Tech and Pedagogy

My intentions as a writer
     With this blog, my posts will often be very rough drafts, sometimes including many scattered scraps of thoughts.  If blogging is truly collaborative, it seems necessary for what is published, to still be in process.  Clearly, I'm still coming to terms with this, because I feel the need to preface an incomplete piece of writing.

Scattered thought/bullet points
     I also find it helpful to write thoughts as I think them, leaving notes and reminders to come back to, which also demarcating paragraphs with titles, when I would otherwise have obsessed a little longer to find that best transition.  "Scattered," though, is pejorative.  The potential for connectivity in blog writing, as suggested by our readings, requires an embrace of this kind of thinking.  This writing isn't chronological.


This post is incomplete, and many items from this list below will remain unanswered. (Bolded text in parenthesis is there as a note to myself to return later).



Points to address 
1. Blog as Genre 

• What is Genre? 
• Different from Form? 
• My understanding of Genre Pedagogy 
• What defines the Blogging Genre/Form? 
• What do I need to do to develop as a writer to reach "complex blogging," in Richardson's definition (31)? 

 2. Review my past blogs 

• Three Examples: Adult ESOL, 9th grade Tech, Personal class blog for Visual Culture class at TC
• What were my approaches? 
• What were my intentions? 
• What were the results? 

3. Blogging in future classrooms 

• What do I need to do differently for fall semester? 
• What blogs am I going to read?
•  How can the potential for meeting others that Berners-Lee describes, be a feature of my classroom blogs?

4. Experiences, Challenges, Success in formatting this blog (so far) 

• What did I learn to do? 
• What do I want to learn to do? 

5. Questions for Class

• Citing expectations and copy write formatting? 

Blog as Genre 
     Connective (source): 1) literally connecting and linking to other sources to enhance meaning. 2) writing and reading online is truly symbiotic  
     "Transactional" writing (30)
     Close reading and interpretation: "blogging is writing down what you think when you read others" (31).


Review of My Past Blogs 
(There's no way I'll have time to get all that in this post.)


Blogging in Future Classrooms 
    While teaching ESOL in Queens, I decided that I wanted to develop more lessons that would utilize the computers available to students, in a lab in the building site. After teaching at 10 or so different locations in library basements and church board rooms, this was the first location that had a lab, and dedicated tech staff. For whatever reason, I decided that we should blog as a class. 
   
   My first attempt at using blogs in a class was also my first attempt at using a blog. I'm not sure why I thought I could make it work. Arrogance, maybe. I had no interest in reading blogs. In fact, I had vague sense of distaste or superiority for the form altogether (where did this come from?).  I did, without fully acknowledging, read scattered blog posts when they were linked to something I was searching for, but I've never read enough of a single blog to observe "complex blogging," which Richardson defines as: "Extended analysis and synthesis over a longer period of time that builds on previous posts, links, and comments" (31). Reading a novel requires skills unique to longer works, and teaching this, clearly, requires an experienced reader of novels. 


   Here the issue of time seems to have additional meaning beyond the length of time needed to read a text. Consider Josh Neufeld's web comic AD New Orleans After the Deluge. Though I discovered this in it's final printed form as a graphic novel, this project began as a blog, with illustrations posted as he finished them, comments from viewers and writing from the author, original source photographs for the illustrations, audio of the interviews the author conducted during his research. Viewers were invited to not only observe but to participate in the artist's process, offering comments, suggestions, and corrections (source?), when necessary. Richardson suggests that with blog writing, "we have to stop thinking of publication as the end of the process; if anything, in the social writing space of blogs, it's a midpoint" (30). The viewers of Neufeld's web comic were involved in that midpoint, before the publication of the graphic novel. Beyond the potential for "transactional writing," blogs may be timely and immediate, the posts related to events as they happen, while the author is present, and able to respond. I've never experienced this. 


 "Just as writing teachers should write, and literature teachers should read, teachers who use blogs should, well, use blogs" (Richardson, 43) 


 "And as we all know, when a teacher believes in what she's doing and is confident in her tools, well, it rubs off on even the most resistant of students." (Ganley) (How do I cite a quote quoted in another text?) 


 For my development, I need to soon find active blogs within topics of interest. My initial inclination would be to seek out quality education blogs, and I do plan to browse the suggested blogs. But, if I'm really going to read a blog (which means reading and responding), for long enough to get a sense of how blog authors begin to build connections, I need to be honest with myself, and seek out the kind of blogs I'd want to read on my downtime, the kind I'd feel guilt obsessively consuming. 


Meeting:
     Tim Berners-Lee described his vision of the World Wide Webe as a "collaborative medium, a place where we could meet and read and write" (Richardson, 1).  The potential to "meet" others is really one of the most exciting aspects of the Internet, getting to know people in ways otherwise impossible, presenting yourself as you want to be seen. Though, you ultimately have no absolute control of this, considering memes, where the context of images is altogether irrelevant, and the application of which is stretched to the point of being meaningless. (You can really get frustrated seeing the same variations on the same theme.) 
     So, how can blogs in the classroom offer this potential for "meeting?"  How can blogs offer opportunities for students to get to know classmates in new ways?  One possibility may be the potential for blogs to "enhance the development of expertise in a particular subject" (Richardson, 27). And clearly, this potential for meeting, also requires a host of considerations for Internet safety and classroom web protocol.  Consider Steve's example earlier: his photo unwittingly became a symbol for all things negative.


Formatting and Tech Work (so far)
      At this point, I have spent far more time working on how this blog looks, and figuring out as many tools and features I could find to manipulate, than I have on the actual content.  I'm going to forgive myself here.  I think it looks pretty good.  And I'm pretty proud that I figured out, for example, how to use the After the Jump feature.  This was something that had bothered me on my other blogs, that need to scroll and scroll down the page looking for a post like a bucket lowering down and down a drying well.


      Knowing that I may over fixate, and that no one really cares, or would ever notice that I adjusted the margins so my title image would better fit, I need to make a point limit this area of research.  I can always come back and adjust the font size.