Teaching Writing with Blogs

Clancy Ratliff posted a query to her blog, CultureCat, asking for help on how to use blogs in her writing course.

Here's an excerpt:

I'm thinking I'll have each student keep a blog, and at the end of class each day, maybe during the last fifteen minutes, I'll have them do "progress posts"--sort of a "what I've learned, what I've accomplished" thing. That will help the students to synthesize concepts from class, hopefully. I want them to use the blogs to post about whatever they want, too, but ultimately I want the blogs to help the students with their projects. Please give me any other tips you have about having students keep blogs!

She got some really good advice from Mike, who has his own blog at http://www.vitia.org/.

Mike observed, among other good stuff, this:

I guess one big question would be, how are you planning on evaluating the writing? I would assume that you probably wouldn't use the same criteria as you would with an essay, in the hopes that students might feel more at ease and relaxed in their posts. I've never had students keep blogs, but I've done similar things with journals and bulletin board posts; what worked for me was to set it up as a forum for low-stakes public writing.

I find this exchange between Clancy and Mike illuminating and iconic. Substitute any new writing genre for blog -- WWW site, Flash presentation, PowerPoint, Web discussion board, e-mail -- and you get at the core questions we all face as we begin to incorporate the growing varieties of online writing into our courses.

For me, the questions are:

1. What role will this new writing play in my larger course goals and purposes? Will it be the point of the course, or will it support some other learning and/or writing goal?

2. In what ways can these new technologies and forms of writing help my students become better writers overall?

3. In what ways can these new technologies and forms of writing help students discover and think through the ideas they're asked to explore?

4. To what extent should students be judged on the traditional measures of writing quality (Audience, Purpose, Argument, Clarity, Coherence, Usage, Style, Punctuation, and so on) within the conventions these new technologies create?

The beauty of teaching, the fun of it, is that there never has to be one fixed answer to these questions. Each course is an experiment in learning and teaching, each syllabus and each lesson plan is a hypothesis. It is in practice, when students meet and engage their teacher, the course, the assignments, and the learning technology, that we see what works, what doesn't work, and what sort of works.

My guess is that if Clancy's students find blogging useful for achieving the course goals she sketches out -- developing their projects and summarizing what they've covered and learned each day, that they'll want to also create and keep their own personal blogs, ones outside the course. That is, like email discussion lists and discussion boards and instant messaging and WWW sites, students might strike out on their own, and work outside the blog required for the course.