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The Amazon of Higher Education

“Five years ago, Southern New Hampshire University was a 2,000-student private school struggling against declining enrollment, poor name recognition, and teetering finances.  Today, it’s the Amazon.com of higher education. The school’s burgeoning online division has 180 different programs with an enrollment of 34,000.”  Read the rest of “The Amazon of Higher Education” at Slate.com.

I spend most of my waking hours (and I suppose a fair amount of my sleeping hours too) inhabiting two worlds that have both been heavily disrupted by technology:  1) writing and publishing, and 2) higher education.   SNH provides a road map for how even smaller universities can bet big on online education and reap huge dividends.  There will always be a place for the traditional, straight-out-high-school, student — trust me, no parent wants their kids going to college in their basements — but focusing exclusively on those students is almost always going to be a losing proposition.  Just as in publishing, it’s critical to a book’s survival to have that book available in as many formats and markets as possible, higher education must deliver learning to as many different groups (eighteen-year-olds, working adults, long distance learners) and in as many different formats (face-to-face, online, hybrid) to ensure their long-term success.  Public universities may not be able to turn the corner as fast as a private institution like Southern New Hampshire, but that’s all the more reason not to delay.

Wooden Bones a Finalist for the Oregon Book Awards

Good news!  My book, Wooden Bones, is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in the Children’s Book category.  It’s a pretty broad category, from picture books to middle grade novels.  My book is a short novel aimed at 9-12 year-olds, though I really wrote it for all ages.  Who doesn’t want to know what happens to Pinocchio after he became a real boy?  The winners in each category will be announced on March 17 at a ceremony in Portland.  I won an Oregon Book Award in 2011 for The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys and it was a terrific honor.  And whether I win this time or not, I appreciate the nod more than anything else.

So much of my life as a writer is spent in isolation, hunched over a keyboard in the wee hours of a morning, and it’s nice when every now and then you get a little external confirmation that all those hours of work haven’t been for naught.

From the Video Archives: Lee Child’s Writing Advice to Writers Is to Ignore All Advice

“The best advice for a budding writer is to ignore all advice.”

Child has a lot of words of wisdom (I won’t call it advice or you might ignore it) packed in that short two minutes, but that was the line  I agree with the most. I’ve certainly handed out my share of writing advice, but really, none of it amounts to much. You put one word in front of the other, and if you keep at it, and trust our own vision and your own voice, in the end you might have something good. And if not, it’s at least yours.

And while I’m a big believer in constantly trying to get better as a writer, I also think there are times when it’s best to stop taking writing workshops and stop reading how-to books and stop hanging out on writing-related forums and just do the work.  This isn’t to say you never take another writing workshop again; it’s just to say that there are periods along the way when it’s best to get all the other voices out of your head and just follow your own path.

Not Every Blog Needs a Comment Section. In Fact, Most Might Do Better Without Them

Think the comment sections on YouTube videos are the cesspools of the Internet? You’re not alone. The AP has an interesting article up on the steps some sites, including YouTube, are taking to curb the rampant vile behavior you often find on comment sections across the Internet:

“Mix blatant bigotry with poor spelling. Add a dash of ALL CAPS. Top it off with a violent threat. And there you have it: A recipe for the worst of online comments, scourge of the Internet.

Blame anonymity, blame politicians, blame human nature. But a growing number of websites are reining in the Wild West of online commentary. Companies including Google and the Huffington Post are trying everything from deploying moderators to forcing people to use their real names in order to restore civil discourse. Some sites, such as Popular Science, are banning comments altogether …” [Read the rest.]

As I said to a friend of mine the other day, the fastest way I can find to lower my opinion of humanity is to read the comment sections on major news sites like CNN.com, so I’m glad to see some of them taking steps to curb some of this behavior.  While total anonymity doesn’t bring out the worst in everybody, it certainly brings out the worst in the worst of us, and since only the bored, the passionate, or the enraged tend to comment on the Internet at all, the percentage of people who seem like loons is magnified.

This article got me thinking about whether a blog needs to have a comment section at all to be successful, or whether it’s just a personal choice depending on the inclinations of the person doing the blogging.  A little Googling led me to Mark Hughes, who blogs at Forbes.com, and who had an interesting take on this question in his post “Are Comments the Measure of a Successful Blog?”

“My blog has received a total of only 1,289 comments in a period of about a year and a half. That’s an average of around 71 comments per month, and many of them are from me personally in discussions with readers, so really probably only about 60 or so per month are from readers.

And really, about half of all of the comments I’ve gotten in the last 18 or so months came on just five or so articles/posts. Meaning I really probably only get about 20 comments per month from readers most of the time. Of those, some are from the same people posting multiple comments, so we could safely say the number of unique individuals commenting on my blog per month is around 15 or so.

But despite that low level of commenting, I had a million-and-a-quarter total views last month, with more than 550,000 unique visitors. That was a pretty good month for me, my first topping a million views, but I pretty consistently average in the quarter-million range for unique visitors (sometimes much higher, sometimes closer to 200,000) and have a very healthy repeat viewership percentage as well.”

The rest of the post is well worth reading.  I know that Andrew Sullivan, one of the most popular bloggers on the Internet, has no comment section at all.  It certainly hasn’t hurt his traffic.

Although I haven’t blogged very frequently the past ten years, that’s something I’m planning on changing as the nature of my writing career and my day job at the university have grown closer together, and one of the questions I’ve wrestled with is whether to turn the comment section back on.  Since this blog until now was mostly just news related to my fiction, with the occasional post (three or four times a year if that) about writing or publishing that might be of interest to a wider audience, I didn’t think it needed a comment section.  Now I’m leaning toward keeping it off, because I’d rather channel any energy and time that would go to managing a comment section into posting more frequently.

That said, I certainly think a comment section can be a viable part of a blog, if managed properly.  I even find myself commenting on a few.   But necessary?  I can’t find much evidence to support that conclusion.