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Please tell us who you are and what you do.
I'm Paul Thomas, and
I'm associate professor of education at Furman University.
How does your work involved writing in digital environments?
[In] my scholarship I do a lot of writing on blogs, and there are
more and more electronic scholarly journals. And I use
Twitter a lot for scholarship. And then with teaching
I use blogs for all my courses, and I also use...
I would call it a digital world, having students submit
work in Word, and I respond in Word.
How does what you do involve more traditional
pre-digital forms of writing?
Not as much as it used to, but still, a lot of the scholarly
world is still hard copies. In other words, the final products,
the published journals tend to be hard copies.
But even that, most of the submission process is electronic.
Still in the classroom, I would say that students especially
like things to be hard copy. Most textbooks are hard copy
And even if you provide things digitally,
students tend to print things out.
What tools and technical skills do you use
most often in your work?
Technology-wise? I do almost everything in my laptop.
I'm on it most of the day, every day.
So I have to...
And a lot of the places that I publish are self-publishing
blogs, so I do have to know how to format my own work.
The environments you publish in on blogs have a lot
of variety to them. There's technical different things
to do in different environments.
So most of it is the blog and Twittersphere and
just basic Word and that kind of thing.
But I work almost exclusively at a laptop if I'm not teaching.
Do you have any exciting stories about how those
technological things have been useful for you?
"Exciting." The only thing I think that borders on "exciting"
is the blog world allows it to be interactive.
I tend to comment on online writing, and when people
comment on my online writing I comment.
And that is generally tense.
So I would say that's probably exciting because
it's generally not pleasant interactions.
I enjoy doing that,
and I think it's kind of important to do that.
I do it a lot of times to show students,
so they see what other people think.
How has your job changed over time
as new digital technologies have been adopted?
I'd say the biggest change is
--I'm primarily a writing teacher--
is that all of my students submit everything electronically,
and I do all of my responses electronically.
And for my 18 years of teaching 100-plus students
who wrote 40 essays a year, that was a lot of paper.
I marked everything in hard copy.
They turned everything in hard copy.
Every single paper had to be completely rewritten
over and over again.
So there was a lot of tedium for students
to try to rewrite their stuff.
Students can write 4 or 5 of 10 versions of a paper,
and they just work right on Word,
and it's not nearly as tedious for them.
And I think being able to respond by track changes
and putting comments into Word is huge.
I think that's a really big difference.
The scholarly world has changed a lot, too.
Because more people are doing
what I call "public intellectual work."
They write commentaries, and they blog.
So some of us are doing, probably, more blogging
than we do traditional scholarship.
And I think the blogging's more important
than traditional scholarship because if I write,
submit a piece to a traditional publication,
it may be a year before anybody sees it.
If I have an idea, I can blog it this morning,
and several hundred people will see it.
Those are the biggest changes.
Has it been for you to, I guess, adapt to the different changes that technology as brought about?
I don't think for me it hasn't been. I like most of the changes.
I like simple things like being able to have connection
to Twitter and my e-mail and to facebook
directly though my cellphone.
And I can be in constant connect with my students.
And they tend to appreciate being responded to
quicker then quick. So, adapting for me hasn't been hard.
I think it's been harder for the students.
Students really don't like things digitally as much as you
think they do. They don't pay attention to the blog, um,
They ask me twenty times "Where is this?" and I tell them it's on the Google
Doc link that I sent you at the beginning of class.
And it's...and they don't think electronically.
You would think students would be technologically savvy.
I find they are not. That that's a myth. They can use their phone really well.
That's about it.
What changes do you anticipate happening in the future as new digital technologies are introduced?
Uh...I hope that we move almost completely away from hard copies.
I think the biggest change should be textbooks.
I think...I've thought this the whole time that I have taught.
That there should be no textbooks. I think everything a
student needs should be accessible through the internet.
and should be free. I don't think students should be paying
money for textbooks. It's insane..uh..if the government
would step in and do what it should do...alll...
the information that students need in school shouldn't be
commercialized. There is no reason for there to be a
market for students. So, the textbook companies, regretfully,
make a living off of education that I think that they shouldn't.
That should be the biggest change. Online education will
probably increase, but there's alot of problems with it.
There's already a lot of corruption and bad education
online. So, I hope we don't quit having face to face education.
But we may. Holograms..or one teacher and sixty thousand students watching videos.
How is your website important to your work?
I have about twenty three thousand blogs, partially because
of my ADHD...uh..I have a primary blog that I post everything that's my work.
So, I do have a centralized blog that helps me keep all my
work in one place, but it is also a place where people who
care about my work can see everything.
It's anything that I write. So, I think that it is really important.
The main thing is that I now know that people read my stuff.
When I wrote stuff before in scholarly journals...you know.
There may be a hundred professors that own the journal and
four that read it. And then why do I care if another
professor reads what I wrote because we think the same thing.
But if five hundred people in the public read something.
I think that is a good thing.
In your work does your organization use social media like Twitter and Facebook?
Our education department does have a Facebook page, but
they did that reluctantly. It's been hard to get them to do it.
I think that we're suppose to have a Twitter, but I don't know
that we do it. Furman is on Facebook, but I don't know that it's on Twitter.
People have gone to Facebook, but I find for
scholarly things Twitter's way better. I got pulled into Twitter
because almost everybody I follow in an education scholar or teacher
and I don't do social twittering I do professional twittering
and it's outstanding. I mean I can read Twitter in the morning
and get twenty five pieces of research in two minutes that
would have taken me weeks to find on my own.
