the chutry experiment

Interesting thoughts. In my case, from a non-academic standpoint, I've found similar ideas. I have written in many formats and for different purposes in the past, including in online journals. What helped my blog find it's "identity" was when I began to realize that I didn't want to, necesarily, right about myself, my life, what I did today and how it made me feel, but rather I wanted to use it to comment on the things that interested me. This was aided my emerging mentality that I was writing this for consumption, and not just for my own personal reflection.

So, writing for and audience is one important part. Also, for me, the sense of community that begins to build around your blog, if you are lucky. It makes me want to write more for THOSE people who have then become my friends.

Interesting writing you are doing.

By the way, when I started my comment out by saying "Interesting thoughts," I meant your thoughts in that particular post were interesting, and was not implying that the thoughts I was about to write were going to be interesting.

Just don't want you think I'm narcissistic, (although writing an entire seperate comment to prove you aren't narcissistic only makes it clear how much one thinks about one's self).

Thanks, Dylan. I didn't read your comment (or the follow-up) as narcissistic at all. I think that I have been so enthusiastic about using blogs in the classroom for similar reasons: blogging has taught me a lot about writing for wider audiences.

Now, when I write certain entries, I'll sometimes have specific readers (or groups of readers--academics, fellow Atlantans) in mind when I'm writing, and when they add to the conversation, that makes writing much more enjoyable.

I look forward to reading your article someday, Chuck--sounds like interesting work. I've been thinking a lot about these issues, because I'm having my First Year Writing class keep a group blog (english50.blogspot.com) and most of the entries are *very* personal. I haven't given the students much direction about what to write, although in my syllabus it suggests that students should write about "anything related to our course theme--America as we imagine it and as the rest of the world imagines us." As you can guess, that "anything" is being broadly conceived of as the personal as well as the political. I'm so pleased with how the blog is going so far, even if it's not what I expected it to be.

I'm just now (several weeks into the semester) struggling with how to help students make the transition from personal entries to entries that are more explicitly written for readers outside of our class. My main concern is to avoid squelching their freedom and changing the fact that the blog is functioning very much like a community resource. Dylan's point in the comments is helpful--that once a blogger gets a sense of that outside community, he/she may start to write *for* those people, rather than just for one's self. Strangely, in my own blog writing experience, I've had the opposite pull--as time goes on, I find I write on my blog more for myself than for my readers. I wonder what to make of that (no theoretical insights this morning, at least).

BTW, I like the idea of the class-insider pseudonym a lot...perhaps next time I try the blog thing in my class, I'll suggest something similar to promote safety, though that seems not to be a major concern this time around. I've simply suggested that they use first names only, though that's imperfect for sure.

Thanks, Rachael. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing my article finished. I think I have a tendency to direct blog entries a little too much, making blogging feel like an exercise, rather than something more expressive and personal (not that the political is opposed to these terms).

I'd also agree with you about Dylan's comment. One possibility for producing that sense of audience might be to orchestrate a collection of courses using blogs and to require/request that students read blogs from other universities just to establish a better sense of a community of readers.

I think the pseudonym has helped some, but first-name-only has a similar effect. One of the reasons I've let students use pseudonyms is that class rosters are not supposed to be published publicly (I forget the precise reasons for this).

Hah! Chuck, have you been blogging about lingerie again?

That was scary, because I was reading your blog, specifically this post, and was just THINKING about sexy lingerie, and then this comment shows up, so it is very possible that that was my fault.

Jen, I'm going to delete the lingerie comment in a minute. No sense giving them page rank, but I find the false folksiness of the comments themselves pretty amusing....

Dyaln, missed your comment before. I won't hold it against you this time, but please stop thinking about those things when you read my blog!!

By the way, is it just me or have the blog spammers been espeically busy lately? I've actually been thinking about shutting down comments around here again, especially on entries more than a few weeks old.

I've noticed that they've hit your site pretty hard lately... my blog must not be well known enough for the spammers to even bother... So, maybe it is a blog status symbol.

It may also have something to do with the way that Typepad and Moveable Type create links using comments, but I'm not sure.

I don't think that my blog is *that* well-known....

I haven't been receiving any spam lately, but I know Atlanta Desk still receives a lot of spam on older posts, since I haven't posted there in decades.. so it may be an MT thing. And BfD has been hit hard lately.

re: Rachel's concern about trying to re-shape / re-direct the way in which her class write:

"I'm just now (several weeks into the semester) struggling with how to help students make the transition from personal entries to entries that are more explicitly written for readers outside of our class. My main concern is to avoid squelching their freedom and changing the fact that the blog is functioning very much like a community resource."

The good thing about Blogger is that once you've got an account, you can create many more blogs - I've got about 8, sad, I know - and each blog can do a different thing. So people in Rachel's class could have the class blog, then small group blogs, or personal blogs, or blogs arranged by theme for writing which is for outsiders / general viewing public. And using different writing styles in each blog - even try to write stuff that will get noticed, and get commented on (not spammed) by outsiders.

I started blogging because of an article in the Guardian online which featured Rebecca Blood and Jason Kottke, and for me, having a model, something to aspire to was very helpful. And my blogging has gone through several metamorphoses eg designing my own page and updating via ftp, using blogger to update a page on a server I was paying for, then when blogger offered the comments for free tranferred everything onto their space.

Maybe blogging carries with it the stigma of self-publishing, that is, how can you put up your work without having an editor look at it first? or without someone asking you to do it. But for me it's like playing in a garage band, people do it because they like it, and they'll play at parties, and try and get gigs supporting other bands at pubs, and they're not making any money out of it, they're just doing what they do. So, writing online is for me doing what a writer does.

I'd agree with a lot of these observations. When I first started getting students to blog last fall, I required that they read a lot of blogs and even required that they write a paper analyzing a blog. As a result, my students understood the genre pretty well. This time around, I've simply set them up and running with the requirement that they write about political themes, and I think the topical focus helps.

But I do know that some of my students keep perosnal blogs or create other blogs after they leave my class. The garage band comparison is pretty apt. When I first started on Blogger, that's about how I imagined my blog. Now, between Moveable Type and Blogger, I have about 3-4 active blogs at any one time.

I would like to say some words on your blog. I'm left with a feeling that you put students in opposition to the rest of the world. I mean why should one differentiate if it's a student or not while telling about usefulness of being a blog writer? I agree that I might have got something wrong here.