The verdict is in...many of you like blogging, some don't (and other thoughts)

Hey, everyone,

Well, the verdict is in. After 5 classes where I got to hear your presentations about blogging and talking to you about blogging, I have the impression that many of you like the experience of blogging. However, some of you don't like the experience, which makes me feel somewhat sad, but I think that it is a writing experience where we all can learn a lot from each other and (hopefully) that learning can bleed over into our 1301 and 1302 classes. Of course, there are students like Imran, who seems to feel conflicted about blogging--saying that he didn't like the experience in class, but writing in class that he enjoyed the experience. I don't know if students like him feel like he has to say something to make me feel better, or if he secretly likes the writing experience. (Oh no--perhaps he is a closet writer and just doesn't know it! :) Then, there are other students who thought it shouldn't be a English class experience, like Sarik, but who also seemed to have gotten things out of the experience. (Maybe it is possible that students like him think that the only learning about writing can come from writing essays?)

Anyway, I wanted to share what _I_ learned from the experience:

1) Blogging is an interesting writing experience because it provides a true egalitarian (spelling?), decentralized, non-authoritarian conversation. In other words, I can't control this writing environment, and many of you seemed to appreciate this. Often, in writing classrooms, theorists talk about resistance, where students "resist" the authority of the professor. However, this environment seems to overcome this resistance, by placing the ultimate control over writing in the hands of you students. This makes this writing experience, perhaps, a safer learning community where all of you feel more open to share...perhaps more open than you do in the classroom. Hopefully, when you feel more comfortable with each other and with me, you will be more open to learning and writing. Of course, one student brought up the point that he didn't feel comfortable sharing private information in a public forum, which brings me to lesson number 2.

2) I learned that blogging is an interesting writing experience because it is a public forum. It is interesting to see students play with their voice, styles of writing, etc, while struggling with the concept of audience. Some students seemed to be aware of the difficulty of addressing an audience in what is ultimately a private journalling manner. In other words, many of you had to make tough decisions of what to share and what to hold back. I had that same tough decision to make--how candid I wanted to be. Michael brought up the point that he wasn't sure what audience he was addressing. On face value, we are addressing each other in a classroom environment, but also, we are addressing the whole world. This is obvious in the number of "lurkers," i.e. random people not enrolled in our classes, who have been reading/responding to our posts, both on my own blog, and on your own blogs. I am not sure if students were fully aware of how public this writing environment is, but it certainly is more public than simply writing a paper and me being the only reader, or only a couple of peers reading what you wrote. This leads me to the third lesson:

3)A public writing environment is beneficial to students because it allows students to see different styles of writings of other students. Kim realized that students now-a-days are perhaps more deep in their thoughts than when she was in college "back in the day," before she recently came back to school. Sarik pointed out that he never really gets to know how other students write when you only get to write essays.

4) Another lesson I learned from blogging is that being candid and open with students can help with rapport and help me and students feel more comfortable with each other (this is related to lesson 1). It is good for students to recognize me as being human, and for me to be reminded that students are human too. Writing is fundementally a human activity, and only when we recognize each other's humanity can we truly understand and care about each other. I would argue that caring is a prerequisite for learning and teaching.

5) Blogging allows certain students to go beyond their distaste of writing and see a fuzzier division between personal writing and academic writing. For instance, Morgan, who has made it clear how much she dislikes academic writing, wrote beautiful writing that could easily be translated into academic writing. Other students did the same--using blogging as a place to make strong, insightful and persuasive "freewrites" that could be easily translated into essays. Perhaps, like freewriting, blogging simply gets our brains working--and makes it easier to translate our thoughts onto paper. It was also good that this is a conversation, because students got feedback on their thoughts. I also got feedback on my thoughts, which, in turn, helps me clarify my own writing.

So--those are some of the things I learned from the experience. I might assign another lab that involves blogging this semester--however, if I do this, I will have a mini-tutorial session to make sure all the anti-bloggers (who often seemed to be anti-bloggers due to technical difficulties) can actually get on and blog.

Cheers,
Melissa