blogs in composition class

After pondering blogs vs. message boards, I have begun to think of things differently. Originally I was thinking of which medium would be better for student responses and engaging with other students, but I'm thinking that a blogs aren't really that useful for that purpose. When students are required to read and respond to a other students' posts, the responses are typically superficial and don't accomplish what I wish they would.

So what do I want out of a blog? Here are a couple of old posts on audience and blogging that I wrote when I first started this blog. I was excited about my developing sense of audience and how that shaped what my blog became. I want my students to experience that, and I also think that frequent "low stakes" writing is really useful to me and to my students to help us feel like writing is a habit and even fun and not a scary, anxiety-inducing reach for perfection that we cannot achieve--I think that most students feel this anxiety to some degree, and for many it is paralyzing. This is the value I see in a blog--a vehicle by which to work out ideas through writing (or as the dreaded freshman comp books call it, "prewriting"), to write habitually, to gain a new understanding of audience. And that end cannot be reached through forced interaction.

I had a great talk recently with a fellow teacher who is using blogs in a way that I think is really useful. She is teaching an Advanced Composition class and giving blog assignments that are not direct responses to readings but rather related questions that can be taken out of the context of this class and might be of interest to a blog reader who is not in the class. An example of one of her questions is, "What are you doing here?" Here, meaning online, on the web, in the electronic world of communication. So students can answer this question is many different ways and readers can stumble onto the blogs and read interesting posts that are not limited to a specific reading or specific course. The students have an opportunity, while meeting certain criteria, to create blogs that are interesting to them and might interest others--in other words, real blogs and that do more than just go through the motions. She has also asked them to link to other blogs in a couple of posts, which has started getting them some response because, as we know, any diligent blogger knows about every link.

And students are not required to read or respond to the blogs of other students. Which leaves a place for message boards, although I'm not convinced they work so well. We'll get to that in another installment.

While this will not work for all classes in all subjects, I think this is a great way to use blogs in a composition class, and I'm going to do this next semester.