Prompt #1: Look at, and link to, weblogs written by people in your field. Characterize the types of discussions that go on in the comment threads, to analyze the rhetorical situation of a “professional weblog.”
In searching for a blog to track, I was struck by how many are out there. So many words, and who is listening, really? A huge ocean teeming with blog-life. Slogging through so many (lots of them long and dense) underscored for me the importance of writing succinctly, energetically, engagingly. I saw, too, how chunking, using headers and subheaders, and attending to design increases accessibility and allure.
Here’s one that I found that relates to my work in Penn State’s Composition Program: This blog is entitled “Teaching College English–the glory and challenges”. She (I had to dig to discover that she’s a she, as she just references herself as “Dr. Davis” on the blog, an interesting rhetorical choice) talks explicitly about who she envisions her audience to be. She writes on her “About” page: “if you are a new college teacher…if you are a seasoned college teacher…if you are a student…” And so she directs her explorations and ruminations toward the interests of these audiences (for example, she groups different posts with category tags such as “Teaching Tips” and “Learning”).
Which brings me to one of the interesting things I will take from this blog–the idea of organizing posts with categories. (I believe our PSU blogs platform allows for this.) Doing this will help me and will help readers find writing on particular topics. If I trust this blogger’s voice, if I accept what she has to say on subjects such as whether adjuncts are good for a university, I will find myself visiting the site often to take advantage of the information gathering she does, to hear her insights. At first I will simply be a silent visitor, but who knows? At some point I may jump into the conversation and make myself known to her through my comments and responses. Thus, a virtual community is born.
Most of her posts I read had 0 comments. Will I require students to comment on each others’ blog entries? I would like to encourage it, perhaps by giving time in class.
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I’m rereading and updating this entry as I teach Tech Writing in the Spring of 2010. As I revisit the blog I found to comment on last year, I see that the author hasn’t posted in the past year, but then I realize if I click on the title, I’m led to the the most recent version of this website, which includes entries from this month. Teaching College English: the glories and the challenges. It makes me makes me think about how easy it is to get lost in the maze of the internet, of hopping from one link to another, from one site to another, and then wondering how you got from A to B to C. How links get old and broken, and how difficult it is to have stable sources and paths of information.
I am in the midst of a professional development course this semester with other instructors of English Composition, and part of our work is to create a teaching e-portfolio and teaching philosophy on a Blogs@Penn State website. I think I will create a list of other composition teacher blogs there that I can and should follow and comment on. “The Glories and the Challenges” will be the start of that list.
As for having students comment on each others’ blogs, I have worked that into our syllabus this semester (after having students last semester say how they wished they had more readers than me and the occasional classmate, how they wished for a “blogging community”).
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