Introduction

Why Blogs?

 The recent flurry of classroom activity regarding blog use has been accompanied by critical attention; scholars are asking what exactly blogs do, how they rhetorically function inside and outside of the classroom, and why we as educators should be paying attention to them. While there are no simple answers to these questions--really, what is there about rhetoric or composition that can claim to be simple--but there is research indicating that student blogging has the potential for real and multiple benefits.

1) Teaching the intersections

Writing teachers would likely consider it a part of their job to encourage student awareness of genres, audiences, and authorial multiplicities. In their article "Blogging as Social Action", Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepard posit blogs as important intersections of public and private selves, identities which must be negotiated via composition. In doing so, students learn to cultivate the self in a public way, a task for which previous experience has not necessarily prepared them.

In using blogs to explore interconnected and varied purposes and audiences, composition teachers can teach students that writing has outcomes. For example, Geoffrey Middlebrook's "Educational Blogging: A Forum for Developing Disiplinary and Professional Identity" cites examples of students who have received job offers or other professional accolades as a result of educationally-initiated blogs. Significantly, studies conducted in "Learning to Write Publicly: Promises and Pitfalls of Using Weblogs in the Composition Classroom" by John Benson and Jessica Reyman show that many incoming students don't understand the interplays of audience, genre, and modality in blog writing, or potentially in any kind of online writing. Student participants in studies responded that "they do not or would not censor themselves or think about their public audience and potential consequences when writing a blog," because they misunderstand "the potential reach" of online writing, viewing blogging instead as a means of solely self-expression. This misunderstanding of potential audiences and goals affects student perceptions of modal affordances; Benson and Reyman found that only more experienced student blog-writers were likely to utilize multimodal techniques in their composition. As online writing becomes more prevalent in students' personal and professional lives, understanding of genres, audiences, and affordances becomes more important to students as successful writers.

2) Teaching citizenship

Blogs are uniquely situated to broaden students' engagement with writing and public discourse; Benson and Reyman cite a CCCC position statement calling for compositionists to "move beyond traditional academic discourse" into the civic realm. The private/public nature of blogs, and the necessity of negotiating audience, purpose, and identity in their composition, can encourage the skills in critical thinking necessary to informed, invested citizenry. Charles Tyron's "Writing and Citizenship" sees blogs as "concretizing" the lessons of civic engagement that focused education can encourage and, when used to this purpose, working toward Richard Ohmann's goal of "encouraging hearty citizenship."

Likewise, the potentially collaborative nature of blogs can allow students practice in skills for community-building. Miller and Shepard find that "many bloggers see blogging as a way of developing relationships" with online communities of writers and commentators. Nourishing this collaboration can give students a view into the collaborative nature of citizenship, community, and writing.

3) Rhetorical design issues

Barclay Barrios, in his web article "The Year of the Blog: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom," encourages classroom discussion of the visual design issues implicit in blogs. He notes that students can "consider the relation between the content of a blog and its design :how does the design reinforce the identity being inscribed in a blog? How does it undercut, challenge, or complicate it?" The interactions of digital interfaces and personal identity remain rich rhetorical grounds for analysis; a fairly common digital interface--that of the blog--can lead students into deeper consideration of these wider issues.


Why Place?

Miller and Shepard see blogs as serving a "recurrent need for cultivation and validation of the self." This need is expanded and complicated by Tim Lindgren's web essay "Place Blogging,"which considers the need for humans to construct a physically and spiritually healthy relationship with their surrounding spaces. Blogs, as adaptable and "narrative-rich geographies," can help writers to rhetorically construct a place-based relationship with both natural and online communities.

The formulation of this relationship is beneficial on multiple levels; in addition to contributing to a sense of rootedness and a critical sense of place, rhetorical constructions of place-connection can benefit students as writers. Lindgren quotes Anis Bawarshi's assertion that "Writing takes place. It takes place socially and rhetorically. To write is to position oneself within genres--to assume and enact certain situated commitments, identities, relations, and practices." In this sense, success as a writer and success at developing place-identity are linked.

Developing place consciousness is potentially important both inside and outside the classroom (or the web). Robert E. Brooke asserts that this developed sense allows us to "know enough about [our] natural and cultural region to fashion lives that enhance the communities located there" (13). Paula Mathieu, et al, profess the need for place-based education in more dire terms: "Cultivating a critical sense of place does matter. If you are not able to do this, there is a good chance someone else will do it for you--advertisers who want you to buy their products or stay in their hotels, developers who want to change the neighborhood around you whether or not you agree to it, or companies who want to dump toxic waste near your house" (xvi).

The inter-exchange of place-consciousness and writing structures a pedagogical approach suggested by Brooke and McIntosh: 1) Writers explore and analyze themselves within a specific location, 2) Writers explore their relationship to that place, including "personal responsibilities, commitments, choices, and influences" with and from their location, 3) Writers write for the benefit of their place (132). Lindgren perceives an even wider potential for audience and benefit when such a pedagogy is combined with the genre of blogging; students may focus on distant audiences or local ones, and may in writing place-based blog entries formulate their own relationships with place, and inspire others to do the same.

My proposed place-blogging assignment is influenced by these recent theories regarding classroom blogging and place-based writing. The assignment, as it is currently conceived, asks students to explore, research, and plan four blog entries, each entry corresponding to a specific category:

Blog 1, Local geography and history

Blog 2, Local language and culture

Blog 3, Contemporary social issues (explore, explain, and/or argue a local issue)

Blog 4, Reflection

In order to test the viability of this project, as well as to provide students with examples of place-blog composition, I will be completing each of the entries as part of my own Athens-based place-blog.


Works Cited

Barrios, Barclay. "The Year of the Blog: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom." 2003. Computers and Composition Online. 20 Feb. 2011. <http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/barrios/blogs/index.html>.

Benson, John, and Jessica Reyman. "Learning to Write Publically: Promises and Pitfalls of Using Weblogs in the Composition Classroom." 2009. Northern Illinois University. 17 Feb. 2011. <http://www.john-benson.net/blogstudy/>.

Brooke, Robert E., ed. Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing. New York: Teachers College Press, 2003.

Brooke, Robert, and Jason McIntosh. "Deep Maps: Teaching Rhetorical Engagement through Place-

Conscious Education." The Locations of Composition. Ed. Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weisser. New York: State U of New York P, 2007. 131-149.

Lindgren, Tim "Place Blogging: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs." 2005. Kairos 10.1. 15 Jan. 2011. <http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/10.1/binder2.html?coverweb/lindgren/index.htm>.

Mathieu, Paula, et al. Writing Places. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.

Middlebrook, Geoffrey C. "Educational Blogging: A Forum for Developing Disciplinary and Professional Identity." 2010. Computers and Composition Online. 17 Feb. 2011. <http://www.bgsu.edu/ cconline/middlebrook/>.

Miller, Carolyn R., and Dawn Shepherd. "Blogging as Social Action." Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura Gurak et al. University of Minnesota. 17 Feb. 2011 <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action_a_genre_analysis_of_the_weblog.html>.

Tyron, Charles. "Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition." Pedagogy. 6 (2006): 128-132.