Teaching with Blogs
Okay, so what is a Blog?
“Blog” is short for web log, a web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common webpage that anyone can access. Many weblogs enable visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers centered around the blog; others are non-interactive. The totality of weblogs or blog-related websites is usually called the blogosphere. When a large amount of activity, information and opinion erupts around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere, it is commonly called a blogstorm or blog swarm.
Want to use Blogs in your Composition Class?
Students can easily create accounts at blog servers like blogspot.com. This server is very usable, and requires no special knowledge to get started. There are also lots of options to customize and be creative.
We’ve found that teaching with blogs is a way to more Universally Design pedagogy—most students with really high blog “literacy” were not as engaged by “traditional” writing; they became teachers of blogging. This was a way to affirm the kind of writing many students do outside of school, or to introduce students to a form of writing that facilitated ongoing communication and community, that emphasized process over product, that expanded conceptions of genre and audience, and that gave students much more creative control.
In writing classes, blogs can be used for many things, including but not isolated to:
- in-class writing or out-of-class independent writing
- creating and cultivating links between written products, writers, and communities
- reading journals or just plain journals
- posting e-portfolios
- rhetorical analyses of alternative media, including analyses of blog dialects and media-specific analyses of blogs as “embodied” composition
- discussions about the blogs of writers or other famous people, or studying blog journalism
- soliciting feedback or inviting debate from, or “feeding back” and debating with, a larger community online
- learning .html and other coding through split-screen composition, working with multiple media, designing (or user-testing) templates and interfaces
- challenging the idea that the professor is the only audience for student writing
Post to the CompositionWIKI with more suggestions!
Some Blog Links in Composition and the Blogosphere
- Poundy
The blog of Wendy McClure, a famous blog about body image - Colby Buzzell's Blog
U.S Army soldier in Iraq - “The Year of
the Blog”
an article on why Blogs are important to Composition by Barclay Barrios - KairosNews Weblog
Kairos is a Comp. journal, this is its News Weblog - Into The Blogosphere
a Rhetorical Weblog Community - A list of weblogs by Composition scholars and teachers
- Poet Ron Silliman’s Blog
a poetics of blogging - The Intellectual Property Caucus of the CCCC
dealing with copyright issues - Computers and Composition Online
Journal about Comp. and technology. Lots of articles of interest, including several articles on the use of blogs. - Kairos
Another journal. Articles of interest, including several articles on the use of blogs. - Boing Boing
- jjcohen.blogspot.com
Collaborative academic/medieval blog - ydog.net