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Blogs as Collaborative Writing Tools Essay

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Blogs as Collaborative Writing Tools

Blogs are widely embraced as a tool that has revolutionized publishing on the web. It’s easy and it’s fun to keep a blog, two elements that are always attractive. I like blogs, but what I’m going to write about in this essay is a way in which I think blogs don’t work; or, at least, a way in which blogs didn’t work in my teaching in the way I tried to allow it to happen. Just to telegraph my points clearly: First, and I only want to touch on this point briefly, I learned that the logic extreme of the “student-centered classroom” doesn’t work that well, even with electronic tools that you would think would facilitate it and even in a class of advanced students who you would think would know …show more content…

This is the first time I’ve tried this assignment, so when I describe it as an “experimental” writing assignment, I mean it. We will have to see how it goes. All I ask is that you give this experiment a chance by staying involved with it, that you be willing to take some chances, and that you remain open-minded.”

I want to note two important things, at least in terms of how it all turned out for this class. First, this assignment doesn’t have any particular requirements in terms of the number of postings, the subject of the postings, or anything else. We set up the groups on the first day of class, more or less as a quick and somewhat hap-hazzard exercise. Second, this was the only element of the class that was even remotely along the lines of an “electronic discussion”—that is, while there was a class mailing list, one that figures prominently into my discussion here in a moment, there wasn’t a specific requirement or even expectation that students post messages on the mailing list.
(Here I gave a brief “show and tell” of the blog space and discussed how it turned out—poorly, I thought). Note also that most of these blog spaces weren’t really “dynamic” at all in that they didn’t involve exchange between posters and there wasn’t what I would call a conversation going on here. People made their posts and moved on. Now, I want to talk only briefly about my

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