In preparing for the SSAW Conference, I posed these questions to my class:
Dear Class,
I hope you have been having a good year since we parted ways last May. I still have your Portfolios if you would like to stop by my office in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research to pick them up (New Lib225E).
I
“Think twice, write once,” I was taught 50 years ago when the execution of writing meant inkwells, and a blotted line equaled slovenliness. Now immersed in the writing process, we encourage our students to create draft after draft, to write one, twice, a hundred times, if needed, in order to create clarity, organization, and a logical, compelling argument.
“Rethink, revise, re-see,” is our mantra now, and it is a good one, but sometimes, our students revise themselves out of a voice, and if they have no new thoughts or no new opinions from outside of themselves, their rethinking resembles an overcooked stew. Peter Merholz praises the immediacy of blogs and their importance in open up the thinking process beyond the self:
I still believe that the power of weblogs is their ability to immediately put form to thought–that I can get an idea in my head, however poorly baked it might be, and in seconds share it with the world. And immediately get feedback, refinement, stories, etc., spurred by my little idea. Never before was this possible.
Peter Merholz
Our Blogs, Ourselves. Posted on 01/25/2002.
I’ve been thinking of the value of the immediacy of blogs in encouraging thinking in regard to this online discussion my class had last year.
I’m very grateful not to be presenting at dawn: SSAW Program. From the bios and pics, it looks as if our panel, has the oldest (bg and me) and the youngest (Eugene and Piya) paricipants.
When student work is exposed to the world, class dynamics can change in subtle ways. Topics that might have been spoken about freely can become muted on the web. Does a student want to refer to her sister if her sister might read about herself on a class blog? On the other hand, the faceless computer screen–even though it opens up to the world through a blog–can release opinions and narratives not expressed in a face-to-face classroom. So in a course that by its nature deals with sensitive, even confidential, material, what should be public? What private? Which talk should be hidden? And which, set free?
WP202S04 : April 13
I’ll be working with this journal entry for the conference in May.
For me, using blogs in an academic environment is about having an opportunity to bring discussion and resources to students faster and more completely. I like to create a small world of resources on the blog that expands to the larger world on the web for my students. In Jane Austen and the Royal Navy, a non-writing intensive class, I was able to create extensive paperless writing guides by linking back to information on the weblog of a previous writing class and, also, to off campus sites.
Easy communication outside of the classroom, allows in class time to be more important, more vital. In my Writing Workshop 1 class, the on-line journal combined with my newsy blog about class events and assignments created what my colleague Hector Vila described as
Barbara Ganley. Eugene Lee, Piya Kashyap, and I are off to this conference in May: Social Software in the Academy Workshop. I plan to be talking about my experience with blog journals in my Writing to Heal class last spring as well as an indpendent course I’m teaching on the same topic this spring.