Notes from Roald Amundsen: On Keeping Your Wits About You in the Wilderness

I don't remember when I first heard about Roald Amundsen's mission to become the first man to reach the South Pole, but there are two aspects of his situation that make me identify pretty strongly with him as I begin this blog.  This may seem hyperbolic; in fact, it may be unsalvagably so; bear with me.  

The first is that, like any explorer, Amundsen set off into the unknown.  The details of his story (found here) are these:  that, at 38, he set off from Morocco with a loyal crew, sled dogs, rations, and a plan to survive on a hostile continent he had never seen before.  That he had close competition in the form of Robert Scott, a British explorer, and a cautionary tale in the failed attempt of Ernest Shackleton, another British explorer who had attempted the journey in 1909.  That the entire trip took 99 days, and that the crew covered 1,860 miles, but that, eventually--on December 14, 1911--Amundsen raised the Norwegian flag over the pole.

Tonight I have spent roughly four hours making my initial forays onto sites such as Google Reader, Blogger, and PBworks.  I accessed Posterous a few days ago to post my class introduction, but I still have to admit that I have no idea what else the platform might be used for.  Maybe it's a testament to the extraordinary levels of specialization I associate with the web (I'm sure everyone here has visited the tumblr kimjongillookingatthings), but part of me believes it could exist uniquely for users to post introductions.  Tonight I have also attempted to tackle the subject of our "tinkering" blog (I'll save the "grappling" for Sunday) by clicking through the recommended blogs at the bottom of our Summer12Literacies PBworks Wiki, as well as by organizing my Google Reader and paying special attention to the staff-pick category of "Dinosaur Comics," which is apparently a huge internet thing that I've been left out of.

On the bright side--no ice picks required.  Also, I'd far rather sit in the courtyard of New Residence Hall on a Friday night to catch up with classwork than I would like to wear showshoes, eat canned sardines, or suffer anything else that Mr. Amundsen or his crew suffered.  And this exploration, in contrast to Mr. Amundsen's, felt fairly effortless.  Nothing was at stake, so I felt free to wander.  And I have had some experience with wandering around the blogosphere for my own satisfaction, though most of my prior experience has been with the study-abroad blogs of friends in places like Jordan and Nepal, or else with artsy Tumblr sites like The Burning House.  The coolest blog I re-discovered while sitting in the pleasantly warm atmosphere of the courtyard is hyperboleandahalf, which is a site that kept me awake way too late, cracking up, during some week in the summer of my junior year.  It's been updated considerably since then, and with Richardson under my belt (and aware, now, of the importance of frequent linking and analysis), I was able to evaluate it according to the standards of the blogosphere.  


These standards are far more exacting than those of a stressed and sleep-deprived RA surfing the web at 2 am while on hall duty, but now I see that the site has many of what Richardson identifies as the characteristics of a successful blog:  namely, there's a profusion of user-created images and reader comments (4264 on Allie's last post) as well as links within entries to previous entries, etc.  There are some things that the genre of the blog (a personal reflection / humor site) makes it liklier to include than others.  I've never seen a video, but because the blog is so consistently organized around Allie's reflections (as conveyed through a combination of pictures and narrative) videos would feel out-of-place.  They're not in the aesthetic of the blog.  That's okay.  Here, I think--because we'll be expected to engage in a research-type way with other bloggers and real-life authorities (i.e. place many different voices in conversation)--more frequent allusions to other sites and sources will be more appropriate.


In case you were worried that I'd forgotten about Amundsen, I haven't.  The other reason I identify with Amundsen is because the only other alternatives are to identify with either Scott or Shackleton.  Shackleton returned to England and tried, for the rest of his life, to make up for his abysmal failure, while Scott died on his return from the pole his rival had reached over a month earlier.  


I told you this comparison may be a little hyperbolic.

In exploring the blogosphere, my biggest problem was staying focused on one article long enough to finish it:  because websites tend in a huge way toward the hypertextual, I get distracted by every link.  Whenever I'm on the Web, I'm afraid I'll find one great article inside another great article, and another great article inside that article, and so on, until what I get is 88 one-eighths of great articles that fail to give me anything coherent to show for the massive amount of time I just spent on the Web instead of, like, outside or with friends or whatever.  Therefore, when I tried to browse blogs focused on education, I kept a record of my travels.  I went first to the recommended links at the bottom of the Summer12Literacies PBworks page, where I clicked on huffenglish.  On this blog's right-hand panel I found a link to an entry on another blog that, from the title, appeared to critique the Khan Academy--something I had been reading about in Time earlier today (Time loves the idea).  So, click.  Onward.  There I found a blog called Hackeducation, which is a blog by a tech journalist named Audrey Watters dedicated to using new technologies in education.  


I liked the style so much that I decided to really stay this time.  I began by doing the credibility-check Richardson suggests in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms:  making sure the blogger's a real person who attended a real institution of higher learning (or otherwise became credentialed or published in some manner), checking to see if legitimate (corporate or journalistic) sites have linked to or reported on the blog, and scanning for egregious misspellings or grammatical errors that would prevent a site from coming off as legit (which makes me think Richardson didn't subscribe to the theories in the 80s and 90s regarding Discourses versus discourses and etc).  Then I evaluated it according to Richardson's other criteria for good blogging:  does it have tags?  Yes.  Does it allude to many other things, and provide links either to those things (if they're websites) or to explanations of those things (if they're non-virtual in nature)?  Yes.  Can users add comments of their own, and re-blog the original blog entry on their own blog, and subscribe to the original blog via RSS feed?  Yes, yes, yes.  


Audrey writes about personal concerns (such as the abandonment and re-discovery of former internet selves and blogging identities--here) and politically-polarizing things (like the validity of the Khan Academy, which she questions in this entry).  Because of the dual nature of her blog, she's much more in conversation with news and opinion sources than is Allie on hyperboleandahalf:  Hackeducation offers rebuttals to publications like Wired Magazine, and frequently validates the facts and figures it uses by linking to external sites such as Reuters.  Since Allie doesn't have to validate anything (she's writing from a personal rather than a political perspective), her blog lacks those elements.  Are both blogs valid?  I think so.  But in writing this blog, I think genre mandates I style it more after Hackeducation than hyperboleandahalf.


Which is okay.  I wouldn't know how to create the drawings that appear on Allie's blog if doing so was the only thing that would save me from death-by-arctic-creature in the deep (deep) South.  I also still don't know how to subscribe to my classmates' blogs on Google Reader using RSS, add tags to this (though I think I see a promising link to the right), or retrieve this long entry if, at the moment of posting, something goes horribly wrong.  After the time I've spent tonight on the internet, I still feel as though I'm more ignorant than informed--which I don't think is a feeling that ever goes away.  But this, too, is okay.  I could use a number of terrible cliches appropriate to the Arctic theme we've established (I've only seen the tip of the iceberg; the important thing is to keep my head above the water), but I think I'll settle for signing off.  As of tonight, I'm not Scott or Shackleton yet--and it's even possible for me to believe that, by the end of the summer, I'll stand a good chance of being able to raise that flag over whatever it is I've set out to conquer.