WHAT ARE WE DOING?

Many of you are familiar with using Blackboard in either online or on-campus classes. This semester, you’re going to do something a bit different; you’re going to keep a weblog throughout the semester.

You may be wondering what a weblog is. The simple answer is that a weblog, or blog as the word has come to be used, is an online journal or diary that is updated regularly and which includes a mixture of links, commentary, and personal observation. A typical example of a long-term blog can be seen at http://www.scripting.com/.

Blogs often contain links to things the blog writer has read about on the web, but blogs can also be used to write about things the writer experienced or observed in real life/real time. Blogs can serve as a record of your thoughts on issues or topics of interest and can provide a space where you can express your personal views and attitudes.

We’ll be using our weblogs to post reading, writing, and research assignments. Your class blogs will be located here at WordPress, which is a free, web hosting service that allows an individual or community of users to publish, manage and organize a variety of content.

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?

Many of you have taken one or more online classes from TCC, and are familiar with Blackboard, the course content system we use. Blackboard is a password protected environment, which means that only people enrolled in the course can see what others have written, so the audience that writers are writing for is a small cross section of society.

With a blog, you’ll be writing for a broader audience because anyone on the Internet will be able to read what you write. Writing for a broader, more public audience should help you develop an awareness of that audience and make you more conscious of strategies for appealing to your audience’s interests.

If you’ve taken more than one online class in Blackboard, you may have noticed that different teachers use Blackboard in different ways. An online math class is very different from an online English class. Even in the subject area of English, you see differences from one teacher to another. The one thing that most online English classes have in common, though, is extensive use of some kind of discussion board.

The Blackboard Discussion Board is slanted toward setting up discussions according to topic. When everyone is posting in one forum about the same topic, it’s hard to get a sense of each writer’s style or interests. With your own personal blog, you’ll be able to build a portfolio of all the work you do for the class and your readers will get a stronger sense of who you are as a writer.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WRITING

A writer’s audience can run the spectrum of one person (very private) to the whole world (very public). Outside the academic world, journal and diary writing is usually very personal and meant for the writer’s eyes only. Letters and emails have more than one reader, which makes them more public and formal than diaries, but they‘re still rather personal. Memos, reports, and newsletters have an even broader audience, though the audience is usually limited to readers who belong to a specialized group associated with loose-knit communities of family, friends, neighbors, church members, co-workers, and so on.

In academic environments, writing can also be private or public. In most classes, student writing is most often read only by the teacher, which conditions student writers to write for a reader who, they assume, will be reading for correctness of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and format. Sometimes, student writing will be read by other students in peer review workshops, where the students will give each other feedback about how to improve their writing. Sometimes, students write for a campus paper or submit their writing to a literary journal sponsored by the school. That’s about as public as student writing can get.

Writing for the Internet, however, is more public than most academic writing. Even though many teachers and students do write in online environments, such as email and discussion forums, online academic writing usually takes place in protected environments, which makes it more private than Internet web pages. Almost everything on a public web page, however, can be read by anyone who has access to the Internet, which means that writing for the Internet is in the public sphere, much like newspaper writing, and has the potential to reach millions of people rather than a few dozen. In fact, weblogs have been compared to public journals and newspapers and form the core of what is known as the “New Media.”

BLOGS AND ESSAYS

“But this isn’t a journalism class,” you might say. “Aren’t we supposed to be learning how to write academic essays and research papers?” Good question. Yes, the main objective of the class is to learn some of the conventions of academic writing. But essays and blogs have more in common than you might think. The best definition of an essay that I’ve come across is at John Tagg’s Discovering Information class page. The definition was phrased by Frederick Crews, professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. According to Crews, an essay is “a fairly brief piece of nonfiction that tries to make a point in an interesting way.”

Like blogs and newspaper articles, essays sometimes use research information to support their points. And like blogs and newspaper editorials, essays express a writer’s attitude or opinion toward the subject. And since blogs are such a new form of writing, there’s no rule (yet) that says a blog entry can’t be like an essay. So one of the secondary objectives of this class is to learn how to write essays in a publicly accessible, online environment. And blogs are the most fun way I can think of to do this.