This Time, It's Personal

Elevating Creative Discourse Through Student Blogs

By Barbara Ganley

In my traditional liberal arts world, students arrive armed with an impressive list of accomplishments: high standardized-test scores and GPAs; myriad academic, athletic, leadership, and community service honors. Clearly, in their drive toward college, these students have ranged across their high school landscapes, consuming everything in sight. Accustomed to success, they also expect results.

And so they look at me from around the table on the first day of a writing course, ready to listen, ready to please, ready to perform. But that is precisely what I don't want. I want them to learn how to learn, write, and think critically and creatively for themselves. The last place they'll find out how to do such things is in a room with me at the front delivering a lecture. Instead, I give them blogs.

Worlds Collide

Initially, the students are skeptical, even appalled when they see what I am asking. This isn't what they expected. They don't necessarily like to work in public or in groups. When what they want is order and sequenced assignments, I hand them a fluid and public medium—blogs, the seemingly informal stuff of their personal lives. That's what attracts me: bringing together the serious academic business inside the classroom with the dynamic and often creative world they inhabit outside the classroom via their computers and cell phones—a world connected to their families and friends in extended communities. Learning is, after all, intensely social, and blogs as social software are all about connecting and communicating. With a group course blog (example: Writing Workshop I), individual blogs for each student (example: Student blog from that class), and plenty of time together talking, we build a committed learning community beyond the confines of the classroom, and reap the considerable rewards of collaborative learning.

Everything written gets posted—drafts, response papers, discussions, reflections, podcasts, digital stories, and essays. Everything is organized and connected through links and categories: the writer to her own growing, unfolding thought, and progress through the flow of entries (example from a first-year seminar); the peer to others through publishing, linking, commenting and trackbacking (example from Artswriting class); and on the course blog through theme-based discussions that pop up spontaneously and evolve at leisure (example from a creative writing class). Students also connect to the world via discussion with experts invited onto the blog (example from a creative writing class) and comments from family and friends (example from a junior blogging from abroad).

A (Sometimes) Silent Partner

The students connect to me through the course blog and comments (example from a first-year seminar)—though I try to stay off the blogs as much as possible. I open and end the semester with posts to the central section of the course blog, but otherwise, I post from off to one side, within my own space, to encourage them to make discoveries together, on their own, and without me prompting every discussion and every learning experience. I'm there as guide, chronicler, and mentor—modeling writing, showing them how to read the grammar of their arguments, of images, and sound. Just before class, I can cruise the blogs, seeing how well they have understood assignments, searching for examples. Capitalizing on teachable moments, pointing to blog discussions that touch upon but veer away from the themes we're exploring, for example, I waste no time.

Collaborate, Revise, Repeat

Seeing one another's writing creates invaluable opportunities for learning. Students can return to a discussion, pull up an old paper written by a peer, or see how I have responded to an early experiment. They begin, as a result, to probe ideas more deeply, wrestle with words as they gain fluency with the vocabulary and the forms of writing. The sentences grow graceful as students gently push each other. They push me. Indeed, last year my students inspired me to start my own blog to experience for myself what I was asking them to undertake; students routinely leave me comments, stretching me as writer, thinker, and teacher (example from my blog with comments left by three students). This is efficacy in action—they become more invested in their learning as they see its effects on their environment. By the end of the semester, students recognize and own their progress—not only as writers and thinkers, but as group members and as directors of their own education.

Blogging has allowed me to cover more ground, more deeply than in my pre-blog classrooms. Blogs serve the pedagogy, not the other way around. It takes careful planning and a firm resolve to persevere when the students are in freefall during the first couple of weeks. Blogs are not for the faint of heart, but they offer powerful ways to make the learning authentic, deep, lasting, and connected.

Barbara Ganley is lecturer in the Writing Program and English, and director of the Project for Integrated Expression at Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vt. You can read her current, ongoing blog, and previous blogging projects.