Note: This post was slightly edited after my presentation this afternoon. I’ll also be adding an afterword.

I’m giving a talk tomorrow afternoon to colleagues & interested parties at the university in blogging. When I first conceived this talk last semester, I was going to talk about academics blogging their research, careers, political opinions, etc. & make the case for the blog as an emerging literary genre with a particular set of rhetorical practices. Actually, I still intend to begin that way, then veer into using blogs as a way to interact with students. One of the main problems in giving a talk like this is that some of my colleagues & students will be familiar with blogs, at least conceptually, while others will be, to put it bluntly, clueless. Clarkson, where I teach, has been named by one rating outfit or another as one of the “most wired” campuses in the country, but our students are not, in general, big into self expression. There are exceptions, but most Clarkson students are into putting their heads down & grinding. It’s not that they don’t have time to blog. They certainly find time for other sorts of unofficial activity, some of it quite creative. That’s not so much a complaint as an observation. Though it’s a bit of a caricature to say so, we’re a numbers rather than words sort of institution.

My colleagues are another matter. One stopped me in the hall the other day to ask if he could be excused from attending because he was too stupid about computers to ever understand blogging. This is someone who has translated complex philosophical works & published books on abstruse philosophical issues. Abstruse to me, at any rate. But that’s an extreme case. I’ll walk into the colloquium assuming that most of my colleagues & all of my students can understand what I’m going to say. But I’m going to begin in kindergarten:

• What is a weblog? (An updatable webpage with the most recent entries at the top; one or more sidebars, blogroll; permalinks; links.)
• Want to play with a weblog? (Try Blogger or WordPress or Edublogs — just follow the link & go through the simple steps. Five minutes to your first post.)
• What is the technology that supports weblogging? (The internet, a web of connections; hosted vs. independent domain; web-based software; specialized tools.
• How have academics in various fields used this technology? (Talking to each other: hallway chatter to conference exchanges; interaction with students.

Individual Blogs by professors:

• Michael Berube (defunct)
• Timothy Burke’s Easily Distracted
• Bardiac
• Tara Smith’s Aetiology

Professor Smith’s blog is one of a large number of individual science blogs that are bundled together at ScienceBlogs. And bundling does seem to be the wave of the future in blogging. Whereas ScienceBlogs bundles lots of individual blogs by scientists & about science, other bloggers have bundled their efforts by creating group blogs. This is simply a blog where more than one individual writes entries. Group blogs:

• The Valve
• Cliopatria
• Crooked Timber

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long list of academics who blog. But I suspect that most of my audience will be interested in using blogs as an instructional, rather than a self-expressive technology. And in order to demonstrate that, I’m going to pull up the two blogs I’m using this semester, Introblog (for Lit 200) & Litpop (for Lit 324), and use them to talk about what I’m trying to do, both technically & philosophically. These blogs allow me to post entries & my students to post comments. Some readers of the post will have used the Blackboard system for class materials & while it is certainly more robust than my blogging software, especially in the way it handles comments, I find it unintuitive & un-agile. Blackboard tends to want to chop online communication into lots of discreet units, whereas a blog emphasizes flow. Both certainly have their uses. I have just come from talking with Nancy Bowers, in fact, about using Blackboard to teach my Vietnam course entirely online this Summer.

I’m happy with the way my course weblogs are working this semester, though. The fact is, in the past I have tried to incorporate blogs into my classes, with very limited success. This semester, I decided it was make or break time with class blogs. I had worked with Edublogs in one of my earlier attempts at class blogging, so this semester, instead of setting up Blackboard sites for my classes, I created class weblogs at Edublogs, which makes a specialty of providing a version of the WordPress blogging software fitted to educational needs. This is a bootstrap, not to say bleeding edge, effort — mostly a guy named Mike James & a couple of servers. [Note: I have it reliably that Edublogs is shortly going to become less bleeding edge, much more professional.] But there are other, more robust options as well. You can create a hosted WordPress or Blogger blog in a few minutes & those systems have real documentation.

In my previous attempts at class blogs, I had made the process mostly voluntary, assuming that students would find the system as attractive as I did; when that didn’t work, I tended to let the blogs go slack. Not this semester. I have made a formal deal with my students in which they must post three to five comments each week on one of the articles I post. In return, there are no formal exams in the course, though there are quizzes & essays & a short project.

As an aside, this raises the issue of the distinction between posts & comments. Theoretically, it’s possible for every student to have a weblog on which they would write posts, but reading more than a hundred weblogs regularly is beyond even my mighty pedagogical abilities. I ran an Honors seminar this way several years ago, but it isn’t really practical with large numbers of students. In the anatomy of a weblog, then, there are posts & comments. I write the posts & require students to comment. Requiring comments in specific numbers is the new element for me this semester. And students have to do more in a comment than just say, Rawk On, Man! Using some of the rhetorical tools developed by Gerald Graff, I ask that students characterize an argument or idea before responding to it. In fact, on my Introblog the other day, I laid into students a wee bit for mostly posting comments of the Rawk On! sort. It seemed as if students were commenting from their received knowledge rather than from the assigned reading or my blog posts. As an aside within an aside, it is very useful to be able to link to a particular post via a permalink, as I just did above, rather than merely to a website. You can use this to link both out from & within a blog.

Should you blog with your students? Maybe. It requires a good deal of work to keep up. It also requires active engagement outside the classroom. Student reactions have been interesting this semester: on the first day of class, when I said there would be no formal exams, but that they would be required to post comments to the blog, on average, five times a week, I got a bit of that Rawk On! vibe. By the end of last week, it had dawned on my students that the blog requirement was going to be a bit of work. And when I began telling them that they needed to actively engage my & other students’ arguments, well, let’s just say that took a long silent moment to sink in.

Afterword: I think the talk went well, though as usual in such situations, I was a bit hyper. I’ll have another post this weekend responding to some specific questions that came up. I also want to point readers to this resource, Academic Blogs. It is actually a wiki, but that’s a subject for another day. Thanks to Scott McLemee in a comment to this post for the pointer. Finally, as I noted in my talk this afternoon, the rhetorical focus of this blog post shifts pretty radically as it progresses. I began with the idea of writing a post about my talk, but by the end was addressing my audience — in the room, not on the internet — fairly directly. Necessity, my darlings.