Revised Proposal

Proposal for 2011 College English Association of Ohio Spring Conference — Siyang Zhou

Title: More Than a Platform for Sharing: Exploring What Teaching Writing with Blogs Demands from Instructors

Session Description:

Based on some recent suggestions and findings on blogging in college writing classes, my presentation will explore ways in which instructors can substantially apply blogs, avoiding possible formalistic use. While it is evident that blogging can shape students’ writing experiences greatly (in terms of its ability to foreground audience, facilitate employment of multimedia components and multimodal composition, and co-construct knowledge in the scope circled out by the course), we, as writing instructors, should not think of it as a natural outcome of having blogs inserted in our curriculum. Echoing Tougaw’s articulation of how blogging is able to bridge the expressivist-constructivist divide embodied by distinctive approaches to teaching from Bartholomae, Elbow, and Joseph Harris (2009), I will look into some specific demands at the instructors’ end that are essential in building a productive writing space with blogs.

First, the course entails certain subjects for teaching and a considerable amount of complementary materials that are able to generate both expressivist writing or response and genuine lines of inquires that students can pursue. All writing assignments in blogs should be rooted in course concepts and strive to prevent students from inadequate common-place-thinking when they start to form their common place carefully in negotiation with the academic discourse. Second, it is part of the instructors’ job to provide detailed guidelines and curriculum that ask students to explore the affordance of blogging by using multimedia components. Third, based on several studies on students’ evaluation of blogging in English classes, it appears to be important that the instructor employs a blog space or program with which technical restrictions are reduced to a minimum extent. Fourth, although blogs enables writers to revise and update with a higher frequency in comparison with traditional paper assignments, instructors need to incorporate stages of revision into the course and allow reservations of traces of revision as well as following-up peer assessment in various forms. In this sense, instructors ought to implant measures with which students will carry out peer commenting and reflection more in the form of a public dialogue of comparison, contrast, and learning instead of a procedure that is countable for credits. Finally, using blogs in writing classes requires a high investment of time and reflection from instructors. The teacher-student power relationship is correlated with teachers’ responsiveness and accountability to the literacy practices that students bring to bear on the disciplinary frames of the curriculum.

As a convergent medium, blogs are undoubtedly great vehicles for composing with multimedia and multimodal elements. Therefore, I hope to present this study as some kind of framework of course preparation for writing instructors, especially those who are inexperienced with it, in moving towards this digitized space.