Imbued With the Temper of Their Writer

What initially got me interested in technology was my curiosity about how teachers might implement it into their own composition classrooms, especially at the college level. Since I am teaching college composition—I want to know how technology will be beneficial for my students. First, how may I implement it into my own college composition classroom? Would it be beneficial for my college composition students? If so, how may I connect it with writing? What technology would I like to implement? What role will it play in the writing process and how will it affect my students overall product—writing? I began my research open-ended. It wasn’t until I initially began conducting research did I find the area that I wanted to focus on—blogs.

By definition of “Collaborative Literacy: Blogs and Internet Projects” written by Erica Boling, Jill Castek, Lisa Zawilinksi, Karen Barton, and Theresa Nierlich, "blogs are websites that allow individuals to create personal webpages of text, pictures, graphics, videos, and other multimedia with the same ease as creating a word processing document" (504). Blogs are an online community of writers. We cannot deny the fact that the way we communicate is changing. The way in which we read and write is also changing—with the advent of the internet. Online media offers new portals to our students that traditional academic settings do not. The way in which to engage our students is to understand them; to learn what they already know. We must learn how they approach different ideas and perspectives. What challenges them? What allows them new portals to debate and explore further insight on challenging issues? How might they connect these with the composing process and how might they discuss it with their peers who are also questioning these new ideals? Blogs are one way our students can accomplish this with ease.

Blogs can be implemented into any discourse community, into any classroom setting. For a college composition classroom, blogs may serve as journals, peer review and response, collaborative learning, and/or prewriting strategies. For my college composition classroom, I plan on implementing BlogSpot, a service offered through Google, which students will utilize for class discussion, probe new questions among their peers, and establish an online community of writers. The texts that will be required in my college composition classroom include Branded by Alissa Quart, Hip-Hop Revolution by Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, and Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy. These are not simple texts, rather they are quite complicated and for first-year college composition students, class discussion can be a great tool in understanding new and exciting information. My students might find themselves challenged with new perspectives or encounter subjects they are not at all familiar with in which I plan to implement blogs to facilitate class discussion. But first, we, as college composition teachers, must establish what benefits blogs provide our students, the possible interference that a new medium might have on our students’ ability to compose and interact, and finally, how they are currently being used in composition classrooms.

We cannot begin to ignore the popularity and increased use of blogs. We, at the college level of composition, should look for new avenues to implement blogs into our own classroom instruction because blogs invite controversy and criticism in ways in which the traditional classroom setting does not. Traditional classroom discussion goes only so far in understanding complicated issues especially within a limited timeframe such as a 50 minute college composition class.

What I have found in my own personal experiences with traditional classroom discussion is that our students are hesitant to discuss controversial issues or are afraid of offending one of his/her fellow peers. On some occasions, I find that my students do not want to recognize controversy such as misogyny, racism, or different lifestyle choices. In reality, what is crippling our students is that if we do not recognize and discuss such controversy then we are, thus, enabling it. According to “Technologies for Transcending a Focus on Error: Blogs and Democratic Aspirations in First-Year Composition” written by Cheryl C. Smith, “by giving participants equal access to a public voice in a forum that is familiar to many young people, blogs create a safe place for risk-taking and error, making it less likely that students will disengage in the face of the challenging transition into college expectations” (38). Blogs are new progressing technologies that offer valuable and worthwhile conversations among our students and their peers. I will exercise this next semester as I implement blogs into my classroom instruction. I intend to pose questions that my students will respond to on BlogSpot and will respond to their peers’ comments as well. For instance, one question that might be posed in regard to Hip-Hop Revolution is, “How does Eminem establish his ethos among the African-American community and the hip-hop community considering he is one of the very few white males in the industry?”

My students will also have the opportunity to privatize any blog posts they wish to remain anonymous. This will be kept private to just me and the select student. According to Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd, co-authors of “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog,” “Blogs can be both public and intensely personal in possibly contradictory ways” (1451). Although opponents within and outside the parameters of the composition field argue that blogging has no intended purpose, an increasing number of our students blog each day. Technology has made it easier to access and write via the web—through the format of blogs. As it is a composition class, my students will have the opportunity to explore further insight on any major projects they will complete for the class. For instance, my students will select an issue that is highlighted in Hip-Hop Revolution and research a specific perspective about the issue they have chosen. If a student chooses to research Eminem’s ethos in the hip-hop industry, he/she will be able to revisit the blog where students posted their responses to the question and to their peers for further insight.

