Advisor Creates Blog About Flood

Damage from this summer’s flooding in Iowa extended all the way to Oregon State.

Eric Stoller, an academic advisor at OSU, is from Columbus Junction, Iowa; a town of about 2,000 people that was besieged by water in June when the Iowa and Cedar Rivers overran their banks.

“The only way I could do something to help was to put information up on my blog,” Stoller said.

The transplanted Iowan is quite tech savvy. In a previous job, he worked as a Web consultant and he also built the OSU Admissions department’s blog. He started his personal blog in 2004, mostly as a way to publish his academic work and social justice views. In June, Stoller began posting flood photos and links to Southeast Iowa flooding news stories.

LIFE@OSU is the official newsletter for faculty, staff, graduate teaching assistants and other employees of Oregon State University. Produced in print every other week throughout the regular academic year and monthly during summer sessions, LIFE@OSU seeks to tell the stories of the people and programs of Oregon State with color and style, using all the tools of print and digital media to do so.

LIFE@OSU is intended to promote a civil discourse on campus and to foster a greater sense of community among the OSU work force.

Student Affairs Technology: To Boldly Go

“They should have explained the basic concepts at the beginning (e.g.: podcasts, blogs, wikis, etc.).”

“Helping me to boldly go where I’ve never been before.”

One of these statements is not like the other two. I’m sure you can guess which one gives me hope as a student affairs techie that we as a profession have not lost our willingness to learn, to explore and to stay positive about new technologies. This article represents a call to action for student affairs practitioners. The microblogging site, Twitter, has a feature that lets you “nudge” someone that you are following. This is me providing a gentle nudge to my fellow higher education administrators. I hope that you nudge me back. Let’s push the envelope. Let’s shift our professional paradigms. Let’s make technology (and learning about new technologies) a part of our daily practices.

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I’ve had numerous friends and family members who have unsubscribed or even flat out refused to read my blog. The reason given was usually that they didn’t agree with me. Some folks have even told me that they are afraid that if they read my blog that our friendship will cease to function/exist. My posts were too radical. Too many posts on social justice, higher education and technology.

I was thinking about how my blog is, not always, but sometimes, an insightful window into who I am. My writing lets you know who I am. By saying to me that you don’t want to read my blog because of what I write about, are you also saying that you don’t really want to know who I am? The complete me is something that you resist knowing? I am okay if you don’t want to read because you think my blog isn’t very good or that you disagree with my thoughts. I think most bloggers are okay with that.

I remember when my mom and my brother unsubscribed from my blog’s automatic email function. I was okay with them not agreeing with my posts, but I was concerned that they stopped reading. My brother might be reading via RSS. However, I am fairly certain that my mom just stopped reading. It felt like they didn’t want to know who I am. They wanted an incomplete me. A more palatable me.

I place who I am on this blog. If you refuse to read my blog, it feels like you really don’t want to know me. Who I am. Please don’t read if you don’t want to, but don’t tell me that you don’t read in order to maintain some sort of false sense of me.

One of the bitter ironies anti-racists face when working to end white-supremacist thinking and action is that the folks who most perpetuate it are the individuals who are usually the least willing to acknowledge that race matters. (bell hooks, Teaching Community, 2003, p. 28)

You may be wondering what 7 astronauts have to do with a quote about anti-racism work from bell hooks. I too would be curious. Well, let me attempt to fill in several bits of context and hopefully you’re wonder will be satiated.

Last week, while checking out a NASA-related post from one of my favorite blogs, the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture Blog,” I happened to observe that none of the 7 astronauts for NASA’s latest space shuttle mission were people of color.

There were already 15 comments on the post. Most of the comments praised the ingenuity of NASA or extolled the fantastically big pictures on the post/site. I decided to post a seemingly innocent question regarding the racial makeup of the 7 astronauts in picture #23:

The pool of astronauts isn’t the most diverse is it?
7 white people. 6 guys and only 1 woman. Where are the astronauts of color??? ~Eric Stoller

I had no idea that my comment would generate a shower of racist rhetoric and inflammatory comments.

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I returned from yurting to see that ORblogs is going to be shut down.
I then read in my rss reader that ORblogs might be resurrected.

Thank you for reading and contributing to the site. ORblogs has stopped gathering post excerpts from Oregon blogs, though the current weblog directory will be available for another 30 days.

When I started ORblogs in March 2003, there weren’t many good ways to find bloggers living in a particular area. And because I had recently moved to Corvallis, I wanted to learn what I could from people living near me. The site personally put me in touch with bloggers across the state, taught me a lot about Oregon and its cities (including Corvallis), and I hope the site did the same for others. I feel ORblogs served an important role for Oregon blogging by gathering independent voices across all spectrums into one place where everyone shared a common geography.

