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Thursday, November 01, 2007

Blogoscopy II


Having just tried it, Oso Raro is ambivalent about incorporating blogs into one's university classes:


'...[T]he development of a written voice is essential to blogging. Those of us who blog regularly know this aspect of the medium, and are drawn to it, I would suppose, because of the expositional and narrative possibilities. Some of my students have taken to the genre like fish to water, and are, as they say, natural bloggers. In fact, when I designed the assignment, I thought this would be true of most of my students, imbued in social networking and online chat and Instant Messaging. This, however, was a misapprehension. Aside from those natural bloggers, who typically are also either gabby or strongly opinionated students in real life (IRL), some of my student bloggers have had trouble crafting themselves in the genre. On Friday, I had an early morning appointment with a student, a smart dedicated young woman, who admitted she was having trouble figuring out how to blog and what to blog about.

We had a long conversation on models, ideas, generating thinking. But the simple fact of the matter is that it is hard, if one is not naturally drawn to electronic media, to sustain something like a blog. When I was writing the guidelines for the assignment, in late summer, I knew there would be an adjustment period for some students, but in fact this adjustment period is, for some, not temporary. The simple fact of the matter is that some of these students are not bloggers, and would have been better served by the traditional writing option (you know, papers and stuff).

The rules for course blogging are in the end very similar to something I have begun to think about the blogosphere: One must start with voice to become fluent in developing voice. In other words, and for the most part, voice cannot develop in electronic media unless it already exists on some level elsewhere, verbally or politically or socially or on the written page....'


This points to one of the reasons UD's opposed to Creative Writing majors in college, and indeed to the tendency of some undergraduates to take more Creative Writing than literature courses.

You don't get this voice by sitting in class after class reading the pretty voiceless writing of other eighteen-year-olds. Nor do you get it by cranking out your own poetry in class -- poetry that's likely, given the ethos of university Creative Writing, to be over-praised. You get it by the selfless study of great writers.

And this is why UD wouldn't use blogs in her classes. It's unfair to throw at students, many of whom are too young to have developed their voices, a medium which, as Oso rightly notes, demands a strong voice.