For many writing teachers, our first response to the growing popularity of online weblogs is something like what my colleague exclaimed when I first showed her a number of blogs: "Cool! But, how in the world would I actually use this?" My colleague's response reflects both the potential and the difficulty of integrating blogs into the computer classroom. While blogs can encourage a dynamic and community-oriented writing environment, there are some steps an instructor can take in order to create a more successful experience with classroom blogs. In an effort to share some of these ideas with other writing teachers, two CWRL instructors, Tom Nelson and Mariela Hristova, discuss their own experiences with classroom blogs. Although they use blogs in different ways, Tom and Mariela suggest some basic strategies for productive classroom blogging. Both instructors agree that is important to pursue a clear purpose and context when integrating blogs into a writing classroom.

Tom Nelson: The Purpose of a Classroom Blog

Tom is currently using blogs in his Rhetoric 309m course, where students are divided into "blog groups" according to their interests. The groups in Tom's class include blogs on such subjects as politics, sports, movies and music, food, and technology. Students post weekly writings that relate to their group's topic. Rather than imposing the criteria for what counts as an acceptable post, however, Tom asked students to create their own rules for what the group's blog should include. The groups were asked to collectively decide on guidelines for each post's content, style, and length. Students responded to this assignment by reflecting on the rhetorical goals of the blog, the needs of their audience, and as the desires of the group. For example, the technology group decided that posts to their blog "should discuss some aspect of technology and how that affects people. Post should offer answers as well as questions into the future of the technology being discussed." In addition, the group specified the blog's style should take "a more casual approach . . . in order to gain a more personal experience. All technical terminology that is uncommon to most should be defined or linked. Sources must be stated if they exist, and general good conduct is expected."

A look at the technology group's blog in Tom's class.

By asking the groups to devise their own criteria, Tom suggests that students are able to define their own purposes of what the blog should accomplish. This helps students to engage more with the rhetorical situation in which they are writing. A student can use her group's own guidelines as a way of determining whether or not her post is helping to accomplish these goals.

In addition to designing their own guidelines, Tom asks the groups to further define their rhetorical purpose by addressing a clear audience. The groups achieve this goal by generating their own "blog rolls," or lists of relevant links to other blogs that relate to the same topic. Students research similar blogs and add links from the group's main page. This kind of "blog rolling" helps students to refine their own sense of the discourse communities that surround their group's subject.

A view of the sports group's blog from Tom's class

Mariela Hristova: Putting Blogs into a Context

Mariela currently uses blogs in her Rhetoric 306 class. Unlike Tom, Mariela asks students to keep individual blogs, where students post reflections about their development in the course. This allows the blogs to serve as a kind of online portfolio for students, helping them to track their own progression from one assignment to the next. More than just a "progress report," however, the portfolio-style blog can also help students to generate invention work and ideas about current projects and future revisions.

In past semesters, Mariela has also integrated a single class blog into her courses. Students were asked to post responses, questions, and thoughts about the week's readings. While many teachers require such reading responses from students, the blog format makes student responses immediately available to the entire class. Mariela often began her classes by reading aloud these posts as a way of generating discussion. She explains that this helped to put students' blog writing into a real context, bringing various "out of classroom" ideas back into the classroom. By putting blog posts into actual use within the day-to-day exchanges of a class, students are encouraged to view their own writing as existing within a specific context.

Mariela suggests that framing class blogs within a context is crucial. Students better understand their rhetorical purposes for writing when they envision their writing within a real context. This context--the sense of having an audience who want to engage with the writer's ideas--also helps to create a rhetorical purpose for writing (beyond just fulfilling an assignment). Instructors can even contextualize student blogs by having cross-classroom blogging exchanges with other classes or a real group of readers outside the classroom. As Jill Walker writes:

Weblogs are good as learning journals (searchable, writing practice, catching thoughts, intellectual workout. . . ) but all these things could be done in a paper notebook - though the knowledge that other people are (or can be) reading is important. What's more important to teach our students is network literacy: writing in a distributed, collaborative environment. Bringing network literacy to the classroom means jolting students out of the conventional individualistic, closed writing of essays only ever seen by your professor.

By stressing the importance of a broad writing context, Mariela echoes Walker's arguments about network literacy. If a blog's writing never seems to circulate outside of the student-teacher loop, it is difficult to achieve the fuller collaborative and dynamic potential of classroom blogs.

A student's portfolio-style blog from Mariela's class.

Summary

Both Tom and Mariela suggest some specific ways to achieve more successful and productive classroom blogging. These include:

• Encouraging students to generate their own guidelines for blogs.
• Asking students to create "blog rolls" that engage the same discourse communities that they wish to address.
• Integrating students' blog posts in day-to-day classroom discussions.
• Pursue cross-classroom networks of readers.

Although these are only a few examples of how to implement blogs in the writing class, Tom and Mariela point out two important things for instructors to consider: (1) students should be able to recognize a rhetorical purpose of their blog by (2) understanding a clear context for their writing. When both of these elements are well planned, the classroom blog promises to deliver many exciting possibilities for composition classes.

More information about classroom blogs

Into the Blogosphere
Jill Walker: "Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network"
Meg Hourihan: "What We're Doing When We Blog"

by Jenny Edbauer, CWRL Developer