I’m shutting ORblogs down now because the site continues to grow and the job of maintaining the site at the level I feel is necessary to keep it valuable has grown with it, putting it out of the bounds of a hobby. I wasn’t able to make ORblogs self-sustaining financially (let alone turn it into a job), and I can no longer devote the time to the site that it needs to grow. Blogging has changed significantly in five years, and blogging is no longer a hobby for many—it’s a job. Commercial blogging isn’t as interesting to me as the personal web and that factored into my decision as well.

Thanks again for making ORblogs what it has been over the years. Please take a last look through the directory, find your favorite Oregon blogs, and subscribe to them in your newsreader if you haven’t already. There are some spectacular voices in Oregon blogging that I will now have to read another way. I still believe it’s important to read locally while I read globally, and I hope you agree and continue to make the effort.

— Paul Bausch (9/4/2008)

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Kevin, a long-time blog buddy, thinks that I am a kick ass blogger. I am honored to be given this award. A lot of the bloggers that have received this award have been mainstays in my RSS reader since I started wading into the blogosphere pool.

There are some rules/regulations for the awarding of a Kick Ass Blogger award. According to Kevin, if you neglect to follow the rules, then your ass kickingness card will be subsequently revoked.

• Choose 5 bloggers that you feel are “Kick Ass Bloggers”
• Let ‘em know in your post or via email, twitter or blog comments that they’ve received an award
• Share the love and link back to both the person who awarded you and back to MammaDawg
• Hop on back to the Kick Ass Blogger Club HQ to sign Mr. Linky then pass it on!

So without further ado, here are 5 bloggers that kick ass:

Professor, What If…? A relatively new addition to my feedreader, Professor, What If…?’s posts are insightful and kick serious ass. Asking tough questions and providing critical analysis are the hallmarks of this site. Critical educational ass kickery. Add this feed to your reader. Go. Now. Do it.

Michael Faris at A Collage of Citations An ass kicking blend of rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy. Michael does not need nor want awards which is exactly why he should win them. Pretentious? Yes, in a he’s-smart-so-listen-to-him-as-he-puts-down-some-kick-ass-thoughts kind of way. Brilliant? Mostly Don’t let him know about it. His head can’t take the swelling

Crip Chick Kicking ableism’s ass and putting up some amazing posts. One of my favorite bloggers. Go check out her stuff. Pronto.

Feminist Philosophers A multi-author site, Feminist Philosophers is a great read for anyone who wants to sit back, think, and learn. Learn a lot. Oh and they have cat posts on Sundays Ass kicking cat posts.

Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican He’s blogging the DNC. Redesigning his site. Shooting video for MTV. Feeding zillions of posts into our feedreaders. Tweeting from morning til night on the twittersphere. Nezua kicks ass on so many levels. Every post is like a poetic essay that forces us to think while enriching our spirits.

Registration is now open for WordCamp Portland. More than 50 people have already registered! I wonder if Matt Mullenweg will make a guest appearance?

WordCamp Portland will be held at CubeSpace on September 27th. You can head over to the Agenda page to check out the details, but we’ll kick things off with a couple large-group speakers including Lorelle Van Fossen as our keynote speaker. The middle of the day will feature several small-group breakout sessions with a variety of topics. Attendees can pose WordPress questions to our “Ask the Experts” panel before dinner. After dinner, we’ll have a bunch of rooms available for unconference-style sessions to be determined by the attendees on the day of the event.

We’re now accepting registrations for WordCamp Portland. The advance registration fee is $10 which includes lunch, dinner, a WordCamp Portland T-shirt, and entry into drawings for door prizes.

Follow WordCamp PDX updates on Twitter.

I didn’t monitor my web stats in 2004 (shocker!), but here’s a snapshot of how my little blogging experiment has grown from 2005 to 2008:

My blog was featured in a news story in the local Corvallis newspaper, the Gazette Times: “Former Iowan blogs back to his flooded homeland“.

I have 3 copies of the print edition, per my mom’s request, that I need to mail back to Iowa.

When I purchased them the cashier asked if I was in the paper. I said yes and she rolled her eyes .

While he’s lived in Corvallis for nearly four years, Eric Stoller will always identify himself as an Iowan.

He spent more than 20 years living in Iowa, and has close ties to his family in Columbus Junction. So when reports of massive flooding of his home state began appearing on the news, he paid close attention to the water’s progress. When it hit his hometown, he started blogging.

“I was in Oregon, and (so) blogging seemed like the only thing that I could do,” Stoller said. “It was cathartic. I quickly went through several (Internet) searches for information about Southeast Iowa flooding.”