Initial Outline
Why Blog?: Writers and Their Networks
As writing instructors, we encourage our students to engage in practices that many bloggers exhibit: intertextuality, acknowledgement of and attention to a diverse and sometimes unknown audience, consistency of style and development of an individual voice, and above all, a commitment to writing as both a method of expression but also as discussion. What are bloggers’ motivations and purposes in blogging? How does the networked component of the blog affect bloggers’ approaches to composition? How might we harness these sorts of energies and devotions and put them to use in the classroom—both with and without the use of blogs as a teaching tool? By examining a limited pool of blogs and through interviews, I hope to answer, partially, the above questions.
What do I need to get this done?
1. Figure out which b logs I’ll use for the study. Who will comprise the subject pool? Whose blogs will I read—and which bloggers will I interview? [should they be the same?] What justifications/specifications (what characteristics should each blog/blogger have and why?) will determine how I choose?
2. Develop interview questions. What kind of questions will I be asking during the interviews? Will I conduct the interviews electronically, or will I attempt to meet people or speak to them over the phone? What methodology will help me to situate my questions and focus them so that the bloggers will talk about the networks in which they participate but not anticipate their answers, or answer the questions for them? Who/what field can I read so that I can have insight about putting these questions together? [Maybe Alison can help here.]
3. Develop a method for textual analysis and coding. How will I go about using the blogs themselves to answer my questions? Will the blogs themselves only work as textual examples of rhetorical moves that I argue exist, or will I look to the blogs to help me think about why bloggers are compelled to write? That is, can I look at the product to hypothesize the purpose and the impetus? This seems problematic, especially since a writer often begins with an impulse and ultimately finds herself having composed something altogether removed from her initial purpose.
4. Develop a working/preliminary theory about networked writing. What does it look like? How is it different from writing that doesn’t exist within an immediately material (or immediately obvious) network (like writing in/for class)? How much does the networked aspect of writing depend on the affordances of social software—does it simply make visible the inherent sociality of writing? Does it Assemble a bibliography for a review of literature for network studies.
5. Assemble a bibliography of work that has attempted to answer similar questions. What have scholars and bloggers already found concerning the “will to blog?” What are their methods of analysis? What conclusions do they offer with regard to blogging as a writing tool and as a network tool? How do they take up issues of personal/public writing?
6. Develop a working/preliminary theory about how current writing pedagogy takes up personal writing in the classroom. Writer-based writing vs reader-based writing, contact-zone, safe spaces, writing as a social act [draw here on essay from Louise’s 611 and the Ethics of personal discourse in the classroom]. Assemble bibliography on personal pedagogy.
7. Plan to organize the chapters of the study based on the above tasks. Possible Chapter chunks:
1. Purpose for the study (new technology + writing classroom = new ways of thinking about writing and teaching)
2. Review of relevant existing scholarship
a. section on blogs as writing tools
b. section on network studies vis a vis writing/composition
c. section on personal writing pedagogy
3. Methodology (what am I doing? How am I doing it?)
4. Analysis of data (What did I find?)
5. Possible conclusions; synthesis of data (what does what I found mean?)