Blogging is one of the most important facets to its users. According to Miller and Shepherd, “Content is important to bloggers because it represents their freedom of selection and presentation. Blogs, as Andrew Sullivan emphasizes, ‘are personal, … imbued with the temper of their writer’ (1459). One of the driving forces of blogs is the personality it places on the emphasis of the writer. It is a place—an online writing community—that calls for self-expression and community development. It is a place where users are their own audience; they are the recipients for the blog’s content. Although the writing is published, it is very much private to its user. Our students can choose to privatize their blogs or make them public. If our students select to privatize a blog post, then it will be between the teacher and the student. The audience of blogs for our students includes their fellow peers and the teacher unless our students select to privatize a blog. It is essentially writing that is to be viewed by its user only, so “writing that allows the writer to value (her) own words and thoughts and not worry about the reactions to them by others” (Miller and Shepherd 1461). As it is a new medium in which our students can compose, it is also a new medium in which our students can collaborate and interact. Our students can easily respond to questions outside of class and pose further probing questions to their fellow peers.

Using blogs in the composition classroom encourages real-life application and helps students express themselves. How we read and write today is dramatically different from only five years ago to just a year ago. Online media is also changing dramatically. Online media has brought forth easier ways that we can read and write. With the evolution of the internet, Jason Ohler asserts in “New-Media Literacies”:

But because of responsive, easy-to-use, and widely available new tools, literacy now requires being conversant with new forms of media as well as text, including sounds, graphics, and moving images. In addition, it demands the ability to integrate these new media forms into a single narrative, or media collage such as a Web page, blog, or digital story. (32)

Myspace, Facebook, BlogSpot, and Twitter are within everyone’s grasp. Although these are considered social networking sites, many of our students are actually utilizing these sites several times a day and our role as teachers is to determine a way to implement them into our classrooms in order to engage our students. Many, though not all, of our students write outside of school using online technology whether it is updating their Twitter status, posting a comment on a friend’s wall on Facebook, or writing via blog like BlogSpot through Google. Ohler asserts that in order to interact and communicate in the world—the objective of literacy—we have to utilize online media for our classrooms.

For Ohler’s students, the objective was a portfolio. Ohler defines blogs as “a basic Web-page template for nonprogrammers that can serve multiple purposes” (32). Essentially, how are we implementing blogs into our composition classroom? What is our primary objective? Ohler’s students were faced with how they would present themselves as professionals to their audience. In determining what to post, his students’ thought carefully about what they wanted to post and what kind and how much interaction they wanted from their audience. Blogging is different for everyone. Teachers may be the primary audience for a traditional academic essay; however, the public reads blogs. The public can be anyone such as a potential employer to a distant relative. The objective for Ohler’s students “is to be brief, clear, and concise” (32). In a traditional academic essay, we write long arguments whereas blogging is a type of a journal. It is synthetic. According to Ohler, blogging is visual rhetoric. It is comprised of the four B’s: bullets, boldface type, breaks, and beginnings. Unlike a traditional academic essay, blogging is much more condensed. It is brief and to the point. As visual rhetoric, we can select images that speak for what we are composing or in addition to it.

The internet has broadened opportunities for others to network and exchange information. The internet, such as blogging, calls for open participation, interaction, and expression. Although Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter have become popular among our students and utilized as social networking sites, we can include them into our classroom instruction. According to Smith, “Students today write more, but in less conventionally academic ways, than students only a decade ago, and they arrive on our campuses with entirely different new skill sets and a new relationship to composition and expression” (38). Online media is changing how we communicate with one another in no regard to age. Although it is easier for nontraditional students to access and utilize digital rhetoric, it is in due part because they have grown up with this technology. Non-traditional students, too, utilize digital rhetoric, but at a slower pace. If we examine e-mail and social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, a network community where over 50 million working professionals exchange opportunities, ideas, and information, they are becoming ever more popular among non-traditional students as they learn how to access and utilize these online sites.

