We introduced blogs to the kids this year and while it has not been without it’s struggles, they seem to be taking off. I too have noticed that we are able to bridge the two worlds together. Most recently though, I have discovered that we have been able to open up another world when the reality brings us something that we do not know how to comfortably deal with face-to face. My student’s blogs have allowed them to open up some of their inner thoughts and feelings to share support and concern that no one wants to speak out loud. It’s an interesting journey, one that I hope the children will continue on long after they leave me in June.

Congrats on the new site, it looks great.

As a former student who spends more time slinking in the shadows of your site rather than contributing (things don’t change, do they?), I couldn’t help but feel particularly drawn to this last post.

I agree that the above-mentioned student isn’t struggling with the online media aspect, but with the online community aspect. I think it’s something most of your students go through at some point; for me it was dealing with a certain loss of ownership between the author and the work when it leaves the relative safety of a room and enters a community where the work and its author are the only entities with name and form, and everything else is relatively anonymous.

In a way, this is similar to professional writing, where the author doesn’t know the reader, and in that way I maintain some of the same reservations I have always had about blogging. Are students necessarily ready to face the opinions (critical or otherwise) of the (not-so) general public…and is the general public ready for everyone who can handle a keyboard to be expressing themselves quite so freely?

My students write in all kinds of spaces, with all kinds of technologies, not just on the blogs. I want them to feel the differences between soft red notebook with pencil and screen with tapping fingers. I want them to hear their voices recorded, and also to speak out in our computerless classroom. What he articulates here, I think, is a healthy dose of doubt, of close examination of what happens when we are working on a screen for the world, and an honest self-consciousness that someone who really cares about ideas and words must feel every time he writes, especially when starting out, especially in this space.

One striking thing about this student is that he is incredibly adventurous with his mash-ups, with his multimedia, with his Flickr-based stories. He is, actually, incredibly comfortable writing multimedia online.

I want my students to feel reflection-in-action, reflection-on-action, connecting as they go to the larger conversation. He should be uneasy about his contributions–he’s so young, wondering what he could possibly add and how it helps him during his apprenticeship as a writer. I think that he’s learning to move beyond his fear and his skepticism by blogging, and seeing its value as a place to connect, to get over awkwardness, to gain confidence as a writer and member of a creative community.

I love what you say about getting carried away with the idea, the nagging question as to forget yourself as you write into possible answers, into the narrative. Katherine Anne Porter, I believe, said something to the effect of “Write hot and read cold.”

~bg

How does one help a student through this? I looked at some sites about prewriting, since my instinct was that in general students don’t do enough of this. Mostly I didn’t like what I saw, with this Purdue site showing some insight.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/673/01/

My own method is to try to build a complete narrative in my head first. If I don’t have that when I sit down, it’s very hard to start. If I have that, then I can start and I don’t mind making perturbations, which can turn into significant detours, in the process of composing.

The student might ask – where does that narrative come from? Really, I’m not sure. But I know if I have a question about something, or I’m disturbed by something, that’s a good start. I need to flesh that out and doing so produces the narrative. And then the sense of self gets lost, at least for a time.