“Exploring the Benefits of Blog Use in First-Year Composition: A Pilot Study”
by Jennifer Hewerdine | Xchanges 12.2/13.1
Blog Ownership
Ownership of text and space extends beyond agency. Students demonstrate agency in their texts, but they do not always display ownership of ideas and the writing space. In contrast to agency, which deals with students’ identity and personality traits, ownership deals more with students’ attitude toward their physical space or their property, including their writing. When students have their own blog, it is their password-protected space. Because users view blogs as a personal space, students position themselves as experts on their topics of choice, and though others can disagree, their comments are limited to the comment section.
In my study, James used his blog to respond to class comments about the death penalty, saying he disagreed not only with the death penalty but also the viewpoint about the death penalty with which I countered in class. He did not speak in class when the discussion took place. The post to his blog came three days after the class discussion, effectively carrying the conversation on over time and space. But more importantly, I had to enter his space, his blog, where he was the authority and I was the outsider.
Clark (2010) tells a story similar to James’s in that it portrays the student’s feelings of ownership over her blog space, words, and the ideas she chose to post to her blog. When writing a narrative for class, one of Clark’s students chose to write about her experience as an illegal immigrant living in the United States. Out of concern for the student’s wellbeing, Clark asked the student to remove her essay from the blog. The student refused. Over the course of several conversations the student continued to refuse to remove the essay until Clark told the student she would fail the course if the essay remained (p. 31). The student’s resistance, despite the possibility of legal ramifications, speaks to her feeling of ownership over the content and possibly the blog space, too.
It is the students’ sense of ownership of their blogs and the text within the blogs that seemed to be the key to the students’ mostly positive experiences using their blogs. The ability to self-determine the ends to which they used their blogs increased their autonomy. I graded formal assignments separate from the blog, allowing the blog to act as a catchall for unpolished student ideas. In interviews with writers about their past writing experiences, Brandt (2009) found “their accounts were rife with evidence of how a legacy of control, resistance, and surveillance” dominated their memories of writing, and that “rebellion motivated a lot of ordinary writing” (p. 67).