cac.ophony.org

Recently I’ve been thinking about incorporating some form of blog/s/ing into a course I’ll be teaching for the first time this Spring. After spending two years as a CUNY Writing Fellow, taking a few creative non-fiction writing courses, and teaching sociology on and off for several years, I have the opportunity to teach “Writing in the Social Sciences.” I’m really excited to have the chance to combine these numerous interests of mine. And, fortuitously, I’m doing some writing in the social sciences of my own—that is—my dissertation on contemporary art and social change.

As a Communication Fellow I’ve had increasing exposure to weblogs. I had begun one of my own last May on the free site Blog-City, but it was just this semester that I really delved into the whole ‘scene’ as the Communication Institute started discussion of cac.ophony.org. I’m still learning, following links to see where they take me, getting used to the genre, the geeked-up versions of vernacular English, or the letter-to-my-mother versions of critical, cultural and political theory that seem to exist out here. My first impression so far is that a blog is a great space to think thoughts out loud. Blogging is making space for our more tentative, not yet fully formed ideas, to go public. This kind of writing (ideally?) could also make way for interventions, cooperative strategizing and shared theorizing. Of course this is the optimistic view of the information distribution system that is the internet, but experimenting with the possibilities does appeal to me.

Now that my brain has started to think in terms of how technologies across the curriculum can work with Writing Across the Curriculum, I have wondered how I might use blogging in my own teaching. That said, this entry marks the first in a series of posts I’ll be devoting to my thought processes, considerations, questions, concerns and planning for some role that blogging might hold in my Spring 2005 Writing in the Social Sciences course.