogher.com/node/8494.

Now - back to the subject at hand, which is your lovely essay on the for-profit and academic blog-worlds colliding. My reading of posts about the conference indicates your experience is one of many such collisions from BlogHer '06 -- our differences as bloggers made for shock, appreciation and disappointment throughout the conference. Here's another: the intersection of women who blog about parenting and women who aren't parents, for example. This is a societal division writ large that always troubles me. But it's just one example: There are equally important distinctions within the community of women who blog about motherhood. To your point, "Can't we all get along," I found relief last night when I read "Mommybloggings," a post by the always articulate Mom-101. She nails it - here's an excerpt:

There isn't mommyblogging, there is mommybloggings.

There are two groups as far as I can see. There are writers who came to blogs as another medium in which to hone their craft. The community of kindred spirits found through blogging is a wonderful and rewarding but altogether unexpected side benefit. These are the women - me included - for whom the term is inherently limiting. It tells men, older parents, the childless, this writing is not for you. And there is no writer who wants to alienate a potential reader before he or she has even read word one.

The second group of mommybloggers are women who came to blogs as a way to find a community of like-minded people and develop more meaningful relationships than those found in a chat room or an online message board. The writing itself was perhaps secondary to the friendships--or maybe it became more important as time went on. For these women, mommyblogging is entirely the opposite of limiting. It's downright freeing. It's a portal to wonderful things, opening far more doors than it closes.

I'm not proposing that we further subdivide the community of parenting blogs, nor do I have a suggestion as to how (or whether at all) to reframe the language. I just want us to start understanding one another just a little bit better.

And, boobs and booze aside, in the end, that's what BlogHer was really all about.

Bingo.

This, to me, is why it's so important to have discussions and disagreements--here and at conferences--that explore the diversity of what women are writing online and doing with our lives. This way we're using web-based technology to:

1. Liberate the external/outside world's/media discussion of women's work from its usual two-dimensional shrink wrap and sound bites.

2. Liberate our internal thinking/conversations and mindsets from our stereotypes of each other -- a far more intellectually limiting barrier and one I fear more.

So - my goal is to keep blowing my own mind (and you helped, as always, thank you L). Then keep advocating to blow everyone else's.

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

Will Richardson of Weblogg-ed is taking a very proactive method to getting DOPA slowed down or reworked. Anyone, or lets say everyone, who wants to get involved should read his blog.

In today’s entry he says that it is time to take the fight outside of the education community and presents a few good ideas about how to do this.

He also has written names of some politicians and how to contact them.

lia from luebeck, germany

(author of the media safe 101 page on the Red Tent Blog)

Thanks for posting about this! I didn't make it to BlogHer, and I also had mixed feelings about that. Besides the fact that one of my best friends would be there, as a CE, I thought I should go and I was genuinely sorry to miss out. But I also felt a little unsure about where I fit in the community and how relevant the sessions would be for me, as an edublogger/biblioblogger. My other hesitation was, as Lisa said so well:

the intersection of women who blog about parenting and women who aren't parents

I'm one of the latter, and it seemed to me that the conference seemed to be focused more toward the former and I just can't relate. I'm definitely blogging from my perspective as a woman (and as a member of a profession that is predominantly female but seems to advance men to leadership roles disproportionately), but my focus is more on building networks and sharing information than driving traffic or earning revenue from my blog. That said, BlogHer 07 is on my calendar for next year and the more I read BlogHers' accounts, the more I'm looking forward to it.

There are so many edubloggings. There are the collegiate bloggers who are writing about their lives as academics, but not using much connectivity in their classes. There are the collegiate bloggers who are using blogging (and other Web tools) to teach. There are the high school teachers, also bifurcated, and the k-8 bloggers ditto. Then there are the edubloggers writing about edu policy

Some of the dissonance, I think, is that "edublogging" has not yet come up with an internal taxonomy or categorization.

I will have to think and write on this more...

Liz Ditz
I Speak of Dreams
lizditz@gmail.com

The anti-Dopa wiki

http://dopa.pbwiki.com/

Victoria Davis's blogging against DOPA

http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

There's another RSS feed, but I can't find it just now.

Liz Ditz
I Speak of Dreams
lizditz@gmail.com

...for great blogging related to everything academia. We just celebrated our 40,000th post, even!
UThink Blogs at the University of Minnesota

I've followed this post and thread with some interest--I was not at BlogHer, but have followed the subsequent discussions all over the place. Ganley's concerns, and this discussion about "types" of blogging connects with something that is on my mind right now--I have a humorous personal blog that if anything is more of a "mommy" blog than anything else, in that i write candidly (but certainly not exclusively) about my experience as a parent (yes, I embrace the term politically--although I think I like "muthablogga" better;-).

In its early days, I attempted to post more "academic" musings (I work as a researcher in Digital Humanities) but soon realized that this was not the audience I was attempting to reach or connect with in this space--indeed, my writing was more stiff, my sense of audience too prone to second-guessing. I've learned a great deal by writing a non-academic blog (even though I still take on some academic issues--like body image or gender stereotypes). It's been freeing, and the blogging networks to which I belong tend to be more connecting, affirming, proliferative (though this may be the case with academic or edublogging, I am not yet part of that community--and I am pretty sure there are differences based on the contexts here).

But now the academic in me wants to reflect, think more, and write--for other interested academics and researchers. About blogging, gender, social networking, and the future for the technologies we build. And I realize that in order to do this, I need another blog, another persona (one that I professionally stand by with my real name). Yes, I can ponitificate on some of these larger issues--gender, social networking, identity, subjectivity and communuity--in my personal blog, but the context is wrong. It'd be like changing the channel unannounced.

And I need to "change the channel" subjectively and rhetorically if I am going to pull this off. But I wonder what kind of schitzophrenia it will breed(!) Will my two blog doppelgangers get along?!

which brings me back to your main point and questions--how is your blog changing your world and others?
my personal blog has helped me locate a writing voice I never knew I had, and one that helps me process anecdotes into big picture ideas much more effectively than some of my more academic musings. In a nutshell, it has made me a writer (I never called myself a "writer" before--even with academic articles and a dissertation on the CV). I also gained something I was not bargaining for--a community of friends and readers that are unbelievably talented and generous. And I think this was key to me developing that voice--and yes, I am thinking that the "Her" in BlogHer has a lot to do with this.

As I look at creating another blog to reflect on my research, I wonder how my approach to that writing will be different, how the community will (or will not) reinforce itself differently through that blog.

Hmm. I think I might just have posed a question for one research agenda.

Thanks for this opportunity to think this through--I'll be back for sure:)
I'll look forward to BlogHer 2007!

I blog mostly on what I've learned about teaching English/Language Arts/Reading 4-8.

And, I appreciate BlogHer's recent name change on the Research, Academia, and Education topic!