Rhetoric / Composition: June 2004 Archives
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.
