Blogs in the College Classroom 8.05.06

So... I've been thinking...

How can blogs be used in college?

And why would blogs be used? To what purpose?

I am most excited about what blogs offer the writer. There is something that is central to the acts of self-identity and self-formation that blogs provide. Blogs are playful sites where people invent voices, names, lives. Blogs also suggest, and make real, an expectation of audience. So a writer crafts her message and her identity with an eye towards being read by someone who is real, someone who is not a teacher.

Blogs offer a sense of self and thought over time.

Since blog entries must be written while one is one line, they are limited in time and space and time of creation/production.

Blogs are not great instruments of revision or advanced compositional moves. They are rudimentary word processors with extremely limited features. One cannot change fonts, colors, margins. One cannot use horizontal space playfully.

Because of these limitations, blogs resemble typewriters.

Blogs can be free.

Blogs seem to invite creating a multitude of voices and purposes, all within the same blog, or offer the writer multiple blogs, multiple sites, multiple voices, multiple places.

Blogs impose rudimentary organization on one's documents (if one calls them "documents"nanymore. They are instances of hypertext.)

Blogs do not allow one to layer windows, work on sevearl pieces simulatneously, they are not friendly to cut and paste moves.

Blogs are instances where a writer needs to make sense of each entry--define, or redefine, its purpose, its goals, its rhetoric.

Blogs can range from the absolutely informal and hilarioous and exaggerated to the deadly serious, and anywhere inbetween.

Blogs can be highly personal and highly public. A writer can maintain privacy or invite in other readers and offer invitations to post responses.


So...all of this is fascinating Dave, but weren't you going write and think about how blogs might be used in the college classroom?

Well, you're right. I guess I thought it might prove helpful to remind myself what blogs can do before committing to them as a form or forum or tool. I want blogs to be used with intention, with a purpose that extends beyond their innovation. (Composition classrooms over the past fifty years are littered with the detritus of new and revolutionary developments, conceptual as well as physical. (I'm thinking of overhead projectors; grammar quiz shows; reading machines; heuristic software; on-line handbooks; CD-ROM dictionaries; networked classrooms; etc. etc. All of these toys and tools can be helpful, but their innovativeness did not improve writing or writing instruction. Too often, they simply interfered with the interaction between writer and writing, between learners. They were distractions posing as improvements. Let's face it--there is something radical about writers working in a community of writers, face-to-face, talking, sharing, listening, writing.)

So, again, back to the question: how can blogs be used?

1. Well, for one, they could simply be sites where writers write and practice voices, purposes, etc. One could simply count words and invite literacy to accrue through frequency.

2. One could say I won't regulate what you write, but I do want to see evidencee of X number of entries in which you address.... or try....

3. Reading blogs, where students record their thinking/notes/gathering ideas as they work through assigned texts. For instance, in HS380, where students are not required to write up formal reading responses to assigned readings and websites and documentaries, blogs could be the gathering spot where that kind of notetaking and formulating and accruing ideas and questions takes place. (However, that is limited because students don't always have access to blogs and it seems as if we're artifically replacing the jorurnal or workbook with the blogosphere.) Still, if one could find a situation where blogs would be readily accessible, this would be fun to try out.

4. Students can exchange blog addresses and post links so others can read and respond to their thinking. This is snappy because the blogosphere is in hypertext. One can't turn in or hand over a journal and still maintain access. We do a form of this on the moodle. Students can read and review and respond to each other's forum, as well as the instructor's forums. A whole new level of conversation and interactivity is possible. Blogs allow us access to eachh other's thinking and writing that is hardly fettered by the limitations of paper. New layers of reflection and recall and generating a discussion with a memory are possible. Students have a visible voice in the moodle. Also, once students post to the moodle, they can't take it back, so there is an implied imposition of responsibility.

5. Blogs allow for the creation of hybrid texts: texts with multiple voices and languages and the interplay of rhetorical modes. One can eaasily load photos and images, so the mix of verbal and visual is invited, Bogs can invite a blend of narrative and analytical voices.

6. A blog could be the final "product" of an assignment. Rather than ask for papers or powerpoints, one could create a blog in which some purpose is fulfilled.

7. Blogs seem in many ways a natural tool for documentation. Visually and verbally.

8. Blogs offer us the ability to read other blogs and determine the range of purposes and voices and intentions. As well as the varieties of self-formation and the range of play. We can see professional writers, blog journalists, educators, schools, knittting clubs, commercial sites, rants, private confessions, niche audiences and markets, informal discourse among friends....etc. etc. etc. The daily blog roll continues to amaze me with the range of people and purposes who create and use blogs. It's a way to learn about form and content: reading and browsing through others' blogs. Mch like the early days of the internet when people sat in amazement for hours simply surfing the exploding range of sites.

So, I didn't come to any conclusiomns here, but I have opened up my thinking in a direction. My intuition says to offer blogs but to not fetter them with academic expectations. Play must be invited, expected. nurtured.