Blogs for Monitoring One's Progress

Duh!

It suddenly hit me that the blog site might be a perfect instrument for developing a long piece of writing over time, such as a thesis, or a researched essay. Any project that requires substantial revision, deepening, and research.

It's the archival function of blogs that is attractive.

Students can not only monitor their daiily progress, but also provide evidence of their process that is not limited to a series of drafts. So a monitoring blog could be a great supplement to the actual sequences of drafts that a longer project requires.

Perhaps we ask students to keep a monitoring blog (to evidence progress and process) and that instructors could access this blog at intervals, while at the same time we access drafts. With the response function, we could enter a dialogue that's developing in the blog and encourage further exploration and focus, etc.

Perhaps the blog could be tghe site whetre students open up their research--open up quotations and text.

Where one practices voices, strategies.

Where one lists questions.

Where one brainstorms playfully.

The blog can also be a worksbook of sorts, the kind we ofetn want studewnts to use in 201 and 404,in class and outside of class, a site where students practice focused freewrites, post questions, conduct informal thinking, practice revision, etc.

Play with the interp[lay between text and image.

But I like the archival function, and the ability to organize one's thinking in a single spot that is accessible in many areas without lugging a ton of materials...it allows for a diffferent view over time and seems to foster reflection and revision. See what ideas can be retrieved from the playful process of informal writing, brainstorming, clustering, directed freewrites, selected revisions, etc. Practice organizational patterns...

Practice the kinds of exercises promoted in Deep Revision.