Our students share with others their fluency with technology. As students adapt to college campuses, they represent a population of mixed ideals and emotions. They encounter new academic challenges as college students in each discourse community. In their composition classroom, they may feel insecure about the writing task at hand or their writing process. Smith asserts that first-year composition classrooms are built around revision and drafting. Blogs may serve as a beneficial tool in regards to learning and its role in the writing process. Smith asserts that:

They add a new platform for writing that increases opportunities for student-driven expression, facilitate, and energize the processes of collective brainstorming and peer review, stimulate creativity and class community and supplement more traditional platforms for writing without supplanting or detracting from them. (37)

Blogs are one way in which we may engage our students, to challenge them. We want students to step out of their comfort zone and to begin questioning the environment they are now in. We want them to brainstorm new ideas, ask questions, share their opinions and interact with their peers. Although this can be done in a traditional class setting, we are looking for ways to engage our students more fully, more cognitively. How do we ease students into the transition between making them feel more confident and comfortable in college and at the same time, challenge them mentally? We want them to test out new ideas and to take risks with their writing and to do so, they have to begin questioning the world around them. According to Smith, “Blogs provide a timely answer to these questions” (38). Somehow, students feel freer with the writing they do online. They don’t feel like they are being judged or evaluated. Smith asserts that blogs can empower our students who may not feel as confident or comfortable to take risks with their writing because blogging represents a public forum for our students that are all too familiar with young people. It is a perfect opportunity for our students to free their voice and to experience the world around them.

How blogging is weaved into a composition classroom is entirely up to the teacher. It should be woven into the composition classroom, so that students may reflect about what they have learned. Blogging should stimulate thought and foster creativity in students. It should ignite motivation within the individual student. In order to do so, it rests entirely on the teacher as he/she decides how to implement it into his/her composition classroom. Although it should not be placed above instruction, it should be woven into the instruction somehow as it has proven to be a beneficial writing tool. By implementing blogs into the composition classroom, it establishes a writing community among students and teachers. Blogs are viewed among our students and their peers. The response students receive is from one of two audiences—their peers or the teacher.

Blogs offer students an incentive to write for various audiences. Instead of writing a traditional academic essay where we may have only one audience—the teacher and maybe our peers—we write for a number of audiences. According to Rama Ramaswami, author of “The Prose of Blogging (And a Few Cons. Too),” the Coordinator of Elementary Education at Washington College in Chesterfield, Maryland Deb Maricano states, “Writing should be for others to read. Blog writing for schools can become a real-life experience in the writing process—draft, edit, revise, publish—with the capabilities of getting the responses from others beyond the teacher” (Ramaswami 24). Writers claim ownership over what they have written especially when others will read it. There is both purpose in blog writing and inquiry.

Our students are already familiar with this technology; what they do not know is how it can change them as students or, as writers. It is important to first question what value blogs contain before we may incorporate them into our own classroom instruction. In order to implement blogs, we must question what possible interference blogs as a new medium may have on our students ability to compose and interact. Like any conversation we have with our students in regard to an e-mail, a letter, a conference, or even a text message, we must remind our students to be aware of their audience. For instance, the way in which a student engages in a friendly banter with a fellow peer is not the same as a conversation he/she may have with a composition teacher. Although proper punctuation and grammar are vital to composition and the composing process, the content is the primary focus, especially in regard to blog writing. According to Ramaswami, “Can this often belligerent wasteland of poor punctuation and indiscernible structure actually help develop better student writers” (22)? In a world all familiar with technology such as instant messaging and text messaging, will this too enable students to use tech-speak? Moreover, we have to remind our students that while content is the primary focus in blog writing, they are also writing for an audience, which in turn, is published. Blog writing should be correlated with any discussion we have with our peers. It prompts them to move beyond their first assumptions and encourages them to make connections to the text and to their selves to the real world.

I don’t mean to suggest that blogging is for everyone or that it should be incorporated into every student’s writing process. It is, however, one way students can construct papers or any other form of writing they engage in. Writing produces thought or perhaps, thought produces writing. Ramaswami introduces Barry Bachenheimer, director of instructional services for Caldwell-West Caldwell Public Schools in New Jersey, who worked with five area high school teachers to observe if students’ achievement would be affected by incorporating blogs into the classroom. Bachenheimer’s blog “A Plethora of Technology” states “that blogging could improve students’ writing skills by making them write more frequently and comment on one another’s work” (23). One teacher who worked with Bachenheimer wanted to see if blogging would help students construct research papers. He/she wanted to see if blogs would help improve the quality of the students’ final drafts. He/she chose to implement the blog as a journal. “There was interaction among students and there was writing all day long, before school, during school, and after school” (23). The study revealed that students who blogged felt better about their writing. Of the 25 students who were included in this study in one high school English classroom, Bachenheimer found that: 68 percent felt that blogs helped them with what they wanted to say; 74 percent said it helped them explain their ideas; and 60 percent said it helped them construct their papers. Eighty-four percent of students said the most difficult part of writing a research paper was starting it. The statistics reveal that a number of students who blogged felt that blogs helped them construct their papers.

