Recently in Rhetoric / Composition Category
In Educational Blogging, Stephen Downes tells how teachers are using blogs in their classroom--he lists four primary ways--and then questions whether these eduational uses are in fact contrary to the "free flowing medium" of blogging.
That blog thread on TechRhet has led to some interesting blogging about the value of blogs in the writing classroom. Here's a description of a class blog on Dr. B.'s Blog. I'm not sure, however, if the class blog is really no more than a discussion board, which could just as easily be done using good, open access discussion board scripts; phpBB, for example. In other words, I don't think everything created by blogging software is in fact a blog. I don't think a space where students write their thoughts or comment on others' thoughts is a blog. Seems to me that blogging software has been used to create a discussion board. That's fine. Maybe it's easier to use blogware to set up a discussion board. But a blog, whatever it is, is not a discussion board.
I just finished reading at TechRhet an overly long thread about blogs. My reaction to the thread is nicely summed up by Jenny Edbauer in this post of hers. There's a crowd at TechRhet who push blogs as the next big thing that will make everyone a great writer. Maybe that's not what they're saying but that blogs will make writing more enjoyable. Or maybe they're saying a combination of the two. In any case there's a bunch of meta talk about blogs, just as there was with the emergence of personal computers, graphic user interfaces, word processors, listservs, networked writing environments, the WWW, Dreamweaver, MOOs, MUDs, blogs, just about every new technology except Instant Messaging, and most of what I've read there says IM is the next big evil influence on writing. Go figure.
Ron Sillman writes this in Silliman's Blog:
One of the values of blogging for poets is that it can deepen the degree of critical thinking poets themselves do, more so I suspect than the scatter of listserv discussions. If there is a bias hidden in the blogging form, it's toward poets who think critically, but that by no means ensures that said poets will be post-avant, let alone any particular flavor thereof.
No telling what he means by "post-avant" but his point about using the blog to think critically points to why I'm working my way into blogging: I just want a way to push my thinking about reading, writing, and publishing poetry. It's easy to say writing assists thinking but it's hard to get into the habit of writing to think. A blog seems to be a technology that help us all get into the writing to think habit.
But where to start with "post avant." Almost sounds like savant.
This interesting article from the BBC about spam being put to literary use. Some spammers are trying to sneak their mail through filters by including text from out-of-copyright books. Some recipients of spam are snipping lines and subject headings for use in poems.
I'm leaving in just a few moments for the Computers and Writing 2003 Conference at Purdue. It's the annual get together of college writing teachers who use technology for teaching and research. I've skimmed the conference program without noticing much about using online technology for publishing poetry, though there is a pretentious pre-conference workshop called the Digital Publishing Project. Maybe it's more than using a layout program along with PDF, or maybe it's more than hypertext. Maybe I should go.
Why can't writers use the form of writing being discussed to discuss that form of writing? I just read an article on the art of blogging in which George Siemens calls blogging a new medium for connecting and interacting, yet his article does none of that. The article is your typical dead paper sort of essay. I was wanting to know instead what a blog essay about blogging would be like.
