Post 1: Blogs and Community
I would like to put forth the idea that a blog is not merely a place for the blogger to write his thoughts. In my opinion, the most important aspect of a blog (and there are many) is the ability for the blog to become a part of a community. Hyperlinking, commenting, trackbacking, and other community-based tools are the keys for a blog to become more than simply a website. That level of interactivity inherent in a blogging community is exactly what makes blogs so exciting (and scary). Before we go any further, here is a great video, that explains exactly what blogging is…
There. Its all so simple now, isn’t it? And yet it becomes extremely complicated when we try to establish a blog for a writing class. What I’ve found is that there are a few ways to do this, and the most common are The Corporate Blog, Individual Student Blogs, and the MotherBlog. Each of these methods has something positive going for it, and we’ll spend some time talking about them.
The Corporate Blog
This is one website with multiple student authors. The instructor acts as an administrator, but each student has the ability to post to this one blog. This works pretty well if the students aren’t going to be required to create specific assignments for the class, but may not be individualized enough to really allow students to creatively experience the full potential of blogging.
Individual Student Blogs
Each student publishes and customizes an individual weblog. The instructor visits each student blog to observe and comment on the work done. This is possibly the most free-forming, but students can get lost in this assignment if they don’t have enough direction or if a solid community has not been established.
The Mother Blog
The instructor and each student sets up a blog. The instructor’s acts as sort of a highlight reel for the classroom. The instructor comments on and links to a few student posts each week. Students are encouraged to visit and comment on the instructor’s site. Each student site has a link on the instructor’s blog.
Each method has its positives and negatives, but only the MotherBlog seems to establish both the individuality that a blogging student needs and a central communal location to establish the blogging network. And if establishing a blogging community is the goal of a 103 blogging project, I would take that a few steps further. But that requires a really neat piece of technology called RSS.
What exactly is RSS? Well, it just so happens the folks at CommonCraft have a video for that too!
There, it all makes sense, right? Well, maybe. But what good is an RSS feedreader with class blogs? To give an example, here’s what my public RSS reader page looked like for this past semester. As you can see, I’ve separated my students into their sections, providing a link to each student blog. By clicking on the names in the left-hand column, anyone can view posts made by the students. Trying to encourage a blogging community for my students, I gave them this link so that they could read their classmate’s blogs, comment on them, and link to them. It sort of worked.
I talked about this with my mentor, Dr. Young, and we had a great conversation about the various things that can be done to establish a blogging community. He saw my RSS feed, and almost immediately came up with a way to improve it. The classroom subheadings are too big. Students can easily get lost by looking at a selection of 18 other students, but if that subsection is made smaller…perhaps creating groups of 5 or 6, students will be much more willing to read the postings of their groupmembers and contribute to their discussions. I will most likely take Dr. Young’s advice in the future when I set up these blogging projects with my classes.
I’ve also looked around at some of the thoughts posted by my own classmates, and I’d like to talk about some of them here.
Even though Jonathan was discussing a different topic within his series of blog posts on visual rhetoric, I believe he hit the nail on the head within his reflection post. Jonathan said:
“As a wrap-up to my discussion of visual rhetoric, I would like to consider a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Devil & the Good Lord. The character Nasti says: “My brothers, we have no need of priests; any man can perform the rite of baptism; any man on earth can grant absolution; all men may preach. I tell you truly: all men are prophets, or God does not exist” (18). This quote, while perhaps not entirely relevant to the argument I am making about the inevitability of visual rhetoric and its applicability to today’s student, serves as a nice metaphor for the consideration of the rhetor as the one responsible for serving as a “gatekeeper” of meaning. If all students possess the power to construct arguments, if it is not a holy rite reserved only for the elite, then these students must also take responsibility for making sure they are not misleading their audience to erroneous conclusions by setting up arguments based solely on sentimentality and bathos.”
This, to me, is one of the keys to blogging–the idea that students now hold the keys for creation of meaning. That is an exciting and challenging idea for both teacher and student, as it implies a standard of quality in each work that is constantly expected, because students are constantly writing for an audience. Tess also touched on the ideas of blogging and audience in the conclusion to her post from last spring.
“When considering the actual quality of the work the students are producing it seems the most important factor was audience. The atmosphere is what is crucial. As long as a certain standard is set and maintained, there is no real reason to think students would not post quality work. Martindale found that students began to post longer and in some cases extra assignments. Clearly this article demonstrates that Blogs can be an effective learning tool that students may even enjoy using!”
I think Tess nailed it with that thought. Students will write better when they know they have an audience waiting to read their work. Jonathan’s take supports this with the notion that students must also be considerate in the nature of their arguments, making sure to present fully balanced ideas to their audience, and not resort to cheap emotional appeals.
And thus we get to the crux of the situation. Blogs in the classroom are useful in a number of ways, but in the end it boils down to a few significant aspects–audience and community. By establishing a community of discourse, in which our students know that their work will be read by their peers, students will have a sense of purpose to their online rhetoric and argument, hopefully improving the quality of their writing. I look forward to seeing how I can improve what I’ve done with blogging in my classroom next semester.
