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Blog Entries
Most Kairos readers are more than familiar with the use of blogs in teaching. Blog
prompts should make use of schemata networking to bridge core concepts of the course--which might be new information--to the known experiences of students. It's the "known-new" contract. Blogs in classes are most effective, too, if students move their direction. That is, if a student asks a key question in class that other students find engaging, the next blog prompt should use that momentum-building dialectic. It is in this nonlinear or multisequential structure that I framed the weekly blog posts for the course. Rather than lead students through a restrictive understanding of core classical concepts, blog posts served as places for students to dig new trails, to make new weddings between readings and Web pages, and to provide more reflection to hold together gaps.
Tim Lindgren (2005) defined place blogging and the exigencies of place as both a social function and ongoing construction of self within the framework of a class and cultural surroundings. In "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog," Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd (2004) explored the role of situation and kairos in blogging. Bloggers seek ways to make connections with various target audiences, attempt to inhabit an online space, and raise the consciousness of the writer as well as the reader. These distinctions may seem obvious, but they are important in terms of designing an interactive class. Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala (2003) talked about how the Internet "once belonged exlusively to the Structuralists" (p.3). Structuralists are separatists, dividing form and content or meaning and message. In a way, they are very Aristotelian. Designers; however, according to Bolter and Gromala, they are unitarians (p.4). Placeshifting is a unitarian concept.
Steven Johnson (1997) wrote about this, too. He wrote about hypertext having conjoining properties that are both links to information and trails to new meaning-making. But he clearly pointed out that: "At first glance, trails appear to have much in common with the modern link; they serve as a kind of connective tissue, an information artery, that threads together documents with some shared semantic quality. Trails, in other words, are a way of organizing information that doesn't follow the strict, inflexible dictates of [...] hierarchical convention. Documents can be connected for more elusive, transient reasons, and each text can have many trails leading to it" (p.118). Placeshifting makes place (as moderns conceive it) irrelevant, and instead brings importance and relevance together in diverse yet directed ways. Blog trails are invididually cut, and read together they each lead to a shared, metaphysical place that is purposeful knowledge.
