Blog #14: Reflecting on commenting on other blogs

Today’s exercise was about logging into the class’s blog page, reading at least two other blogs, and commenting on them. The point behind this exercise was to help remind the writers that there is an audience for the blogs. Most of the students have public blogs, but they don’t always get feedback from the public. Interestingly, some students have given their friends or family members their blog address, and receive comments from their friends of family members rather consistently.

I think this is pretty interesting, mostly because lots of teachers say that students don’t know how to write today. But it’s been my experience that they do know how to write. The big hang up is not the student’s ability to write, but the teacher’s ability to tap into the student’s innate desire to write. The students who have shared their blog address with their friends and family members and perfect examples of this. They are proof that students do write, and they want an audience for their writing. To put it another way, as a composition specialist, I try to help teachers identify an audience for student writers, so that students can focus their writing. I think that without an audience, we might actually suffer from the audience collapse issue that Mike Wesch talks about. In fact, the lack of a distinct audience might actually be a contributing factor to this perceived notion that students don’t know how to write. This sounds like an article topic to me. Hmmm

To return to the topic, I always enjoy reading the blogs that my students upload. Some of them are rather funny, some of them are very serious, and some of them are simply recorded thoughts of the writer. I feel like the blogs are good places to look for feedback from my students and about the class’s progress. I like to be able to understand what is working for my students and what definitely was unclear. In addition, giving the students opportunities to read the blog entries that their peers wrote and comment on them, allows them to possibly have a better understanding of the assignment and where they fit into the overall picture. They can see that they are ‘normal’ (whatever that is), and they can compare themselves to their peers. It is also fun for them to give their peers feedback, because for that one brief moment, they get to BE the audience, instead of wondering who the audience is. That’s always an interesting turn of events.