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Articles Conference Reviews |
2009E2ReedSession E2: Blogs (2) Nicole Anderson, Winona State University Elizabeth Davis, The University of Georgia Alison Witte, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne Having never attended an academic session on blogging before, I found Session E2 full of interesting perspectives that both challenged and reaffirmed many of my beliefs and suspicions about the medium. All three speakers engaged, to varying extents, with the question of blogging as not just a writing genre, but as a technological medium with its own possibilities. Nicole Anderson's presentation took an unconventional angle on the problematics of the blogging medium, in the sense that her “audience” of students hail from computer science. Her problem was not to convince her students to engage the technology, but rather to engage in the writing itself, with a number of predictable, though interesting, results. Anderson noted how, given the students and the bent of the class (tech communication), students had a great deal of success using their blogs to integrate with real ongoing discussions of pertinent issues. The class blog also had the effect of dramatically increasing the participation of female students in the conversation, though in the long-term Anderson worried that her tech-savvy students were using the blog to replace, rather than augment, face-to-face communication. Again, coming from a journeyman's perspective, I see these results as being somewhat boilerplate for the conversation – blogs tend to offer the possibility of greater conversation within the class (and without) and offer avenues for participation, at the expense of long-term disengagement with the here-and-now. Elizabeth Davis offered her own thoughts on blogging as an academic medium in a roving and somewhat performative style, showing off posts from her own blog, then showing off her own comments on those posts. In keeping with “play” as one of the conference's more persistent theme, Davis's comments tended to orbit around the problematics involved in “requiring” students to “play” in the fluidly hypertextual and multimodal spaces of blogging. Too often, she argued, the force of our discipline reduces the “medium” of the blog to a set of genre conventions, easily internalized and reproduced, leaving the larger question of the blog as both a practice and a medium un- or under-addressed. Citing principles from post-process theory, and looping through her own multilayered posts, she proposed, in essence, the practice of making “bad blogs”: bad in the sense that blogging should value “messiness” over clean design. The dangers of allowing blogging to become more of a genre than a medium of possibilities was touched on in Alison Witte's final presentation, which reviewed her own research on various academic blogs. Witte presented an all-too easy typography of sorts, into which posts tended to fall. Most blogs, often launched with the goal of drumming up cross-talk about course content, appear to devolve mostly into either administrative postings by the teacher or listless (often mandatory) comments by students. The Q and A that followed discussed many of the further challenges to blog use, with many commenters positing that what blogging needs to function as a medium is a broader, more rhetorical degree of awareness regarding the multiple distinctions put into play between genre, medium, practice, audience, and purpose. As if anticipating a common student reaction, commenters also made contradistinctions between blogging and Facebook, the former offering a much more “writerly” version of the medium whose possibilities and sophistications aren't available in the latter. |