The first and second study found that in a consensus of students’ writing it improved their writing skills as the blog was introduced as a journal. Bachenheimer also conducted a similar study in an AP Spanish class. There were nine students total. They focused on the same question: Can blogging improve student achievement through the implementation of a blog? Similar results were found: 55 percent of students felt that blogging helped improve their Spanish writing skills; 89 percent felt that the response they received from their peers helped improve their writing. According to Elizabeth Coogan-Russell, the AP Spanish teacher, “Most of the students in my class demonstrated greater overall ease of expression, which became apparent in

(Footnote) ** In Bachenheimer’s study, it did not reveal if the teacher involved in the study was a male or a female which is why I chose to use he/she.

in-class, timed writing assignments” (24). Russell found that there continued to be errors in student writing, but they were fewer. Many students used new and advanced vocabulary.

Many scholars have written about ways in which to implement blogs into the composition classroom. Although not all have been in a college composition environment, these can be reworked and implemented for a college environment. I am aware though that I may encounter problems. As a first-year college composition teacher, I know first-hand that there will be instances where I need to step back and think about how I may rework and/or reformat an assignment. I am aware of the challenges that face me as a college composition teacher, one of which includes how to engage my students. Because I am a first-year college composition teacher, I must understand the technology I plan on implementing and how my students may utilize it. Secondly, I need to assess the value of the technology and outline the objectives my students will align with blogging since it is a new medium of composing composition and interaction. Another obstacle I face is how I may decide to implement blogs into my composition classroom. What also led me to decide on blogs was my fascination with technology and online media.

In examining how we may implement blogs into our composition classrooms, we must determine what we want our students to get out of blogging. What are the objectives? What sort of information or perspective will our students retain? What will our students learn? How will blogging improve their writing process? What role will it play in our students’ lives after they leave our composition classrooms? The Pew Internet and American Life Project released “Writing, Technology, and Teens,” a study that reveals similar results as Bachenheimer’s project. The studies show that students who blogged write more and better. “Writing, Technology, and Teens” reported that 47 percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for non-school related material as compared to 33 percent who don’t. Of those surveyed, 65 percent of teen bloggers say that “writing (is) essential to later success in life” (24). So how may our students use blogging as a real-world application?

Attitudes about writing improved as did the quality of their writing. The University of Florida preservice teachers published findings that are compared with ones conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and Bachenheimer’s project. Published last year in the Electronic Journal for Integration of Technology in Education, “Collaborative Blogging as a Means to Develop Elementary Expository Writing Skills” observed preservice teachers and third grade students at a west central Florida school. The study examined the effects of collaboration through the implementation of blogs. As students maintained contact with preservice teachers, 18 third grade students wrote a five-paragraph essay about a Native American tribe and created an entire online presentation. Preservice teachers replied to the third grade students as they blogged about their ideas, questions, and comments. Third graders posted one paragraph at a time as preservice teachers would reply with continuous feedback. Before this project, 39 percent of third graders said that they liked writing at school. This number rose steadily after the project at 67 percent. Overall, third graders were excited as preservice teachers commented on their blogs.

How I plan to implement blogs into my college composition classroom are as further basis for classroom discussion and additional help with major writing assignments with students may seek from their fellow peers. For instance as students are drafting their papers, they may blog about what issue they have selected for a major writing assignment outlined in Hip-Hop Revolution. In order to decipher what they want their audience to do and why, they may pose these questions on their fellow peers. In addition, they can also post their working bibliography, so that their peers may see if they would like to include that in their research for their papers as well.

I intend to walk them through how to open up an account with BlogSpot and why it is fun and interactive specifically for them. Unfortunately, there will not be computers in the classroom that I will be teaching in because I learned too late that if I wanted a classroom with computers, I had to let the faculty know as soon as possible. It is with my understanding that the rooms have all been assigned for specific courses for next semester. Either way, it will be a homework assignment. In order to facilitate further classroom discussion, I don’t think that it will be a dramatic concern of mine. If I did have computers in my college composition classroom and they used the technology in class, I’m afraid that it would take away from class time. Having my students continue classroom lecture outside of class will be beneficial for us and will encourage them to interact and debate about controversial subjects.

