Kaye Trammell is thinking about how to tweak her students blogging experience for next term, and once again our brains are in the same neighborhood.
I’m still thinking through exactly how I want my students to use their blogs. Of course, it has to be meaningful & add to the overall goals of the course. But they are blogging – it has to be fun. I want them to fall in love with it as I have.
I’ve been really impressed by the Web logging efforts of a couple of my students as I’ve noted before. Suzan and Susan are getting it and building an impressive space for their topics. I don’t know that they have fallen in love with blogging like Kaye and I have, but I do know that they are learning to have the audience in mind when they are writing. I can see it in their posts. Here’s an example from Susan:
I think music plays a definite role in the media because, in a way, the media is telling you who to be or how to act. By means of music is how kids and teenagers begin to identify themselves, and it follows them into old age. For instance, there are the hip hop kids and gangsters, the pop kids that listen to whatever’s in, the punk kids that are confused about everything. Music taste defines peoples’ friends and changes their personalities. The media can play on this so easily. A lot of art in the “Pop Rocks” exhibit rearranges song lyrics and titles to show how the media is controlling you. It’s sort of interesting. A little scary. I’d definitely hit the link above to check out descriptions of the work.
You know what stands out about this post more than anything? She’s not writing for me. She’s writing for a group of her peers, and her use of fragments and and short simple sentences shows that, I think. She wants to be read. Now like I said, whether or not that translates into a love of blogging, I don’t know. But I do know that she’s having fun with this. She’s thinking and learning and teaching, and that’s what the Web log gives her that is so important.
There’s more to talk about here. Pat‘s digging into the blogs and writing connections again, too:
Blog posting isn’t writing; it’s publishing. Writing happens before the ‘post’ button gets clicked. Good writing is more than news, more than pointers, but benefits from news and pointers. Good writing is re-writing.
He’s right for the most part. This is mostly publishing. But this goes back to the blogging as genre thread, that while it may not always look like the familiar prose we’re used to asking for, it’s good writing nonetheless. And good writing IS re-writing, though I would argue that there is a lot of good Web log writing that takes a short cut where revision is concerned. And in one way, consistent Web log writing incorporates a more immediate, built in revision process that will make traditionalists grimace but may be a skill just as important as the more thougthful, re-vision we teach our students.
We’re still a long way from figuring all of this out, obviously. But I gotta tell you, when I read Suzan and Susan, I get a tingle of the excitement that comes when something new is working. It’s pretty fun…
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