"Exploring the Benefits of Blog Use in First-Year Composition: A Pilot Study"

Jennifer Hewerdine

Jennifer M. Hewerdine recently earned her Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University - Carbondale. She currently works for the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee. Her research interests include multi- and eco-literacies, collaboration, and the development of ethos.

Contents

Introduction

Blogging

Method

Results

Realized Public Audience

Agency

Blog Ownership

Metacognitive Use

Implications for Use and Research

Works Cited

Method

With the aforementioned scholarship in mind, I set out to integrate blogs into my own FYC classrooms with the goal of assisting students in transferring their interests in technology, if any, to the composition classroom. Within two composition courses set in technology-enhanced computer classrooms, 31 students had the option of composing all assignments, class work, notes, homework and anything else they wished to include on individual blogs hosted by WordPress. Of those 31 students, 29 agreed to participate in this research. The institution at which the research took place has not embraced digital literacy as an outcome of FYC, yet digital literacy is vital to students’ success in an increasingly digital world (see Gee, 2016). The school administration was wary of allowing students to compose in blogs due to unfamiliarity with digital writing platforms and a concern for plagiarism, and thus one requirement of this research was that I allow students to opt out of using blogs. Therefore, my research focused on observing how those who chose to use the blogs interacted with their blogs, their writing, and their audiences.

Because I wanted to document how students used the blogs without my prompting, I did not instruct students on how to use their individual blogs nor did I limit how the blog could be used. Instead, I told the students in both classes that they could compose in a physical journal or in the blog regardless of their participation in the research. They could submit formal essays on paper or on the blog; low-stakes assignments could be submitted in the same ways. I did not attach a grade to the students’ use of the blog specifically in order to learn how students used it without penalty or reward. Low stakes assignments were graded as complete or incomplete, allowing students freedom to be creative with their assignments.

The specific curriculum for this course, in accordance with the department’s common syllabus, required students to move through a series of six essays: a literacy narrative, an advertising analysis, two rhetorical analyses, a literature review, and a metacognitive reflection. In addition to these, I assigned freewrites, outlines, brainstorms, drafts, and other pre-writing and revision exercises. Students were able to choose whether to submit assignments via the blog or on paper.

After soliciting participation through a third party, I administered two surveys to the students, one at the beginning of the semester and the other a few weeks before end of the semester. I used the surveys to learn more about the students’ demographics and technology usage. The first survey established demographic information and students’ digital literacy practices. The survey included questions pertaining to students’ gender, race, ethnicity, and first generation and/or non-traditional status. The survey also contained questions about literacy practices including the frequencies with which students used social networking sites, whether they included videos, photos, hyperlinks or other items within their social media posts, and whether they commented on news or social media sites. The last question asked about students’ use of blogs or journals, whether digital or on paper. The end-of-semester survey included questions on the number of high school essays students wrote, the length of the essays, students’ writing preference (digital or paper), whether they used WordPress to write their papers, and what benefits and/or difficulties, if any, they experienced using the blog.

In addition to the surveys, throughout the semester, I took screenshots, documented student conversations about the blog, made notes as to concerns expressed by students, and noted the types of writing that took place in the students’ blogs. I then conducted student interviews at the end of the semester to follow up on students’ survey responses and to learn more about their blogging activity or lack thereof. The survey questions were student-specific and based on observations of the students’ work over the semester.

I did not enter into the research with preconceived ideas of how to code or analyze data on blogging. The analysis was holistic; after reviewing all data, I noticed a pattern in the way students used and discussed their blogs.