So, I think we do about Facebook, but that's it. I think in our department.
I think we're sorely lagging on that.
So, you think it would be useful for your department and the school to make use of Twitter or Facebook?
I think they should. I think they've begrudgingly done a
little bit of Facebook, but I don't think nearly enough.
People are still a little alienated by Facebook. My cycling
There's some cycling groups that just post things on Facebook.
and then people don't know it exists.
Facebook's not really like a webpage
I think Twitter's better.
It's so quick and it's easy to control
what you're looking at.
So, I think people are behind the curve on Twitter.
I think it's got a lot more potential
than people realize.
Do you measure the impact of the choices you
make in using social media or your website
or traditional print publications?
I don't know if that means if I
take into account my decisions based
on whether it's electronic or not,
but I definitely, if I understand that.
I definitely gravitate toward the
electronic social media and a few of us
at Furman, a few professors have been trying
to make the argument that, public commentaries
we think should count more and should count
as part of our scholarship. As opposed to
basically as a professor if you're not
getting published in peer reviewed journals,
it doesn't count.
So our argument is that if I write
an op-ed and 1000 people read it
and if I write a peer-reviewed journal
and two people read it, that op-ed should
count more. So I spend way more time
on electronic social media than I do on
traditional print, although I still buy books.
I'm a hard copy book person. I've done some
electronic e-books, but I don't like them.
What are the most significant advantages of
working with digital tools and networks?
I think it's interactive. I wrote a piece
yesterday morning and it came out of a discussion
on, comments back and forth on a blog posted on Ed Week.
And I basically wrote it as a response to the people
that were arguing with me, and when I posted
it to them one of the guys pointed out
that I had made an unfair statement, and I agreed
with him. I thought that I was being too flip.
So I actually went back and edited it so now
it has changed because of him. And you know,
I even sent him the link and I said, "I've
edited because I think you made a good point."
I even put a little asterisk in it
for people reading it, to let them know that
at one point it said this, but I changed
I changed one word, but I think it was
the right thing to do.
But it's interactive. So, I like that.
Especially if it's interactive with people
who don't have your viewpoint.
Books aren't interactive like that.
You can interact with a book, but it's
you know, it's different.
What are the most significant disadvantages?
Probably most people would argue that it's
too easy to get stuff out there.
So I think some people would think that it's
a quality control problem. I think that's...yea..
But, I've read peer-reviewed things that were awful.
So I think that's probably... I mean,
anybody can post a blog, I mean,
and if you're not a good consumer of blogs
and you're lazy then I think that's your fault.
I don't think it's the blogger's fault.
And you know, scholarship tends to move very slowly.
So, most people, I get these back-handed
compliments or direct criticisms for writing
too much and too often.
So, scholarship tends to want people to go slowly,
and produce slowly. So against those norms
that would be a problem, but I don't think
that's a problem. The volume of what I do,
I don't think should be criticized.
Of course that's me talking about
my own work, so...
What advice would you have for someone who
is still completing their college education
and wants to eventually do the kind of work that you do.
Read, read, read, read,and then read some more.
I would just get involved, I think that's
the one nice thing about the digital world,
is that you can jump right in. You don't
have to wait to have a terminal degree.
You can blog, you can be on twitter.
Be very judicious about who you follow.
Find some people that do what you do
and follow them on twitter. See what,
learn from what they do. Most people
if you, alot of people tweet professionally.
So if you follow their professional tweets,
some people will have a personal twitter account
and a professional one. So I think that's the
good thing about social media and sort of
the electronic world. You can have
way more insight into what it's like to do
the thing you wanna do, now than when
I was your age. There wasn't that open
access to it. I've got a cycling buddy
who jokes about he wished he had a professor
degree and I told him he could have gone to
school for it. So I mean, it's just
scholarship and teaching are just academic things
So it really is reading and writing.
But I would go ahead and get involved in those
media now, because you can.
There's nothing to stop you from using
facebook for more than social things.
Using twitter for more than social things.
Using blogging for more than social things.
Especially if someone wants to write.
I would just start a blog.
Start a blog about something you enjoy, and learn
how to write by writing, and getting
people's feedback would be huge.
You know, if you can find a niche, find things
that people care about. That's what blogs
are all about.
There's tons of nerds out there that like
the narrow thing that you're interested in.
I think that's what the electronic world is for,
the nerds.
Definitely the nerds.
Convening of the nerds.
Is there anything else you would like
to tell us that we haven't already talked about?
Pertaining to this subject or...
I think maybe I would just add that
because of social media and the electronic world
we are starting to rethink reading and writing.
And I think that's a good thing.
I have a column that's ending in English Journal
and the point of it was, to argue with english
teachers that we should rethink what counts
as text, and part of it is based on my
comic book book. And the argument that it's
not just words on the page, that we read
movies. We read comic books. So I think we're
going to be forced more and more
to reconsider what reading is
and what writing is for our students.
I think we're going to have to open up to
more things. I think that's going to be
good for students, because I think
students literacy is... they're more
successful in a wide variety of things.
So if we only have traditional print
text on paper reading and writing,
that limited which kids were successful.
So I think if we opened that up, I know
that when students find out that they can read
graphic novels instead of regular books
you've got ten kids reading now that weren't
reading before.
So I think the electronic world will open up
even more. There are kids
who will blog that wouldn't want to write
a paper for class. There's kind of, some kids
would get into writing 140 characters for twitter.
It's a different kind of writing.
So they would see it as a challenge.
It would be fun for them.
It would be good for them to do that.
Like writing haikus on vacation