Blogging Pedagogy

This is the first semester that I've used a public blogging forum for my class. In the past, I've used Drupal's blogging feature for "Listening Journals," but, because the students were hesitant to show their work to others, I never got (1) the quality of work that I'm getting now or (2) the kind of accountability that a public forum creates. Nevertheless, blogging as a composition practice remains a bit experimental for me. Though I don't have the expertise or pedagogical-philosophical background that Jenna has, I wanted to respond to her call for some

brainstroming about the pedagogical potential of blogging on learning

The avowed object of my "Blog Discussions" assignment is to create short, informal writing that gets students to close-read literature and literary criticism. The students accomplished this beautifully in their first posts in which they selected a line from an Américo Paredes poem that captured "the" meaning of the poem, which, of course, they also had to articulate.

As you can see, the students did a marvelous job of responding both to each other and to the prompt itself. Their close-reading skills surpassed what I had imagined they would be for this initial post. However, my own lack of experience with the blog medium prevented them from composing multimedia posts; instead they just  "commented" on my original post. We thus spent an entire day in class setting up accounts and playing with the blog, incorporating images, videos, audio, etc. The next posts were then absolutely fantastic. They were to look up the word "mestiza" in the Oxford English Dictionary and to comment on how Gloria Anzaldúa revises that more biological definition. As you can see here, they flexed their multimodal compositional muscle by incorporating provocative and appropriate images to accompany their posts:

After the initial experimental stage, then, the students demonstrated their abilities to facilitate several compositional modes at once; indeed, they demonstrated that their own compositional preferences may be to include accompanying material. In light of my own interest in multimodal paratexts, I find their level of comfort with this compositional practice fascinating.

However, what I'm still unsure about is whether these shorter writing assigments will aid in their abilities to compose a longer paper. Will they continue to rely on external images, videos and songs because they've become comfortable with a multimodal writing practice? Will I need to revise my paper assignment to account for their "training" in blogging composition? These are questions that remain to be answered, at least for my own class.