Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs

Abstract

In a stylish and informative online essay, Barclay Barrios (2003) dubbed 2003 "The Year of the Blog."He makes this claim in light of a) Blogger.comannouncing in January of 2003 that it hosts over one million blogs, b) the emergence of presentations about blogging at the 2003 Conference on College Composition and Communication, andc) the interest in blogging that surfaced during Gulf War II.He also describes typical weblog uses in writing classrooms: weblogs as journals, weblogs as research tools, and class weblogs for sharing ideas.These functions can be usefully considered weblog genres (what we call journal, notebook, and filter weblogs) that remediate existing print genres (journals, notebooks, and note cards).The concept of genre, as developed in the work of rhetoric and composition scholars like Carolyn Miller, Charles Bazerman, and Richard Coe, offers a key to understanding both formal features and motivations for weblogging, and their view of genres as dynamic and evolving complements Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's theory of new media: remediation.Our goal in this paper is to bring some greater specificity to, and advance the understanding of, weblogs as educational tools relevant to any class that takes writing and reading seriously.Weblogging seems like such a potentially rich set of online writing activities because it is relatively low-tech compared to producing hypertext or websites, and it incorporates familiar writing skills like summary, paraphrases, and the development of voice.The mix of generic, technical, and psychological factors clearly grabs and compels some people to weblog extensively, and as teachers of writing, we want to tap into that mix.Rebecca Blood, author of the first print handbook for blogging (2002) and a widely cited history of weblogging (2000), offered a vision of blogging's potential for developing writers.She envisioned that the small community that might start up around a weblogger would encourage that person to continue writing where he or she might otherwise stop, and that readers of weblogs might in turn begin their own blogs and reap similar benefits.Her vision is one that many writing instructors share for their students, whether attained through blogging, journaling, discussion boards, class projects, or other genres:As he enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective.His own reactions-to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the mediawill carry more weight with him.Accustomed to expressing his thoughts on his website, he will be able to more fully articulate his opinions to himself and others.He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead.Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration.(2000)Blood's vision is of the writer without a teacher, the writer who is self-motivated and community supported.We did not expect many, if any students, to be transformed by weblogging quite so radically because we were introducing weblogging as an assigned activity within, in most cases, a required course.Like Jill Walker (2003), we expected to find some students who would love it, some who would simply do their assignments, and others who would hate it.But our hypothesis was that if we could understand what motivated some, and if we could identify formal or psychological barriers for others, we could be more precise in assigning and encouraging weblogging; we could also be clearer about out own expectations for weblogging.