Blog to learn
Vitia’s post, The Blogging Panel, comments on some of the sessions that he found really engaging. These sessions were given at the 4C’s Conference in San Antonio. A quote from Mike:
All were engaging, and all were radically different in style and content, and all throo of them did a fine job of usefully pushing the boundaries of the way writing teachers talk and think about the practices associated with weblogging.
I spent some time looking through Terra’s presentation. She breaks it down into the following:
- The Community Weblog
- Student Writing on the Community Weblog
- Individual Weblog Writing
- Linking and Individual Weblogs
- On Audience
- Other Weblog Teaching Experiences
- Weblogs as Information Storage and Retrieval
- In Conclusion
- Works Cited
- 2004 CCCC’s abstract.
I like the way she has incorporated her community weblog with the student weblogs. She makes very astute observations about how the students write differently for each. She notes that when she looks back on her classes before weblogs, her students would never have written journal/diary-like posting and turned them in to her. She goes on to say that they wouldn’t have written them on paper or even have posted them to a Blackboard discussion. She credits this to the sense of ownership weblogs give to her students. Terra sums it up like this:
This is my site and I can write about what I want, students might think.
The audience aspect is discussed in this interesting paragraph in her conclusion:
Similarly, because of the way reading responses are organized…posting initial blogs, then returning to the site to post comments, and then returning again to post more comments, often posting new initial blogs and working on larger writing projects simultaneously on both the community weblog and their individual weblogs, using both environments gives students practice at working on several writing projects of various sizes and importance (grade-wise and investment-wise) simultaneously…a skill that will be beneficial in their academic careers and potentially once they finish with academe and enter the “real” world.
Everytime I follow a link from a fellow weblogger and end up getting to attend a conference throught the eyes of another through posts and links, I still marvel at what a great way this is to learn! I love it! Nothing like it! And I can save it in Bloglines and come back another day to learn even more.
Plus, I only got through one of the presentations. More to look forward to! Thanks, Mike! Thanks Terra!
—–