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SSAW2 panel and paper...

blogging

My panel and Yuri's and my paper were both accepted to the Social Software in the Academy (SSAW) workshop to be held on May 14-15, 2005 at the Annenberg Center at USC. I've inlcuded the text of the panel proposal and our paper's abstract below.

It will be nice to talk about the role blogging plays in academic communities as well as pedagogy. The panel should be especially interesting as the line up includes: Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona College; Media Studies Program), Alex Halavais (University at Buffalo; School of Informatics), Charles Tryon (Georgia Institute of Technology; School of Literature, Communication, and Culture), Richard Smith (Simon Fraser University; School of Communication) and myself as moderator.

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(submitted by Joseph Lorenzo Hall)

Blogging in the Classroom: Successes, Failures and New Frontiers

Whereas classroom uses of mailing lists and class websites have matured, educational uses of blogging and other social software are arguably in their early adolescence. Educators have found that using blogs in the classroom to promote discourse, inclusion and dialogue with the outside world can be very rewarding. However successful and effective classroom blogs take more effort than merely applying the technical knowledge to configure them; they require serious integration into the student social dynamic, class syllabus, lesson plan and evaluation criteria.

This panel discussion brings together educators who have experience using blogs in the classroom in a variety of manners. Panelists will discuss the following topics:

  • Experience with blogging in the classroom. What are past successes and failures with using blogs in the classroom? How have uses of blogs in their classrooms evolved over time? What other types of social software complement specific roles of classroom blogs? What regrets or second-thoughts have cropped up in the use of blogs in the classroom and what mid-course corrections have proved effective? How can educators integrate blogs into teaching in ways that enhance faculty engagement with students without drowning both faculty and students in additional work?

  • Blogging as replacing aspects of traditional classroom dynamics. What traditional classroom dynamics and artifacts are easily replaced or better facilitated by using a classroom blog? What are the trade-offs with using a community blog versus individual student or group blogs? What blogging models work well in general and in specific academic environments? How do educators evaluate work students produce with class blogs?

  • Classroom blogging as facilitating ancillary learning. What types of ancillary learning take place in classes that blog versus classes that do not? How does this learning break down in terms of being technical, social and/or substantive? How much is the decision to use blogs in a class influenced by ancillary learning?

  • Blogging as promoting new pedagogical directions. How do classroom blogs promote pedagogy that is not bounded by the classroom walls and time constraints? How does the public nature of blogging influence student writing and learning? How can blogs facilitate transcendence of the traditional divide between academic theory and practice in the classroom context?

  • The future of blogging in the classroom. What are strategies that might further increase the effectiveness or creativity of the role of the blog in the classroom? What are resources and advice for professors that may wish to incorporate classroom blogging in their pedagogical repertoire? Where is further research needed to understand some of the more mysterious aspects of classroom blogging?

Confirmed Panelists:

  • Nicole Ellison (Michigan State University; Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media)

  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona College; Media Studies Program)

  • Barbara Ganley (Middlebury College; Writing Program and English)

  • Moderator: Joseph Lorenzo Hall (University of California; School of Information Management and Systems)

Previously Confirmed Panelists Who Could Not Attend

  • Alex Halavais (University at Buffalo; School of Informatics)

  • Liz Lawley (Rochester Institute of Technology; Information Technology Department)

  • Richard Smith (Simon Fraser University; School of Communication)

  • Charles Tryon (Georgia Institute of Technology; School of Literature, Communication, and Culture)

Blogging Together: Digital Expresion in a Real-Life Academic Community

(submitted by Yuri Takhteyev. This is an older version of the abstract, I'll post the actual version when I get it.)

Yuri Takhteyev and Joseph Hall

Our paper presents the results of a qualitative study of blogging in a real-life academic community in which we aimed to understand the process by which an individual becomes involved in this practice. We conducted open-ended interviews with members of a university research center, discussing their experiences and habits reading blogs or maintaining their own. Our sample contained seasoned bloggers, recent ones, active blog readers who didn't blog themselves, "drop-outs," one subject who was contemplating starting to blog, as well as members of the community who neither maintained nor read blogs. Our findings highlight the connections between online and offline interactions, showing how involvement in blogging is dependent on having friends who are actively involved, and we discuss the mechanisms underlying this connection.

The purpose of our study was to understand the social factors that might make a difference between becoming an active blogger versus trying it once and giving up. This question was to a large extent inspired by the work of Howard Becker, who approached marijuana use1 with the premise that "the motivation and the disposition to engage in the activity is built up in the course of learning to engage in it and does not antedate this learning process," due to the fact that the novice needs to acquire "a conception of the meaning of the behavior, and perceptions and judgments of objects and situations, all of which make the activity possible and desirable." In other words, the issue of motivation cannot be separated from the issue of learning. In anticipation of what was later theorized as "communities of practice" by Lave and Wenger, Becker further shows that acquisition of the necessary skills is a social process.

Those theoretical perspectives led us to hypothesize that blogging can be similarly understood as a social practice ­ social not just in the sense that it supports social interactions, but also in the sense that one becomes an active blogger by being embedded in a community of other bloggers, with reading of blogs perhaps serving as an early form of peripheral participation in the practice.

Our results supported most of our hypotheses. We were surprised, however, by the degree to which real-life personal ties mattered. The real interactions appeared to be quite important in sustaining the digital ones, for both the readers and the bloggers. The readers reported going back to friends' blogs as a result of real-life conversations. Bloggers talked about the role of friends in getting them started and in supplying ideas for their blogs. We thus see a dimension of sociality that is different from communication. Apart from being a means of communicating between friends, blogging can be seen as a creative activity practiced together with friends. In other words, we suggest that blogging is social not only in the same way as email or mailing lists, but also in the same way as quilting groups or club sports.

While our interviews focused on the aspects of blogging that are not specific to an academic community (e.g. community, privacy, cross-over between digital and face-to-face interactions), it also gave us an opportunity to address questions of knowledge production. In particular, in our paper we will discuss the combination of the more academic topics and those of more personal of humourous nature within individuals' blogs, the interactions between blogs and professional identity, and ...