Blogging for this course is a useful tool that forces me to come to terms with the material I’ve read, to try to integrate it into some sort of practical application. Blogging has the benefit of feeling like a fun interactive game, even if I’m playing solitaire. At the same time, it’s more interesting than simply scribbling a journal of notes on current authors, if only because scribbling makes my hand cramp. Of course, I could tap it out in a Word doc that I keep to myself.
Ostensibly, though, blogging’s benefit is that it builds a community of writers/readers/thinkers. Theoretically, I’m reading all my classmates’ blogs and they’re reading mine. Then again, I don’t read as many as I intend to, thus far, so I wouldn’t be shocked if others paid me the same regard.
Still, this doesn’t mean we’re not building a community, even if we don’t engage with each other in an optimum sense. At the very least, I feel I’m part of a discourse community because Nelson’s references to various blogs confirms that we’re all in this together -- reading, digesting, synthesizing and blogging.
Of course, my primary benefit from blogging is that it helps me imagine how I’ll use blogs in the classroom. We know how popular social networking is, especially for younger people (even if Paul claims blogging’s only for “old people” -- really? -- hoho). It only follows that my students would enjoy reading and sharing their writing with kids in their class, sharing the “buzz” of the hive, rather than working alone in the shadows. Unless, of course, their lack of confidence in their writing had the potential to paralyze them from blogging. But that’s the whole point -- it’s not formal writing. For people who are unsure of themselves as writers, blogging is perfect. It’s one step up from a tweet.
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