What makes a blog lively is not just good posting, but also good commenting. Good/sensible comments could benefit it by sparking more fruitful discussion, and bad/less thoughtful comments could harm it. In that sense, successful blogging should create healthy interaction between writers and readers. My own experience of writing and commenting in blogs these days has got me into thinking about how we can participate in a blog, especially a course blog, in a productive way.
At last Friday’s WID/WAC Professional Development session, Jenny and I attended a rather fun workshop put together by faculty of New York City College of Technology called ‘Thinking about Drinking and Writing about Food’. Among all the fun activities in the workshop, there was interesting discussion on how we could respond to this blog entry by William Grimes, a former food reviewer and presently a book reviewer for the New York Times. How would we as general readers post a comment on this posting? What if this was not an informal journal writing by an already accomplished writer but instead a student entry in (say) a writing course blog that you set up as an instructor? Does it somehow make a difference?
While we might appreciate this piece as a fun read with beautiful use of language, it is not a good example of carefully organized essay with one clear thesis statement, etc. A writer like Grimes might be ‘entitled’ to informally share his stream of consciousness on a blog. However, if it was a student’s writing, our response would be different depending on what kind of blog it is intended to be: students can grow their own voice and throw ideas out there without worrying about organizing them, if that is the purpose of the blog. Only if that is the purpose of it.
A beauty of introducing blogging in the course, instead of sticking to the old-fashioned exchange of papers, to me, is its flexibility. Simply giving the students opportunities to write more and share it with others is one way. Identifying a course blog with a way to brainstorm/freewrite and get some ideas together about the course is another. One can also have the blog as a place to compile and discuss each other’s high-stakes writing pieces. The role one would want a blog to play in the course is dramatically different depending on its purpose. Speaking of healthy interaction in course blogging, I think it is very important for all participants of a blog, before launching on it, to discuss and share understanding of how they should regard posting and commenting on a blog entry as, how it would benefit them, and what role they are expected to play in order to successfully develop the course blog together.
Commenting on other blogs is a surefire way of increasing traffic on your own blog since people reading your comment are fairly likely to click on your name and, at least, visit your blog provided you've included your URL. They might even start to read and comment regularly.
Reply to Mikhail
I find that for the majority of course blogs that I've supported, faculty do not want outside visitors to be able to comment. While this might limit the connectedness of the project, it does inform students that the space is (somewhat) protected. I think that's a good instinct, and the public/private issue is important here.
Yukiko makes a great point about the issues that need to be put on the table before hand, and students especially need to be made aware just how public their writing will be, in addition to being told what type of writing is expected of them. Like a good class, a good course blog employs lots of different types of writing at different stages in the semester (Cheryl Smith is doing this on her blog, where students will over the next month be doing pre-writing for final research papers; they'll be in groups where they are required to comment and ask questions on each others' focused posts).
I do think that course blogs, as we support them now, are distinct in many ways from what you'll find elsewhere in the blogosphere… though they range from wildly different to barely distinguishable. For instance, at this stage, they're almost entirely finite, married to the semester in which they're produced. I'd like to change this–portability of content across classes and for students to take out into the world with them is, I think, the future of this technology. We've started to play with this, by bringing two classes onto one blog, both in a project here at Baruch and one involving a Baruch/Fordham collaboration; we've also discussed having one blog for two classes in a First-Year Learning Community. Various factors, however, have kept us from really pushing on this front. But it's out there for us to grab.
Reply to Luke