Transforming Writing Instruction through Blogging

1
Transforming Writing Instruction through Blogging

• Analysis of a Class Blog

2
Goals of the Class

• Collaborative Learning
• Emergent Pedagogy
• Audience Awareness
• Writing as conversation
• Multiple perspectives
• Understanding of blogging

3
Basic setup

• Freshman seminar
• 2 sections, 30 students total
• Class blog (everyone contributed in the same
  place)
• No set assignments or topics
• No set requirements for blogging
• Formal papers derived from posts
• Portfolio

4
Some numbers

• 500 blog posts 1250 comments
• 265,000 total words (about 700 pages)
• 9,000 words per student (about 23 pages on the
  blog alone)
• By October, averaging 250-300 visits per day
• Over 50 of visitors from off campus

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Correlations
Posts Comm Made Comm Recd Links
Posts - .548 .863 .659
Comm Made .548 - .275 .827
Comm Recd .863 .275 - .438
Links .659 .827 .438 -
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Posts and Comments Received

• Top posters received 4 comments per post on
  average
• Comment threads in many cases developed into
  conversations
• Top posters/commenters responded to comments
  received

7
Comments Made and Links

• Those with more links were more widely read and
  interested in adding to conversation
• Making comments usually led to receiving comments
  (self-promotion)
• Desire for the blog project to work

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Its all about linking

• The one factor that affected portfolio grades was
  linking the more links, the higher the grade
• The top 5 posters averaged at least two and as
  many as 4 links per post

• Wide range of topics
• Models
• Sources well integrated
• Audience awareness
• Complex arguments
• More practice
• More feedback
• Learned more about their own writing

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Audience Before

• All I thought was my professors going to be
  reading this.
• I was writing probably to myself . . . Because I
  didnt know who I should talk to.
• I really couldn't get out of the idea that we
  weren't just writing for our teachers.
• I really didn't think that anyone outside our
  class and maybe their parents who had been told
  about the project would be reading the blog.

10
Audience after

• Nothing happened until we got an audience. Its
  all about the audience.
• I tried harder to write blogs with more mass
  appeal. . . . thought that if the topics had to
  do with news on a national level or topics that
  everyone could relate to, then more people would
  want to read them and I would draw in more
  readers.

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Audience After

• When I realized that other people were gonna be
  reading this, I began to think of what other
  people's perspectives were, like what are they
  coming from, what are they expecting to see and
  things like that.
• I was writing to an audience that was interested
  in the same topic.

12
Overall experience

• Bloggers not only passively read the news, but
  also write posts, make comments, and create
  links. They get actively involved. This vigorous
  participation makes the web look like a real
  web, a chain of connected sites. The absence of
  involvement makes the web look like a set of
  unrelated dots. You can only see the dots you
  cannot see the whole picture unless the dots are
  connected.