In his article, "Educational Blogging: A Forum for Developing Disciplinary and Professional Identity," author Geoffrey C. Middlebrook quotes Ruth Reyard saying that a blog "must be integrated early into the course design, and must be clearly connected to the course outcomes, before it can become anything more than just an extra task for students." Earlier in the article, Middlebrook also mentions that the most frequently chosen blog topic is a person's own experience and life. Put together, both pieces of evidence seem to imply that the care and deliberation necessary for integrating blogs into the classroom is monumental. While I think they can be a valuable tool, I would have to agree that designing specific blogging assignments with the genre in mind is of the utmost importance.
When I ask my ENG 104 students to tell me about the genre of blog (I do this every semester when we discuss genre; we discuss Facebook posts too.), they usually say that there are no rules for this newly formed genre. I posit that I don't think that's necessarily true. After all, there must be some conventions for this to be a genre. We discuss how the genre has evolved from being primarily an online diary to an effective form of communication maintained by corporations, public figures, etc. However, we also note that it continues to offer a soapbox for the common person. Despite these blog differences, what reigns supreme in the minds of my students is the fact that a blog, to them, is nothing more than a ramble.
As instructors, then, we must be sure to create blogging assignments so that students understand they are being asked to do much more than ramble. In addition, what use is it to do in a blog what can be done in a journal or on a discussion forum? This is not to say blogging is pointless, because I don't think it is, but I am of the opinion that blogging assignments must be specially designed for the genre of blog. For instance, Middlebrook did this by asking the students to make a log and tag their posts, in addition to offering multimodal assignments. Requiring an interaction component is another way to make a blog assignment right for the blog genre. However, it's important to be purposeful about what we assign as blog topics and what we assign as forum topics.
Another point Middlebrook brought up was the point of engagement. Though I think it's important to want to engage students in their assignments, we need to be careful that we don't attempt engagement at any cost. I found this video, in which students discussed why they liked using blogs. While I think that many of the reasons listed are valid ones, many of the reasons listed could also be boiled down to the fact that blogs are more "fun" tha other assignments.
While it's not wrong to give "fun" assignments because they are more engaging, assignments need to be given because they do more than JUST engage students. Middlebrook made the point that using blogs had a professional connection. I also think bogging teaches students technological composing skills they will use throughout their lives. However, I think students should be given blog assignments that really stretch and challenge them to compose in a virtual environment. Otherwise, they are just keeping online diaries.
Some of the components of an authentic blogging assignment, to me, would include:
- The use of hypertext and multimodality in posts.
- The customization of the blog's look and feel as a rhetorical element.
- The use of tagging tools to categorize and sort posts.
- The linking to other blogs (in and outside of class) to establish an audience and participate in a conversation.
- The promotion of the blog using social media, SEO tools, etc.
The best defense I've heard of blogging in the classroom (as of yet) is the fact that bloggers have an "authentic" audience when they write. But how real is this supposed audience, and is it any more real than the faux audiences they have as students in the composition classroom? If students are blogging without parameters, it is likely that no one (save the instructor and maybe a few classmates) will happen on their blogs. However, with proper assignment design, blogging can be a meaningful assignment that really teaches students composition in the world of web 2.0.
Reading Middlebrook brought to mind for me the perennial struggle with resume and cover letter instruction. I thought that his concept of a professional identity via blog was a brilliant concept and could be easily integrated into the high school or college curriculum. The use of tags, linking to other professional blogs, and use of current ideas in the field of interest would push student blogs into an authentic audience.
ReplyDeleteBlogs merely as a conversation tool for the classroom are a bit more limited. Tagging should increase the likelihood of others coming across the blogs, as should linking to outside sources and research. I think the focus should be more on providing the sort of information the students believe would benefit other students to create the most likely audience.
The idea of "tagging" also teaches students a very useful rhetorical device--that is, folksonomic discourse (folksonomies--where the structure, organization, and importance of information is controlled by users and not by some external criteria, such is the case with a taxonomy)
ReplyDelete“I posit that I don't think that's necessarily true. After all, there must be some conventions for this to be a genre.”
ReplyDeleteI used to think that blogs had no rules other than that each entry is listed in order from newest to oldest, vertically. However, I know that there are expectations for bloggers. Blogs seem to be more free, flexible and personable than many other types of writing. In the classroom setting, however, blogs can only be so flexible before they become no longer conducive to the original point of the class and can also become difficult to assess.
“is nothing more than a ramble.”
In response to your students, maybe a lot of blogs are written that way. But some of the more effective blogs use specific rhetorical techniques. Outside of the blogging world, bloggers sometimes use techniques like the “link bait” where the blogger writes something controversial with the hope that others will link to the controversial content. Would something like link baiting be relevant in a classroom? I have a hard time seeing educators say “write something controversial in your blog to get attention.” Maybe if a class is ever held on “blogging strategies,” something like this might be covered.
“The promotion of the blog using social media, SEO tools, etc.”
I’m glad you brought this up. I often wonder if at some point educators should give students a sense of how their blog posts become visible. Students who write a blog post and badly want an audience might become frustrated when they do not receive many pageviews. For students who want to start a real career as a blogger or who want to get their ideas more widely distributed, they might benefit from learning about traffic generation techniques, SEO, backlinks, ect.