This week at CWE, I am setting up a blogging schedule with my students. I thought I would just post the framework I am using, and my discussion of it with them in the form of a writing assignment. I have learned that most of the students are education majors, in particular elementary education. When I say most, I mean like 85% of the 24 students who came the first night. Some are excited about being part of a blog, others seem to think it’s fun, fancy, and maybe a bit too faddish. So in writing the assignment, I have tried to link it up to the larger goal of learning to write for the social sciences. Many students also have no experience with blogging at all, and so I am using this as an opportunity to talk about genre.
Blog Schedule
We learn something about genre when we we distinguish between a blog “post” and a blog “comment.” Genre refers to a specific form, format, or style a piece of writing takes. There are so many different genres of writing. Technological change seems to highlight these for us, and new technologies form new genres. Traditional genres you are familiar with might be the short story, the persuasive essay, a business letter, or a letter from teachers to parents. If you think about it, each of these has its own specific style. In a blog, “posts” tend to differ from “comments,” A post is often a very brief essay or journal entry that addresses a news article, a movie the writer has seen, or an event in their personal life. Its audience varies from being quite wide and unknown to a select group of friends or fellow bloggers. Comments have a more limited audience—they are often a brief note to the author of the post sharing related experience, information, or disagreement. Noticing these distinctions in blog writing will help us when it comes time to write longer essays and a final paper. For these assignments also, we will need to consider genre and audience.
Please sign up for either one post or two comments.
Ideas for posts— (Posts must be two and half to three(3) full paragraphs. One paragraph equals 5 to 6 sentences.) Include a provocative quote from the reading and your reflection on the quote. Argue with a position the author takes. Provide us with a personal experience you’ve had that is connected to the reading.
Ideas for comments— (One full paragraph.) Comments may contain agreements or disagreement, and explanation. They may connect to other sections of the text that you think support the original post.
Hi Deborah!
This looks really good. I like how you used the opportunity to talk about genre! I look forward to hearing more about your students’ blogging, and maybe someday, if you share it with us, even seeing some of their work.
The best way I have seen for students to get a conversation started on a blog (or on a Blackboard discussion, for that matter) is to train them to try and end every posting with a question–not a yes/no question, but something which invites a real consideration of the issue. If the party isn’t getting started on a class blog, this is something I recommend to faculty. Your suggestions above give great ideas for how commenters can respond, and posters can simply identify one of these areas, if they do not have a more gripping question.
It means people are more likely to comment, because they have an automatic “in”. (Not that they can’t comment on anything else that takes their fancy, and they should be encouraged to do this, of course, since it can lead the discussion into really interesting areas.) It also forces blog authors to think about what they want in terms of a response. Do they want others to find additional ways of seeing what they’ve mentioned? Do they want people to disagree and offer alternative views? Do they want examples of something? So in a lit. class blog, for example, a student might make an argument that character X always speaks in verse, and the blog writer might ask respondents if they noticed any patterns to other characters’ speech. (This is just an example.)
The other thing I liked about requiring a question after a posting, was that I required students not just to post, but to comment–and this made it easy for them to go in and fulfill that second requirement without racking their brains for what to address in comments.
I should end with a question here, right? How is it going? Are students jumping in to comment? Are they types of responses what you’d like to see, and if not, what is missing?
Reply to Kate