BlogSpot, offered through Google, is a really fun tool. It offers multiple author support, which in turn also provides group blogs. We have the option of customizing our blogging template via a template-editing feature. We can share photos and our thoughts with friends and comment on each other’s blog posts. It is very similar to a Facebook page, which allows exciting features such as: an opportunity to upload a picture, an “about me” section, interests, favorite movies and music, and books. Incorporating text, photos, and videos are also an added feature on BlogSpot. This can all be completed even through our cellular phone devices! What I love about BlogSpot is that it is easy for us to utilize while communicating with one another. We can personalize our blogs—coming up with our own title and choosing our own background.

In addition, we may also choose to privatize our blogs. What I will require my students to do in the first week of classes is to open an account with BlogSpot. When my students have set up their BlogSpot accounts, they will email their links to me and I will post the links on my BlogSpot account, so that students will be able to access them at any time. On the right hand side of BlogSpot, our blogs are outlined in the month in which we write them. We also can comment on one another’s post, which I intend to require of my students. For instance in my first week of classes, I will require students to respond to a format of questions one of which is, “What does research mean to you?” Since this is a research-based class, I would like to keep it as user friendly in association with our class. Essentially, what I am trying to avoid is a bunch of ramblings from my students. I want to keep the conversation as focused as possible. My students will also compose a letter of introduction during the first week of class to me and their fellow peers to which they may discuss in their blog posts what they would like for us to know about them.

Many students describe academic writing as boring. Others write for personal reasons like Cassandra who is featured in “That’s Online Writing, Not Boring School Writing: Writing With Blogs and the Talkback Project” written by Shelbie Witte. Cassandra, an eighth-grade language arts student, described academic writing as boring. She was not engaged in classroom writing activities and assignments. Witte scheduled a parent-teacher conference to discuss Cassandra’s situation. Cassandra’s parents’ reaction surprised Witte. According to her parents, “But she writes all the time! She’s on the computer writing essays and poems for hours each night” (Witte 92). Cassandra didn’t consider the writing she did at home in correlation with the writing she did in her writing classroom. Witte took it personally as a teacher. Here was a student who was reluctant to write when it came to writing in the composition classroom, but would go home and write “pages and pages of creative words, unassigned poetry and prose, each night on her blog” (Witte 92). Yet as hurt as Witte was, she was that much more interested in the revelation of technology. Like many others in Witte’s profession, she asked herself, “What was it about posting personal writing on an online blog that was so different from the writing in my classroom” (92)?

Witte brainstormed ways that she could implement technology into her composition classroom. She thought of Cassandra as she wondered if she could use journals as blogs as a means of translating it into the revelation of technology. As Witte examined various case studies, she found that “the convergence of literary instruction with internet technologies is fundamentally reshaping the nature of literary instruction as teachers seek to prepare children for the futures they deserve” (93). She concluded that in order to introduce new technology into the composition classroom, it takes careful planning. In the case studies Witte examined, specifically teachers who had implemented blogs into the composition classroom, she found that students were “hungry for writing on their classroom blog” (93). In response, Witte created the Talkback Project where she implemented two-way journal activities via blogs among middle school students and preservice teachers. Conversations among middle school students and preservice teachers centered on novels they read in literature circles. At first, preservice teachers used blog space as a live internet chat; they posted comments that were not related to the conversations they were intended to have with middle school students. Middle school students felt like preservice teachers were talking down to them. So, Witte decided to revamp classroom instruction via blog. She moved conversations via blog toward collaboration. Middle school students and preservice teachers continued to discuss novels, but they also made text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections. Witte discovered that thoughtful discussions and connections made with the texts they read sprung from the blog.

However we decide to implement blogs into our classroom instruction, we need to be certain that it is done so in an engaging way. As I work to incorporate it into my college composition classroom, I may find along the way that I need to rework and/or reformat how I choose to use blogging. Anytime we incorporate a new lesson or a new technology, it is imperative to outline the objectives and goals. My objectives for incorporating blogs into my composition classroom instruction is that they will walk away from this class with a new approach to compose and interact with others as they encounter new subjects and different perspectives. I ask my students to keep an open mind and remain observant of the different perspectives we discuss in class and on our classroom blog. This is a medium in which we may interact and compose even outside of the parameters of this classroom. I anticipate that it will help them begin composing their drafts and that it will continue as they revise their papers throughout the semester. As for the goals set aside for my students, I anticipate for them to see how blogging may play a beneficial role in their writing process or at least come to appreciate it as yet another piece in the puzzle of the composing process. As a first-year college composition teacher, I invite debate that is both chilling and controversial which blogs anticipate.