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:

While it is evident that blogging can shape students’ writing experiences greatly, we, as writing instructors, should not assume that it would be natural occurrence in classes. Based on some recent studies on blogging in college writing courses, my presentation will explore ways in which instructors can substantially apply blogs, avoiding possible cursory use as public forums. Echoing Tougaw’s articulation of how blogging is able to bridge the expressivist-constructivist divide, I take such role of blogs as the pedagogical goal and will therefore look into specific demands at the instructors’ end that are essential in building a productive writing space with them.

First, the central subjects and the complementary materials of the course should be able to generate both expressivist writing and genuine lines of inquires that students can pursue while preventing them from exercising general sense carefully in negotiation with the academic discourse. Tougaw demonstrates this point well with his employment of dream as the course theme in his article. Second, it is part of the instructors’ job to provide detailed guidelines that ask students to explore the affordance of blogging by using multimedia components. Third, based on several students’ evaluation of blogging in English classes, it appears to be important that the instructor employs a blog space which facilitates maximum capacity of operation. Fourth, although blogs enable frequent revision and updating, 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 and learning instead of a procedure that is countable for credits. Finally, using blogs in writing classes requires a high investment of time and response from instructors.

As a convergent medium, blogs are undoubtedly great vehicles for new media composing. I thus hope to present some framework of course preparation for writing instructors, especially those who are inexperienced with it, in moving towards this digitized space.