“Exploring the Benefits of Blog Use in First-Year Composition: A Pilot Study”

by Jennifer Hewerdine | Xchanges 12.2/13.1

Introduction

Although some students may not have access to or experience with writing in digital environments, most of the current generation of students chooses to spend liberal amounts of time in online environments, indicating that they engage with the content, the platform, the versatility, the social dynamics, or some combination of features found in digital environments (see Garikapati et al., 2016). In “The Outcome Effort Gap,” Thomas Greene, Nathan Mari, and Kay McClenney (2008) define educational engagement as “the effort, both in time and energy, students commit to educationally purposeful activities” (p. 514). Engagement implies a sinking-in to an activity or an intense focus on a topic. In a definition offering a complementary view to Greene, Mari, and McClenney’s, Roz Ivanic (2009) suggests that engagement occurs when an individual opts to participate in an activity by choice, perhaps going beyond the minimum requirements of an assignment or activity (p. 107). Both definitions imply that students become mentally stimulated by and desire to participate in activities they find engaging and worth the time it takes to participate.

Technology seems to enhance interest in activities for the current generation of students who may already find technology stimulating and part of everyday life (see Garikapati et al., 2016). In her research on student media practices, Deborah Brandt (2009) found that writing in digital environments is surpassing reading in digital environments; people are writing more than they are reading, a change from past reading-based literacy practices (66). Most of today’s college students “use [digital resources] as an extension of their brains […] this generation is accustomed to instantaneous hypertext, downloaded music, communication via cell phone and text messaging, and information from laptops,” according to Alison Black (2010), professor of education at SUNY-Oneonta (p. 95). Students’ literacy practices already include vast amounts of communication in a variety of formats, genres, and audience situations. Qualities of students’ extracurricular writing include:

1. purposeful to the student
2. oriented to a clear audience
3. shared, i.e. interactive, participatory and collaborative
4. learned through participation
5. in tune with students’ values and identities
6. agentic, i.e. with the students having control
7. non-linear, i.e. with varied reading paths
8. specific to times and places
9. multimodal, i.e. combining symbols, pictures, colour, music
10. multimedia, i.e. combining paper and electronic media (Ivanic, p. 107)

Despite these traits being present in students’ extracurricular writing, students do not always have the opportunity to engage in this kind of writing within composition classrooms. Blogging is one potential way to incorporate many of these traits into the composition classroom, allowing students the opportunity to engage with writing in ways more similar to their extracurricular literacy practices. In this article, I report on a small pilot study in which I integrated blogging into two first-year composition (FYC) courses and observed how students used and engaged with their blogs throughout the semester.