I’d like to have a conversation about the nature of the student writing on course-related blogs.

All writing, in any media, is an act of exhibitionism.  For student writers, who are emerging as knowledge producers, the question is even more fraught as they straddle two paradigms for making meaning.  One part values knowledge as standard and knowable, while the other seeks abnormal discourse that can add to what is known (Freire, Rorty, Bruffee).  These contradictory impulses are the crux of learning and the crux of learning to write.  One must learn the conventions of academic discourse and simultaneously learn to override those standards in order to contribute to that discourse.

What complicates this process is the rise of new media, which seduces student writers with ease of use and immediate, purported, professional presentation.  But what happens to the writing of student writers who are composing in new spaces in which there are few conventions and a perceived lawlessness?   At first glance, the student blog offers little of the hallmarks of polished academic writing; there is a disregard for order and arrangement, revision, and attribution.   But there is also tremendous intellectual activity represented, which is associative and detailed.  There is evidence of important attention to design, to invention, to gathering resources, and to evaluation of materials.   Therefore, one must re-think what one is looking at by considering these important questions:  What are the features of student writing on a blog?  What happens to the writing of those who compose on blogs and who use blogs as platforms to showcase their projects or store their research?  What happens when these user-writers can make meaning in ways that are not writing? How can we understand and assess the content of student invention blogs?   What are we looking at anyway?  What is happening to writing?  What is happening to student writing is manifest in the media in which it is composed now and in other formats in the past.   In these digital times, this change is happening in a very rapid, public way, and this is especially in evidence on the student blog.

Blogs are not a genre necessarily; they are a medium, which connects a sender to a receiver.  In fact, student writing on blogs (with its possibilities to include hypertext, visual and aural media and with its access to a readership and commentary) challenges basic assumptions about textuality.  When we refashion writing space by making it flexible, interactive, and readily accessible, there is no continuous flow of the reading path.  There are abrupt changes of direction and tempo as users (readers and writers) interact.  Students draft and post questions for their peers’ consideration and response.  Thus, the discussion continues asynchronously in a student-directed way. Collin Gifford Brooke applies this refashioning of the writing space:  “We encourage them to shift their own perceptions of writing, urging them not to think of their essays as empty, preexisting containers to be filled, but rather as texts emerging from an ongoing process of reading, thinking, and writing (25).”   I have observed that this potential can indeed be fully realized with blogwork.  There is certainly a change in the way students regard writing in digital spaces, as authorizing them to interact with texts and meaning in new and important ways.  However, what we read on student blogs can often seem fragmented and unfinished. What we witness in student writing on blogs is not what we are accustomed to reading in print.  In fact, I argue that in some ways blogwork is superior in that represents the struggles students have with the making of meaning.  We must process the student blogger’s rhetorical moves in other ways.

I am interested in discussing the ways others design/assign, interpret and assess blogwork.