Blogging in Composition and Literature Courses: A New Discourse

1. Blogging in Composition and Literature Courses: A New Discourse Technological innovations that assist students with critical thinking, developing, and expressing ideas in writing and literature classes are needed.

2. Advantages of Blogging Researchthat addresses the solutions to this problem include: • The development and free online availability of blogging software has helped transform the Web from a place principally used to access information to one where vast numbers of people publish their own work, with hundreds of millions of blogs launched in the past decade. The potential role of blogs in education, and in second language learning in particular, is revealed through an analysis of the medium’s affordances. The value of online communication in second language learning has been attributed to how it combines the interactivity of speech with the permanence of writing (Warschauer, 1997). Yet different types of online communication achieve this combination in different ways. • An analysis by Herring and colleagues demonstrates how blogs serve as a bridging genre between more highly interactive forms of asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) and standard published HTML documents (see Figure 1). Blogs are more frequently updated (in terms of adding new content or comments), include more exchange among people, and have a higher percentage of text (as opposed to multimedia) than standard Webpages. • Second language educators are exploiting the affordances of blogs to good effect. The ease of writing and publishing on blogs makes them an appealing medium to students and thus has been found to help increase the quantity of student writing as well as its lexical sophistication (Fellner & Apple, 2006). Having students write on blogs can help learners transition from a more colloquial to an academic writing style, develop a sense of voice, learn to participate in a community of writers, and gain an important new literacy in its own right by becoming contributors to and not just consumers of online content (Bloch, 2007; Rezaee & Oladi, 2008). • Ajjan and Hartshorne argued that blogs (abbreviated from weblogs) are user journal entries in the form of text, images, and links to web content, such as websites or other blogs. Blogs have a variety of formats and might include the user expressing their opinion about a topic or documenting activities. Blogs are interactive in the sense that other users could provide comments on the information posted by the blog author. Educational applications of blogs include researching, tracking, interpreting, and evaluating blogs for political commentary (multiple perspectives), cultural events, business, or other news and for examining changes over time

3. Disadvantages of Blogging Research that addresses the innovation’s problems include: • The development and free online availability of blogging software has helped transform the Web from a place principally used to access information to one where vast numbers of people publish their own work, with hundreds of millions of blogs launched in the past decade. The potential role of blogs in education, and in second language learning in particular, is revealed through an analysis of the medium’s affordances. The value of online communication in second language learning has been attributed to how it combines the interactivity of speech with the permanence of writing (Warschauer, 1997). Yet different types of online communication achieve this combination in different ways. • Warschauer added that the exchanges on them tend to be more asymmetric (i.e., dominated by main authors) and less frequently updated than CMC sites such as newsgroups.

4. Innovation: Development Snafus • While technological innovations that assist students with critical thinking, developing ideas, and expressing ideas in writing and literature classes are needed, some psychological barriers were encountered in the development process of blogging. • Among them is perception. Many educators continue to be critical of how tools such as blogging help students with mastery of the English language, can develop use of these tools to enhance teaching and learning and emphasize writing for meaningful academic purposes, mastery of relevant genres, and development of students’ academic language proficiency.

5. Commercialization: • Web 2.0 tools which include blogging have been packaged and manufactured using various mass media channels. The infusion and integration is distributed by educational publishing houses, marketing reps, and the most influential channel of communications---word of mouth throughout academic disciplines and departments.