My two new course blogs are up and ready for tonight’s workshops when the students will create their own blogs and join the ranks of bloggers.
EL170 Introduction to Creative Writing
WP101: he Writing Workshop II
Both are pretty bare bones at this point, but it’s good to take stock before the students transform them into much more effective vessels for transporting us through this writing adventure.
A couple of interesting developments to note: on the Creative Writing Blog one of last year’s students stepped right up and asked if he could write a letter to the new class and have it posted to the blog, which in turn, has prompted other Creative Writing class alums to show interest in responding to the new writer-bloggers. We will, as always, use the previous course blogs as a resource throughout the course, learning from their successes and failures, being inspired and knowing we can do the same.
On the Writing Workshop Blog, I’m trying out many things for the first time–more on those in future postings–but here we also have alums participating, but not alums of the course, blogging alums, bringing with them their blogs from their first-year seminar this fall, and instead of creating new blogs for this course, they’ll continue on with their original blogs, folding them right into the work, extending their writing portfolios. Does this mark the beginning of blogging portfolios? At Middlebury it does. These four students will also serve as class blogging and digital storytelling experts, helping those classmates who struggle with the technology.
And other alums of blogging are reporting in–two seniors have approached me about blogging next year as part of their jobs, and the fall course evaluations from the Arts writing bloggers indicate that the wild, five-blogs-in-a-sixth did anything but scare them away. They found the real-world feel of the blog and the responsibility for bringing it to life and for sustaining it both effective in helping them develop their writing skills and invaluable in creating a sense of community that they often find sorely lacking in other classes.
We’ll see this evening, how the new group takes to wikis and podcasts as well as to blogs! Ha!
Filed under: Spring 2005 Classroom Blogging | Leave a comment »
(the new) bgblogging 