Delirium Waltz

Another grad student and I are hosting a focus session during the orientation for new and returning teaching assistants this week. These are the notes I drafted for the talk. I am referencing my experience with classroom blogging, as well as a number of outside sources. My own experience has been on WebCT (BlackBoard) for the past few years. This year, the Rhetoric program has adopted a new textbook (which is not a book but a flashdrive), Choices: Situations for College Writing, that comes with its own blogging program. It seems similar to blogging on WebCT, since neither blog program has a customizable design. Also, these “sponsored” blogs don’t offer students the same public forum and networking opportunities they could find on WordPress or Blogger. (The Choices blog can be made “public,” but it still remains part of the course web site.) At any rate, I have tried to pick out the most important tips that inexperienced teachers can use when implementing a blog project assignment in their college writing courses. Let me know what you think!

Blog Project Overview

• The project as a whole constitutes 10% of the final course grade.
• Project is meant to be adapted and developed to meet individual instructors’ needs. The blog can work for in-class or at-home writing assignments.
• Choices provides prompts for blog posts in Chapters 2 and 3; there are also blog prompts included in each assignment description. Guidelines for the project are on pg.31 in Choices.
• Instructors decide additional blog prompts, such as free writing exercises (select your own subject) at least one per week after week 2.
• A suggested length for blog entries is 100-250 words. (Choices has a 10,000 character limit, which is about 1,600 words.)

Differences & Similarities between Choices Blogging & “Real World” Blogging

• Difference: Customization
• Difference: Evaluation
• Difference: Exposure
• Similarity: Space to play
• Similarity: Public audience
• Similarity: Multimodal composing opportunities
• Similarity: Critical thinking

Tips for Teaching Blogging

• In Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy, Diane Penrod offers some basic rules that good bloggers follow (40). Here are three that writing students can really use:

1. Pay attention to tone in your blog. Adapt it to the subject and audience, and write to keep the reader’s interest level high.
2. It is important to blog original content, even though you are writing for the web. Cite or link to all outside sources, including images and videos.
3. Use good sense when deciding to post personal content. Think of blog entries as something you would be willing to say in class or have someone read aloud in class.

• Students can experiment with the many different rhetorical situations that blogs present.
• Although individual entries are not graded, the blog is graded writing as a whole. Maintain grammatical standards and discourage students from writing in “txt msg” speak.
• To make the blog assignment more dynamic, try asking students to make a set number of comments on classmates’ blog posts over the course of the semester.

Examples of Different Types of Blogs

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-blog/
• http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/
• http://feministmentalhealthuk.wordpress.com/
• http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/
• Others?

Miscellaneous Resources

• A tutorial on working with HTML
• A multi-use prompt (courtesy of Annie Mendenhall)

“The response blog gives you an opportunity to explore blogging as a personal, political, or opinion-based public platform. In this blog post, you may respond to a class discussion OR any text (blog, article, video, image) you come across in your own time that is relevant to the course theme or reading. You should describe what you are responding to & then offer your thoughts & opinions. Your response can be a rhetorical analysis that explains what the text is trying to accomplish, a thoughtful response to an issue or idea that came up in class, or an opinion piece responding to a text. Feel free to be creative in your responses & to incorporate images, videos, or hyperlinks throughout your post. Keep in mind the rhetorical principles we have been discussing. What do you want your audience to understand? What are you trying to accomplish in your post? Which rhetorical techniques best suit your needs in this situation?”

• Annotated bibliography blog post:

In lieu of the formal annotated bibliography, try asking students to post three or four sources they have gathered for the Academic Essay assignment. For each source, they can describe what they like/don’t like and how they plan to use the source in their papers—just as they would in a traditional annotated bibliography. They should do this before class. In class, ask students to review the bibliographies of two or three other classmates and then conduct online research to contribute an additional source the student could possibly use. Ideally, students who are writing on similar topics would review each other’s bibliography posts. Diigo Educator (a specially designed social bookmarking tool) may facilitate a collaborative research assignment more than blogging software.

• Additional resources

1. Advice about teaching blogging for the first time: http://cac.ophony.org/2009/06/12/lessons-from-a-first-time-course-blogger/
2. Blog project at Ohio State (with sample prompts & links to blogging resources): http://dmp.osu.edu/blog/index.html
3. Annie Mendenhall’s class blog: http://wi09mendenhall110.blogspot.com/
4. Blog search engines: www.blogdigger.com, www.technorati.com, & www.feedster.com
5. List of blogs in Cultural Studies, Theory, Literature, & Rhetoric: http://www.academicblogs.net/wiki/index.php/Culture%2C_Theory%2C_Literature