How can writing teachers better provide students with an authentic audience for their writing? How can the process of writing, which is vital for good product, be better facilitated? How can a collection of writing assignments be better centralized for easy teacher management? How can the writing of our students be used to better promote our program to prospective students and their parents?
By using blogs in my writing class at Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute for the last 4 years, enhanced authentic audience, better process, more efficient management of writing and improved promotion of our program has been achieved.
First of all, what is a blog? It’s short for weblog which is an centralized location on an Internet server where the writing process, i.e., brainstorming, prewriting, drafting, revising, proofing, editing and publishing, can occur. In brief, there are several popular blogging sites, ones that I have found to work well with my writing classes. I will mention just two. The first is blogger.com which is part of the Google service. A second is wordpress.com. Both of these services as well as many others on the Internet are free. Blogger.com is my favorite for my own writing classes at Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute because of its ease of use and its adequate features. Wordpress.com is very advanced and works well for more extended blogs (tens of thousands of posts), and it can also be utilized for full site home pages. In the article, I will focus on the use of blogger.com.
Class blog writing is done via a web browser generally. (Some people prefer writing in a word processing program, such as Word, and then pasting the content into the blog worksheet.) Using a web browser invites multiple stages of the writing process before the writing is actually made public, and there can be different levels of “publicness” to the writing as well. Thus, blog writing can be place where process can naturally occur, i.e., brainstorming, prewriting, drafting, revising, proofing, editing and publishing. The process of blog writing has an ephemeral trait, i.e., it’s not indelible and it invites revision. It’s not etched in stone until published, and even then it is not permanent; revision and editing are still possible. Paper writing that is finally sent to the printer and distributed does not have this attribute.
Let’s talk audience. I have found that most traditional classroom writing is lacks a true audience. Students know they are often writing for the teacher. There are exceptions to this, such as pen pal writing, thank you notes to home stay families, etc. When writing lacks authentic audience, students figure it out quickly, and this limits their potential to write well. In the back of their minds, they know the final goal is just to please the teacher and not necessarily to communicate effectively. (Sometimes those two are closely related, but sometimes far apart.) Blog writing can potentially open their writing product to the world. In our case, at Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute, class blog links are posted on our I Love MFWI home page (http://www.ilovemfwi.com) which is visited by a large number people each day. When students begin to understand that the final product of their writing will be viewed by the world, they begin to take more care when they write.
What about process? Does a piece of paper and ink facilitate process? Is there an ephemeral quality to the writing inviting change and improvement? Process involves brainstorming, prewriting, drafting, revising, proofing, shaping and reshaping, editing and publishing and then doing it over again and again. The tools, environment and space involved in blog writing invite change. Blogs have certain features that promote this. One is the draft vs. publish option for the writer on the writing work space. The writer is encouraged to publish only when the writing is “publishable,” at least in her mind. Two big buttons are prominently displayed on the writing workspace, “Publish” and “Save as draft.” These are always in front of the writer as she writes -- as a kind of reminder that, oh yes, writing involves drafting and improvement before publishing. And even when the writing is published, the student knows that it’s not the end; the teacher as the administrator of the blog can easily unpublish the writing back to the draft mode.
Another important feature of writing on the blog that lends itself to ephemerality is that blogs can be set up to be private or public. On a private blog, only blog authors can view the published blogs, i.e., only the members of the writing class. This means that when a writing assignment is made public, it’s not really public to the world, just to the members of the class, which is authentic audience to a point. It’s an intermediate audience before it’s published to the world. This partially-published writing is an intermediate step in motivating the student to think more carefully about the quality of her writing, after all, her classmates have seen it. (For your information, I have a projector in my classroom with a large screen and we regularly view our blogs as a class.) This is another part of the process that motivates the students to move along in the improvement of their writing.
Once the writing has moved from the draft to the partially-public blog and it has been discussed and rewritten, it becomes ready for the real public blog. In our case, that just involves an easy copy and paste into a different blog -- from our class partially public private blog to our class fully public blog. Students do this themselves and the “Publish” and “Save as draft” buttons continue staring students in the face, reminding them that writing is process, involving drafting, editing, checking, rewriting, etc. Published writing on this fully-public blog is the last of the last steps, but yet still not indelible. Once published on this blog, it can be viewed by the entire world, by mamma, poppa, friends, family and billions of other people on planet Earth.
We’ve talked about audience and process, now let’s move on to management and centralization of writing. Blog content is in one place, on a server in cyberspace (and typically backed up to multiple servers). It’s not scattered in folders, files and notebooks throughout classroom or dormitories. A teacher never hears “Whoops! I left my writing in my dorm.” The writing -- draft or published -- can be easily and quickly accessed in the browser via chronological lists of posts, by search queries and most importantly by labels.
Labels are a powerful feature of blogs that allow visitors (or teachers as administrators) to access writing assignments by topic or by author, which also enhances management and centralization of the writing. By clicking on a label, which was assigned by the student who wrote the blog, the teacher can easily see all the writing assignment by, for example, Noriko. Also, another label might be the homework assignment and by clicking on that label, all the authors who wrote assignments on that topic would be displayed on the page. One blog post can have multiple labels. By clicking on a label, it’s easy to view all the particular work of one student and to see which students have done a particular assignment with just a click of the mouse.
Finally, what better way is there to promote our program than for visitors to actually see published writing with photos -- writing that has gone through a long process of drafting, revising, proofing, and editing?
Some sample public blogs can be viewed at the links below.
http://ronmfwiwriting.blogspot.com
http://mfwiextension2008.blogspot.com
In addition to all the blog features mentioned above, there are several more that enhance the writing product. (These are categorized into widgets, gadgets and gizmos.) First, the writing space is a WYSIWYG environment, which means “what you see is what you get.” It’s not code, not html, not java script, just a simple interface that is easy for writers to adapt to. Second, there is a spell checker prominently displayed in the work space. What writer, especially a second language learner, can do without a spell checker? Additionally, blogs can have surveys and polls so visitors can interact with the blog authors. Visitors can also make comments on the blogs. (Don’t worry. The administrator of the blog has different levels of options that allow moderation of comments -- one being they must be approved before they are publicly posted.) And finally, RSS feeds can be set up so visitors, including teachers, can automatically be notified of new content on the blog. These features and more make the writing more interactive and less passive for the writer and the visitor.
Thanks for reading, but I must confess that I’m leery of printing this and submitting it as an indelible LINK article because I’m sure that I will think of new ideas. Also, I would really want to know what you think, but how can you contact me from a paper article?. Use this idea: if you would like to view the latest version of this article and make comments, just visit ronbloggingtothemax.blogspot.com. ☺
