Prompted Responses from CI5472

How you do might use a blog in your everyday lives and/or teaching (if you teach).

As you can see from the handful of posts from years past, blogging is something that has intrigued me in the same way that journaling is intriguing. Of course, personal journal entries aren't mediated by a publicly viewable audience, so they exist in a different way, but when I journal there is a real extent to which I am engaging in a conversation with myself. Blogging just opens up that conversation to the possiblity of having it be joined by a random assortment of other folks. I have always enjoyed writing, both analytically and creatively (which assumes a difference that in and of itself might be an interesting discussion), but have always lacked the discipline necessary to sustain my writing in a way that creates something of substance. I could see using a blog as a way to create an external accountability that might help create the discipline to write more consistently...or maybe not. :)

What are some of the ways in which you have or will use these tools as a student and/or teacher?

In my work both in the English classroom and more recently as a staff development coordinator I have utilized electronic media as a mechanism for communicating all kinds of different elements of collaborative work. What I am intrigued by now is the extent to which these communications have become more explicitly social. We communicate for the sole purpose of communicating much more electronically than in the past. We do not need to have a purpose. The thing itself is the purpose.

How do they enhance or hinder your communication with others?

I think they enhance. I hear a lot of criticism that abbreviated communications or distance communications are somehow less rich or meaningful, or that they inhibit live interactions. That seems unlikely to me and to source mostly from generational gaps in familiarity. My daughters ability to have 14,000 texts in a month do not dampen her desire to go to the park and hang out with her friends. My desire to post information through a district ning for new staff does not reduce my desire to stop by their classrooms or meet them on Friday for happy hour. I am unconvinced that we are sterilizing our relationships.

What are some things that you want to learn to do with digital writing in this course in terms of your own writing and/or teaching of writing?

I love the idea of becoming more deft with a whole range of tools. I see these as tools that integrate in many unexpected ways to the already established process of curricular development in which I participate in many different settings.