Welcome to the UW-Madison J-School Qualitative Studies Group weblog

Folks, I've recently become a convert to the idea of using collaborative weblogs in my teaching, and it strikes me that a weblog might be a good tool for communication among folks interested in the still-pretty-new J-School "Qualitative Studies Group". I'm not intending this as a substitute for either (a) in-person biweekly meetings or (b) emailed announcements to students and faculty who sign up for our list. But I figured a weblog might serve some extra purposes that these communications techniques can't:

• Allow students and faculty who can't make a particular meeting to offer thoughts and access notes (that's assuming someone's willing to act as scribe at each meeting).

• Provide an asychronous and aspatial discussion forum for projects that the QSG is working on together, such as our nascent "Media Map of Madison" (M3?) project.

• Provide a way for individual QSG participants to pose specific questions, recommend/review specific readings, or propose individual projects which the rest of us can then comment on productively with praise and critique and further questions.

• Provide a site for QSG participants to post links to recent and relevant journal articles, news items, or announcements of campus events that relate to qualitative research topics and methods in mass communication.

• Provide an archive of all of these postings so that in successive semesters, new participants can look back at what the group has been wrestling with.

For now, I have sent an email inviting all the current faculty and student members of the QSG mailing list to become members of this weblog. Being a member means you have full access to post things and comment on the posts of others. For now I'm going to reserve the administrative functions (like changing the lovely color of the background) for faculty, just because it gives me a sense of purpose and direction.

Maybe we'll find that we don't have a use for this weblog, and it will die a slow, painful death. That's OK. There's no monetary investment here and little time investment on my part. But if carving out a corner of cyberspace can be productive for our collective efforts, why not try it.

Comments? Ideas? Reactions?