Blog 4: A Reflection

From a personal perspective, place-blogging Athens was a worthwhile enterprise. I learned a great deal about Athens and OU's history (the fact that OU was essentially started in a bar seems rather sadly fitting...), and was able to voice things that I've come to feel are important about living here. My hope is that this could do the same for my students, and in doing so let them practice the skills for rhetorically constructing place-connections wherever they choose to live in the future.


This is not to say that I wouldn't change anything about the blogging assignment. My initial assignment posited a 500 word (alphabetic text) requirement for each blog entry. I'm reconsidering that. My own entries outstripped this (the history entry came closer to 700). Also, I'm considering the possibility that, using multimodal techniques, it would be possible to fulfill the assignment with fewer words. (Perhaps a student wants to compose an entry via a short video, for example.) My potential change would provide the 500 word limit as a suggestion, but also require that any posted videos or images have descriptive captions, to ensure that writing stays an aspect of the assignment. (This might also be helpful if a student decides to compose an entry from downloaded images or videos--I'm not going to go into the relative merits of new media theory regarding original and borrowed material, but a writing requirement would insure that there is some original work on the students' part.)


I'm also thinking about narrowing at least some of the entry categories, to provide greater structure for the student authors. Particularly, narrowing a topic for my first category (history/geography) was challenging, because it is such a wide scope, and my students will be less familiar than I am with the means of researching these topics. I'm considering assigning a specific topic for each student (ex. research the history of your dorm, or research the history of campus ghost stories); this will insure that the students learn something about their local environment, but it doesn't necessarily mean it will be something interesting to them, which would be a potential drawback.


An Introductory entry, posted prior to any of the category-based entries, could provide a grounding base from which to send students on their metaphorical way (and to remind them of why they are doing this). In an intro, the students would contextualize their situation: who are they, where are they from, why are they here, what do they hope to achieve.


I considered briefly requiring process blog entries similar to mine, but with upwards of twenty potential bloggers, that may become unwieldy. I would like to require students to keep notes of their blogging processes, to make sure they are aware of the necessity of planning for each entry to be as successful as possible.I would also like to devote some class time to discussions of publicizing the blogs. My current strategy is to have students lead a class discussion section for each of their entries; this has worked very well, but if many students work on the blogging individually, this could become time-prohibitive. In such a case, I would probably also require students to comment online on each others' blogs.