Tomorrow (Thursday) will be Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S. — a time for turkey feasts and family gatherings. I’ll probably blog a bit when I get the chance, but I’m also preparing syllabi for next semester.
I’ll be teaching the second half of “Seminar in Thinking in Writing,” a course in “Media Aesthetics” (the focus will be on new media, naturally), “Introduction to Literary Studies” (a Whitman’s Sampler for the creative writing, literature, and new media journalism majors), and American lit from 1915 to the present. I’ll also continue my supervision of the student paper.
As long as I’m downloading current events, I just heard that my proposal for a conference presentation on students’ emotional investment in their academic weblogs has been accepted at the CCCC computer connection, so I’ll be in San Antonio for a weekend in March. Yippie tye ye yay!
Good questions. I’d start off by hypothesizing that students who blog (typically) get feedback from the real world; they are forced to consider an audience beyond the professor. I wonder if that is always the case, though — the NMJ website was fortunate enough to get some publicity from the edublogging community, which means that Google may have found its way to student sites more quickly than usual — though of course I have no baseline for comparison.
And because a good chunk of my students were only blogging because part of their grade depended upon it, their emotional investment would be more complex than, say, Joe Blogger who doesn’t have a professor giving him in-class blogging time or friendly nagging reminders.
Happy Thanksgiving! Congrats on that paper acceptance, too…a sort of holiday gift! Your ability to blog fulltime, teach all those courses and even write conference papers is astounding. Great paper topic; I’m also fascinated by the psychology of blogging. Two issues jump immediately to mind: 1) how is a blog different than an academic “journal” in, say, a writing course? and, 2) how is a student’s emotional investment any different than anyone else’s emotional investment?