Monday, June 02, 2003
Some actual notes to get started:
Year of the Blog (2002-03): A little narrative that might say something about Cindy and Kevin following Sybil down the blogging path. Blogs really hit the big time, with the *books* being the clearest sign, perhaps, that blogging was moving out from obscurity to full light of day.
Case studies typically are driven by hypotheses: they are investigations of ideas. I think we were driven by a couple of ideas:
1. Could weblogging help students be better readers and writers? Quote R. Blood on this one.
"The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions. Blogging every day, he will become a more confident writer. A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts. Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world; he may begin to experiment with longer forms of writing, to play with haiku, or to begin a creative project--one that he would have dismissed as being inconsequential or doubted he could complete only a few months before.
As he enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective. His own reactions--to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the media--will carry more weight with him. Accustomed to expressing his thoughts on his website, he will be able to more fully articulate his opinions to himself and others. He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead. Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration.
His readers will remember an incident from their own childhood when the blogger relates a memory. They might look more closely at the other riders on the train after the blogger describes his impressions of a fellow commuter. They will click back and forth between blogs and analyze each blogger's point of view in a multi-blog conversation, and form their own conclusions on the matter at hand. Reading the views of other ordinary people, they will readily question and evaluate what is being said. Doing this, they may begin a similar journey of self-discovery and intellectual self-reliance." Well, maybe we can paraphrase. I think we will want to acknowledge some of the more recent work that has been done, but emphasize that most reports continue to be anecdotal.
The other theory that drove us was remediation: would students write journal entries, notebooks, or filters? What were they familiar with, and what would make sense to them? Blood had already commented on the explosion of journal weblogs, the marginalization of filter blogs, and it seems to me that our case study only confirmed this.
We will need a methods section that describes all the information gathering that we have done, the sources of information (from surveys to blogs to papers about blogs to observations).
If we pull the string correctly, I think we can get our two driving questions to dovetail into an analysis of students drawn primarily to the expressive / expressivist qualities of blogging, that the journal is by far the more popular genre being remediated, and that the desire to filter, especially, seems to be weak on the part of students. Notebooks occupy a comfortable middle ground. Maybe we should fold "collaboration" in to this analysis: students do seem to want an audience for their reflection, they do seem to want to know what others are thinking.
One student in 110 really understood the possibilities of filtering, and the academic potential of weblogs. Sybil, can you also link us up to the blog you did in Betsy's class? That would seem to be a record of a much more academically oriented weblog. If you go to Dr. B's site (linked earlier), you will find other grad classes using weblogs in a similar fashion.
And I do think we should write about individual blogging styles (and teaching styles): I was just reading your 120 weblog, Sybil, and I can't imagine students being quite so expressive / personal in my classes -- grad classes being an exception.
Year of the Blog (2002-03): A little narrative that might say something about Cindy and Kevin following Sybil down the blogging path. Blogs really hit the big time, with the *books* being the clearest sign, perhaps, that blogging was moving out from obscurity to full light of day.
Case studies typically are driven by hypotheses: they are investigations of ideas. I think we were driven by a couple of ideas:
1. Could weblogging help students be better readers and writers? Quote R. Blood on this one.
"The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions. Blogging every day, he will become a more confident writer. A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts. Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world; he may begin to experiment with longer forms of writing, to play with haiku, or to begin a creative project--one that he would have dismissed as being inconsequential or doubted he could complete only a few months before.
As he enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective. His own reactions--to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the media--will carry more weight with him. Accustomed to expressing his thoughts on his website, he will be able to more fully articulate his opinions to himself and others. He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead. Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration.
His readers will remember an incident from their own childhood when the blogger relates a memory. They might look more closely at the other riders on the train after the blogger describes his impressions of a fellow commuter. They will click back and forth between blogs and analyze each blogger's point of view in a multi-blog conversation, and form their own conclusions on the matter at hand. Reading the views of other ordinary people, they will readily question and evaluate what is being said. Doing this, they may begin a similar journey of self-discovery and intellectual self-reliance." Well, maybe we can paraphrase. I think we will want to acknowledge some of the more recent work that has been done, but emphasize that most reports continue to be anecdotal.
The other theory that drove us was remediation: would students write journal entries, notebooks, or filters? What were they familiar with, and what would make sense to them? Blood had already commented on the explosion of journal weblogs, the marginalization of filter blogs, and it seems to me that our case study only confirmed this.
We will need a methods section that describes all the information gathering that we have done, the sources of information (from surveys to blogs to papers about blogs to observations).
If we pull the string correctly, I think we can get our two driving questions to dovetail into an analysis of students drawn primarily to the expressive / expressivist qualities of blogging, that the journal is by far the more popular genre being remediated, and that the desire to filter, especially, seems to be weak on the part of students. Notebooks occupy a comfortable middle ground. Maybe we should fold "collaboration" in to this analysis: students do seem to want an audience for their reflection, they do seem to want to know what others are thinking.
One student in 110 really understood the possibilities of filtering, and the academic potential of weblogs. Sybil, can you also link us up to the blog you did in Betsy's class? That would seem to be a record of a much more academically oriented weblog. If you go to Dr. B's site (linked earlier), you will find other grad classes using weblogs in a similar fashion.
And I do think we should write about individual blogging styles (and teaching styles): I was just reading your 120 weblog, Sybil, and I can't imagine students being quite so expressive / personal in my classes -- grad classes being an exception.
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