Geeky Mom and New Kid have posts today on audience, something I've been thinking about since I started this blog.
A few weeks ago at a gradaute student colloquium some questions about audience in the composition classroom came up (and I have added some of my own to this list). How do writers in Freshman Composition imagine their audience? Is the instructor the only audience they take seriously? How does the concept of audience change when they know that their peers will read their essays? Does their writing change when that situation is added? Do they seriously consider their peers a real part of their audience, or do they see peer review as just a preliminary exercise before the real audience--the instructor--reads the paper?
Here's one that's important to me right now: Do students have a different perception of audience when the peer reviews happen in person than when the peer reviews are electronic? What about if those electronic reviews are anonymous? What about in a web-based class when they have never actually seen any of the other students in their class?
Here is where I see the amazing potential for blogs as well as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace in composition classes. (In part two of this post, I will address my own experience considering audience as a blogger.) Blogging is informal, even when its purpose is academic, and that can free students from a lot of anxieties associated with "the paper"--and quite literally with PAPER--it doesn't seem quite so daunting when it's not going to be printed and handed in. But as people read and comment on each other's blogs, they begin to develop a sense of who their talking to and what they want to say and don't want to say in the presense of those people. I have not put this into play in my class yet, but I have been examining my own sense of audience and the way that my blog is developing to get a sense of what my students might experience.
What is more important to many of them right now is Facebook and that is a very quick--and much needed--lesson in the importance of understanding audience. Stories are popping up everywhere about bad things happening to people based on what they have posted on Facebook and MySpace--people get wierd calls from strangers, lose job interviews, get expelled from school--because they imagine an audience of only selected friends and like-minded people when in reality their audience consists of their parents, employers, teachers, and their friendly neighborhood stalker. Here's an article on the topic from USA Today that a colleague brought to my attention recently.
I have so many questions--I'm really excited about the pedagogical potential of blogs, and the issue of audience is where I think the big payoff is going to be.
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My experience so far, in interviewing my students, is that when they get those first comments on the blog from people outside the class, they really change the way they write. They don't necessarily become more formal or anything, but they carefully consider what others might think about their topic. They try to counter their arguments or think about what they might need to know if they don't know much about the topic. Very interesting.
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