LCC professors explore weblogging in English classes
Graphic by Scott Meuleners / STUDENT PUBLICATIONS
In addition to requiring his students to keep their own weblogs, English 1101 instructor Charles Tryon uses a weblog as the class website as well. It is used for posting links to discussion topics, current events, interesting websites, and other related material. It has also drawn attention by members of the larger weblog community.
The popular online pastime known as blogging has found its way into the English classrooms at Georgia Tech.
In an innovative approach, Dr. Charles Tryon and Dr. Doreen Piano have both integrated blogging into their English 1101 classes this semester for the first time.
Blogs-short for weblogs-are webpages that are usually made up of short, frequently updated posts arranged chronologically. The content and purpose of blogs depend largely on the author, ranging from personal journals to forums where aspiring writers can post poetry or fiction.
Students in Tryon’s class were instructed to create their own blog at the beginning of the course using the weblog service of their choice, whether it be Blogger, LiveJournal, their own website or another service.
Every week, they complete a blogging assignment given by Tryon on his own site. Such assignments can range from writing their own personal blogs to analyzing and responding to sites and issues linked by the professor.
Other times, the assignments are traditional English analyses that students compose and post to their site. In one assignment, for instance, students had to read an essay by 1940s German author Walter Benjamin and post a response to their own weblog.
Piano’s class, on the other hand, integrated blogging into the course just last week, as the course focuses on electronic communications in general rather than blogging in particular.
Up until then, Piano’s students used WebX, a system where some English professors establish electronic forums for their students. Piano carried out this transition to help her students observe the difference between the two online forums.
Both Tryon and Piano acquired an interest in blogging earlier this year when the war in Iraq broke out, which inspired a number of writers to start their own blogs.
Tryon in particular learned of a blog kept by a Baghdad resident who went by the pseudonym Salam Pax. Pax was able to provide firsthand accounts of the American bombings.
Tryon and Piano shared their newfound interest with one another over the summer and decided that it might be beneficial to incorporate blogging into their English classes.
Both feel that blogging provides students with a real-world sense of what it is like to publish and share their writing with other readers. “It becomes less about the sacred literary canon and more about...authoring something,” Piano said. “The whole concept of authorship changes when you begin to work in [this] electronic medium that is much more interactive and collaborative.”
Furthermore, they said, blogging helps students focus on contemporary communication and literature in contrast to more historical literary studies.
“Authors such as Faulkner [and] Hemingway were writing in a specific historical context,” Tryon explained, “and the novel and the essay form were an important part of what was going on in the 20th century United States.”
“Electronic communities are a form that is emergent and important to understand,” continued Tryon, “and it’s important to know how authors are responding to a specific text...I think blogging illustrates that quite effectively.”
He added that it helps students learn about and focus on current issues and events as well.
“The blog could very well become the new literary form,” Piano agreed.
She also stressed the importance of understanding the new technologies that will become an inherent part of 21st-century communication.
“It makes [the students] more critical of the technology,” she said. “It’s not this transparent thing [where] you can write whatever you want. Every technology provides different kinds of restrictions.”
Tryon and Piano’s new curriculum has earned them both considerable criticism and approval from students, as well as attention fromthose in the online blogging community.
Some of the students hailed the use of blogging as both liberating and entertaining.
“You are able to express yourself-both formally and informally-[and are able to] get your ideas out in a public forum,” said Alex Kennedy, one of the students in Tryon’s class.
Industrial Engineering major Chris Zhang observed, “[It’s] more fun than writing papers.”
Others, however, dislike the focus on weblogging, citing their discomfort over the personal nature and variability of blogs. “It’s real people that you’re actually reading... they’re constantly updating, so you know how they’re feeling at different times,” said Bobby Brewer, another student in Tryon’s class.
Some students also prefer a more traditional English class curriculum. “I’d like to see us going back to older texts and analyzing older literature,” added Brewer.
Industrial Engineering major Fan Yang simply felt that studying weblogs is a “waste of time,” while another student said that it was “horrible [and] annoying.”
Others dislike that the class is studying blogging exclusively. “There are other internet mediums,” Brett Bell, a Computer Engineering major, pointed out.
However, there is no denying that the scope of weblogging goes outside the classroom. Earlier this semester, Tryon linked to well-known political blogger Rachel Lucas’ site as recommended reading. Lucas, known on the web for her biting commentary and sarcastic wit, discovered the link and responded enthusiastically to the idea of being part of a class project.
This sort of reaction is encouraging for the future of blogging as a tool in the English classroom. Tryon, in particular, hopes to use similarly-structured classes in the future if this one succeeds. “In a way, this is the beta test,” he said.
