on blogging and its potential

thinking about using/how to use blogs, in particular for teaching comp or etc courses. thinking about how to expand on the idea of blog as 'diary' how the blog space can be opened and used in more multiple and creative ways. or boring ways (simply a place to take notes, post interesting emails into a single and organized location, posting good quotes or thoughts that one comes across...). here are just a couple of thoughts, there are many more:


Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 23:35:30 -0400
From: Joe Hakim
Subject: Re: Writing New Media and blog assignments
To: 6010@LISTS.WAYNE.EDU

"Second, I haven't found a way
to blend the personal with the academic. For instance, I'm looking forward
to when the class is over so I can delete my blog entries, because I think
they're stupid and don't want to be further associated with them after the
class. On the other hand, however, I'm thinking about turning the site into
a personal blog where I talk about music, concerts, backpacking, and that
kind of stuff."

Cara -

I went through this a couple years ago when I went back and deleted all of my personal stuff in fear of sounding stupid in the classroom setting. However, I learned at that time that blogs are one of the only places that I've come into contact with that the academic mixes nearly perfectly with the personal, thus I regret deleting all of that old stuff because I can never retrieve it. If nothing else, it becomes a sort of tracking device that enables us to document anything that we feel is important at a given moment. So, in essence, blogs give us this space where we can place either our most intimate thoughts or our current research or both. For students, we should teach this methodology. Show them that they can blog about the last concert they've been to as well as the assignment for the week. There is nothing wrong with this intermingling. Eilola says, "Objects 'mean' not because they inherently, automatically mean something, but because of what other objects they're connected to," (202). What does it mean that I've blogged about Kanye West and Explications in the same week? That's for me to decide. The formulation of meaning is paramount here and it is a type of production. I think this is what Ulmer is going for in his mystory, but in a more methodical fashion. Even beyond all of the intermixing, just letting students know that they're able to store tidbits of information (like a box, as Sarah mentioned) is infinitely helpful. Blogs are whatever you make them - it's all up to the user. We're just here to offer blogs as an option not the answer.