"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

Blog Ownership

Ownership of text and space extends beyond agency. Students demonstrate agency in their texts, but they do not always display ownership of ideas and the writing space. In contrast to agency, which deals with students’ identity and personality traits, ownership deals more with students’ attitude toward their physical space or their property, including their writing. When students have their own blog, it is their password-protected space. Because users view blogs as a personal space, students position themselves as experts on their topics of choice, and though others can disagree, their comments are limited to the comment section (Glogoff, 2005.; Tryon, 2006; McGinnis, Goodstein-Stolzenberg, and Saliani, 2007; Clark 2010; Lowe and Williams, 2004). Students are able to voice opinions and beliefs; their personal beliefs take center stage with no one able to decenter those by displaying opposing views in the same space or talking over them. Whereas a teacher often holds authority and power within the classroom, each student has authority and power over her/his blog. The blog is not the same space shared in a classroom because the teacher does not have the password nor unlimited access to the space. Blogs allow for teachers to comment on the text itself but only in the comments section. Even then the student has the option of rejecting or deleting comments.

In my study, James used his blog to respond to class comments about the death penalty, saying he disagreed not only with the death penalty but also the viewpoint about the death penalty with which I countered in class. He did not speak in class when the discussion took place. The post to his blog came three days after the class discussion, effectively carrying the conversation on over time and space. It allowed me to respond to him only, an element that a classroom setting does not always allow. But more importantly, I had to enter his space, his blog, where he was the authority and I was the outsider. I responded to James in the comment section, and we went back and forth on the matter a few times before returning to the conversation again during class where he was vocal about his opinion. Nevertheless, in the course of our exchange on the blog, my comments were relegated to the bottom of his post, and he had the ability to remove the comment if he desired. In the physical space of the classroom, I hold the authority despite working to make the classroom space student-centered. That position reversed in the blog, and it may be James’s knowledge and comfort with this that allowed him to post his opinion after the discussion ended. James exerted more time and energy in his writing than was required of him for the purpose of the course while also demonstrating how ownership of a space may encourage a student to speak out on topics he may not feel comfortable addressing in a communal space.

Clark (2010) tells a story similar to James’s in that it portrays the student’s feelings of ownership over her blog space, words, and the ideas she chose to post to her blog. When writing a narrative for class, one of Clark’s students chose to write about her experience as an illegal immigrant living in the United States. Out of concern for the student’s wellbeing, Clark asked the student to remove her essay from the blog. The student refused. Over the course of several conversations the student continued to refuse to remove the essay until Clark told the student she would fail the course if the essay remained (p. 31). The student’s resistance, despite the possibility of legal ramifications, speaks to her feeling of ownership over the content and possibly the blog space, too.  

It is the students’ sense of ownership of their blogs and the text within the blogs that seemed to be the key to the students’ mostly positive experiences using their blogs. The ability to self-determine the ends to which they used their blogs increased their autonomy. I graded formal assignments separate from the blog, allowing the blog to act as a catchall for unpolished student ideas. This gave students a low-stakes means of submitting ideas, reducing my control over their spaces. In interviews with writers about their past writing experiences, Brandt (2009) found “their accounts were rife with evidence of how a legacy of control, resistance, and surveillance” dominated their memories of writing, and that “rebellion motivated a lot of ordinary writing” (p. 67). Writers appear to desire control over the writing. Ivanic (2009) found that students engage in a wide range of literacy practices when those practices arise from interests and not necessarily from the demands of others (p. 108). Similarly, students in my courses were not given a rigid formula for their blogs’ use. Though the blog was part of the students’ classroom experience, it was not a requirement of the class and was theirs to own and use as a representation of themselves, their interests, and their personality. It was their space; I was a visitor.