After a couple of posts, I also realized that I wasn't doing a very good job of utilizing the affordances of the blog. Those first two posts consisted entirely of text, lacking even a hyperlink, which would at least have offered some suggestion that I knew what I was doing. I think that this too may have come from my conceiving of the genre as more of a response essay than a blog post. From then on I made an effort to add some more dynamic elements to each post; however, I had some difficult in finding images that I would want to use because I was concerned about using those with open-source licenses, and because the subjects of my responses didn't seem to lend themselves well to the inclusion of images as there were few visuals I could think of that would significantly enrich the text.
Hyperlinks, on the other hand, seemed to provide an easier means of adding something to a post that I could not add to a hard copy document. Even if it was just a matter of linking to the work to which I was responding, at least I knew that such links could prove helpful to an external audience should someone outside the classroom ever stumble upon the post. But hyperlinks also allowed me to easily offer additional resources to my audience of classmates, such as when I linked to the CommonCraft video I had mentioned in class a few days earlier. I would like to think that such links encouraged more productive discussions via the comments back and forth; at least that seems to be how it worked out based on some of the comments I received which referenced links.
The expectation to comment on other classmates' posts also seems to have facilitated some really interesting discussions. Sometimes, I would focus on one or two particular aspects of the readings in my own post, but then someone else's post would get me thinking about another aspect or another way of reading the article. I've used the blog tool in Blackboard to facilitate this kind of discussion; however, Bb doesn't seem to encourage the utilization of its affordances as much as blogger does, probably because students are used to using Bb but are not used to adding images or hypertext to anything they do in Bb.
I've also noticed that the genre of blogging seems to have affected my tone a bit. For instance, I tend to use more contractions than usual when I'm blogging. In fact, most of what I write is complete devoid of contractions; yet I've ended up using some in each paragraph of this reflection. It seems as though I've felt encouraged to do so by the genre in the same way that I've felt encouraged to incorporate images and links. I'm still an inexperienced blogger, but something about blogging seems to affect my tone as well as my aesthetic.
I still have doubts about blogging assignments, mainly because of my concerns about tone and audience; however, I now recognize the differences and advantages of a "real" blog over a Blackboard blog. It seems that real blogs could further encourage students to incorporate images and links while still facilitating an ongoing discussion outside of class. I'm also considering starting another blog, so I suppose that means that I've bought into the technology.
Oh, something else I ought to mention. While writing a number of posts, I was concerned that I would come off as a curmudgeonly Luddite. This was an odd sensation for me as I'm generally pretty comfortable with computers and other various types of technology; however, my sense of awkwardness as an amateur blogger combined with my skepticism--at times, adamant skepticism--regarding some of the theoretical approaches we were reading. I remember wondering if I should qualify some of my statements or add some kind of disclaimer, but I maintained hope that some of our readings would provide justifications that I would find more convincing. I had my own justifications all along, yet I waited to see if later readings would appeal more to me (which they did). This makes me wonder if asking students to occasionally write a blog post with even less direction (i.e. they wouldn't be asked to respond to a particular text) might be helpful in the classroom? I also wish, if we had more time in class, that we could have brought more of the online discussions into the classroom space. After all, it's hard to read each post everyone writes.
ReplyDelete