Last summer, I introduced a project a few colleagues and I were working on.  You can read about it here, but the short version is that we wanted to use blogs to teach freshmen composition.  The only difference between our syllabus and the others we had seen that incorporated web writing was that the majority of our student’s writing would be public (under pseudonyms), on-the-blog writing, and that they would be responsible for  keeping up with whatever community they were writing for.  Well, it’s over, and I’ve had a few weeks to recover, so I thought I’d share my preliminary findings.

#1.  Goddamn, that was a lot of work.  80 students writing for 18 blogs (on such varying topics as “fashion” and “shooting shit”), 1,000 words a week (broken up into at least three posts), 3 comments a week, and two audience analysis papers is a lot of writing to evaluate.  We (and by we I mean Mike) did a smart thing by setting up all the student’s Blogger pages to automatically send all their posts to a single Gmail account, so at the very least all their writing was in one place.  Comments were harder to track and count, so eventually we just started taking the students’ words for it.  Finding ways to automate and streamline evaluation is a big part of how I’d improve the syllabus.

#2.  Kids get community.  They don’t always want to make the effort to connect, but I’d say half of my class were geniuses at analyzing the tendencies and desires of their discourse community.  As I said, many of them didn’t exploit their insights, but a lot of that has to do with making the full-fledged leap from student to writer, and that’s not something you can do in one semester.  But all in all, most students did come to understand that the writing they were doing was not so much for themselves, but for their readers, which is a big step. 

#3.  We didn’t save anybody.  One of my big hopes was that, once we showed the kids how to view their traffic statistics, they’d all explode with pride.  A few of them were really turned on by it (especially the ones or two who wrote posts that got a lot of attention), but on the whole the students who just wanted to turn in assignments and go home did just that, only their assignments were public.  Basically, the ones who would have done well, did well, the one’s who did poorly would have done so in any other Comp class.  The middle kids, I’m not prepared say what happened to them.  I’d like to say that, like the top students, they had an experience of writing they otherwise wouldn’t have, with real humans in distant cities reading and responding to their writing.  Quality of experience is hard to measure, though.  The kids seemed happy.

#4.  It works like a fucking charm.  Look, anyone who thinks Freshmen Comp should be spelling and grammar and Shakespeare papers has already stopped reading.  What I want to teach is writing, and that implies a reader, and the trick is to do something to that reader’s brain while managing some pretty terrible constraints.  Grammar and spelling are consequences of that situation (“rhetorical concerns” as we say in the biz), not ends in themselves, and Shakespeare is fucking Shakespeare, and he’s not going to stop being Shakespeare if i don’t make my students read Hamlet (which I love, but that’s not the point).  But if what you want to teach is writing, giving your students a real-life audience with demands and opinions separate from their own is the best way to do it, even if you tell them fuck-all about how to use a semicolon.  They’ll learn the semicolon when it becomes important to them, not when I shout it at them in front of a classroom.

So all in all, a success, I think.  We’re going to be working our experiences into some papers/conference presentations once the dust settles and we can stand to look at each other again, but I wanted to get some ideas down right now, and there just aren’t enough premature observations on the Internet.

(Update: Marc Santos has posted his thoughts on the experiment as well.)