More on Blogs and Composition

A couple of other links to composition related blogging that add to the Weblogs for composition discussion. First, Charlie Lowe at Kairosnews has put up a presentation he’s doing at 4Cs next week titled “Weblogs as a Personal Knowledge Publishing Tool for Scholars and Practitioners.” Under the writing part, he lists:

Easy self-publishing tool available to anyone with Internet access.

Enables publishing of snippets, less developed ideas, or drafts of works
in progress.

A narrative of the development of a writer’s ideas and memes which can make the invention process more visible.

Informal writing. Can be playful or conversational in tone.

Foregrounds the intertextuality of writing.

Invites/encourages peer response through comment postings on site and the posts of others on their weblogs.

Favors a collaborative, social constructionist epistemology in which writing is less of a solitary act.

As a journal which can receive feedback and response, can make keeping a
journal more engaging and encourages daily writing.

Does not have to be conceived of as additional work. Invites the writer to share texts that they are or should be writing already.

Allows expression of the personal alongside academic interests.

Can be used to provide an example of the teacher-as-writer to students.

The last is something that I think is extremely important but also one that I’ve struggled to have happen with teachers who implement Weblogs. And, it makes me wonder if I should have pointed my students to my own writing here (or elsewhere) a bit more. All in all, the presentation is a great resource and is among the best I’ve seen in terms of articulating the benefits of blogging.

The second comes via Peter Ford who is participating in a research project called Web Journals in Language Education which looks to be a two and a half year study into the effects of Weblogs in the classroom. Very cool. The expected outcomes:

To popularise web logs as a medium for collaborative language writing.

To produce a publication discussing the theoretical rationale of the project, its realisation and outcomes, and cite examples of good collaborative writing practice.

To publish an open-source language-independent content-management platform which is reusable and easily installed and configured even by someone with minimal technical expertise.

To publish a corpus of writings created by students during the course of the project using the collaborative publishing platform.

The whole project looks really interesting and well put together. I just don’t know if I can wait until 2007 for the results!