Collaborative Narrative in the Classroom: Blogs

In 2017, I hope that I don't have to explain what blogs are--and this is one of their strengths for instruction. Most students are familiar with blogs or microblogs (platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, especially), and have some vision of the goals of such writing. Given our course and the larger Humanities emphasis on personal growth, blogs can be highly useful within both composition and literature classrooms. They can--

• Encourage students to share their own critical thinking notes on primary literature
• Promote collaborative learning through commentary on other students' contributions
• Track development toward learning outcomes, providing a chronological document of student growth
• Encourage student community and mutual support (Thomas 2017), especially when writing itself is one of the primary challenge
• Give students valuable experience in basic website management, a skill increasingly necessary for online communication
• Encourage students to consider target audiences and writing goals as real, in an environment both within and larger than our individual classrooms--and isn't this the real goal of our discipline? 

Each of these benefits can be leveraged within formal assignments (for example, choosing between an oral report or blog) or more informal tracking a la reading journals (for example, this professor's check-in blog assignment). Whichever method you choose, remember that course blogs are like any other assignment: students need and expect clear grading criteria, models for their writing, and help when they get stuck. 

As a low-stakes first assignment, I find it useful to assign a blog, perhaps from the New York Times Books section, for the week's reading: this allows students to see the genre in action even as they test basic assignment parameters. And especially in courses like E238 20th century fiction, we can use this first assignment to begin our larger discussions on genre and the bounds of literature.

Tools

As you can see, I use Blogger: it's free and integrates with my personal Google identity--and I've been using it since before Google acquired and integrated it, so it's familiar for me. This probably won't be true for our students, however, and CSU's gmail services unfortunately do not include Blogger. There are many free alternatives that students may already be exposed to in other courses, and they have their advantages, though almost all of them have payment scales that lead to limited options in a free mode. For a classroom setting, though, students aren't disadvantaged by unclear hosted site names, and you can encourage them to use AdBlocker to avoid most of the other pitfalls.

• Wordpress.com: the one I want to focus on here. Of all the free blogging tools besides Blogger, this one offers, I think, the most promise in terms of control and continuity. Students will, on the free side, be able to maintain a website that can be templated or built from scratch--and will persist beyond the bounds of one course. Wordpress has also been around for a long time, and subsequently has an excellent online support community. If students grow more comfortable, this is also an excellent medium for developing some basic coding skills. 
• Wix.com, Weebly.com: both blog/website builders that utilize plug and drop features to avoid the need to html code. Students will be limited in their design control, but the templates may also overcome initial anxiety about tool learning curves. Students also have access to Google Pages through their CSU accounts, but I find this option clunky and frustrating for both me and them.
• Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter: all microblogging platforms, where the primary limitation is posting length. Could be useful for quick commentary rather than more rigorous critical thinking exercises.

Don't take my word for it: there are tons of comparison sites. Here's one to start!

Wordpress.com

Not to be confused with Wordpress.org, which is much more advanced and requires service space that may be unavailable to students, Wordpress.com is pretty easy to set up. Simply go to the site, select Blogs from the upper menu, and you'll see a five-step process to walk through. Each step comes with clear instructions, and choices for the student to make.

How to use in a classroom: 

Since one of the setup steps includes creating a user profile, students can immediately start commenting on posts shared with the class. I would recommend creating a Content Page in Canvas that includes a link to each student's blog, with a short description to differentiate them--this can be the first step in an ongoing assignment, to create a blog and post its information to the class space.

Additional reading: 

• Hall, M. (2013). Using blogging as a learning tool. Innovative Instructor blog, Johns Hopkins
• Sample, M. (2011). Teaching for uncoverage rather than coverage. The Chronicle of Higher Education, ProfHacker blog.
• Thomas, S. (2017). Journalogue: Voicing Student Challenges in Writing through a Classroom Blog. Educational Technology & Society, 20 (1), 112–122.  

Did I mention the super awesome online support community?