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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. 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. |