Nick Carbone

Teaching Writing in an Online World

http://http://ncarbone.blogspot.com

This blog also appears as: http://bedfordstmartins.com/technotes/

According to the link trail at Tech Notes, Carbone is the New Media Consultant at bedford stmartins.

Teaching Writing with Blogs

Friday, June 13, 2003

http://ncarbone.blogspot.com/2003_06_08_twowarchive.html#105552797827827229

He refers to questions Clancy Ratliff posted on Kairosnews and the subsequent exchange between her and Mike of vitia.org

QUOTE

I find this exchange between Clancy and Mike illuminating and iconic. Substitute any new writing genre for blog — WWW site, Flash presentation, PowerPoint, Web discussion board, e-mail — and you get at the core questions we all face as we begin to incorporate the growing varieties of online writing into our courses.

For me, the questions are:

1. What role will this new writing play in my larger course goals and purposes? Will it be the point of the course, or will it support some other learning and/or writing goal?

2. In what ways can these new technologies and forms of writing help my students become better writers overall?

3. In what ways can these new technologies and forms of writing help students discover and think through the ideas they’re asked to explore?

4. To what extent should students be judged on the traditional measures of writing quality (Audience, Purpose, Argument, Clarity, Coherence, Usage, Style, Punctuation, and so on) within the conventions these new technologies create?

UNQUOTE

When Carbone says, “Substitute any new writing genre for blog…and you get at the core questions we all face as we begin to incorporate the growing varieties of online writing into our courses,” does it fully account for what feels IMHO like a huge popularity of blogs among college-age students. [Need to do more research to find out just exactly how popular blogs are with college students as that would go further than my gut instincts.]

Carbone has good guiding questions. Need to think about addressing these in my paper.