Educational Blogging:
A Forum for Developing Disciplinary and Professional Identity

Geoffrey C. Middlebrook
University of Southern California

Community, Costs, and Benefits in the Blogosphere

Diane Penrod (2007) reminds us of the challenges that face classroom blogging, which include the provision of adequate training for teachers, the assessment of students' blogs, the creation of meaningful assignments, and the handling of potential information overload for students and faculty alike (pp. 154-160). Taking these and other challenges into account, I acknowledge that the goal of nurturing students' disciplinary and professional personae via blogging is inevitably met incompletely. Pertaining to the role that the internet plays in the construction of contemporary identities, Charles Ess (2005) argues that computer-mediated communication has caused neither a McLuhanesque "electronic global village" (p. 162), nor "its complete absence in the celebrated postmodern fragmentation and decentering" (p. 166). Rather the outcome is an agglomeration of what Ess refers to as "partial publics," a concept derived from Jurgen Habermas' notion of Teilöffentlichkeiten (p. 163); included among these partial publics, according to Ess (2005), are scholarly and professional bodies, many of which conduct their web-based interlocutions through blogs. Yet Susan Herring and her co-authors (2005) question the interlocking dynamism of the blogosphere, for their research indicates that while there is an "A-list" of blogs to whom many link, refer to, and comment on, "a majority of blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs […], suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected and sporadically conversational" (p. 1), with most blogs a kind of "long tail."

Herring et al.'s (2005) findings notwithstanding, I maintain that educational blogging can produce at the very least an incipient sense of self in the discourses of one's field. Alexander Halavais (2006) is, I believe, accurate when he says that even "bloggers [who] might be classified as 'mumblers'-without obvious comments or readers [….] are seeking a way of conversing with the world" (p. 118), and of enjoying the "intrinsic reputational rewards" that one may reap from blogging (p. 123). For reasons that I hope are clear from evidence in the previous section, my students frequently use their blogs for applications to graduate and professional schools, jobs, internships, and study-abroad programs; one even earned first prize at a USC undergraduate competition in the category of professional writing. This real-world relevance can be seen in a video interview conducted by the university with one of my prior students, viewable in a pair of clips here and here, which is bolstered in email messages from two former students. One stated "I […] had been looking for […] interim employment while I work on my med school apps. I was offered a job […] to promote medical education in Africa […] and my boss to-be specifically mentioned my blog when talking about my strengths and how I will be able to contribute to her project. She said it was an impressive achievement, and she was glad to have someone on board with those […] skills." Another announced "my current boss […] promoted me largely due to the blog that I […] created in your class, which is now featured as my writing sample on LinkedIn."

These representative anecdotes enable me to concur with Jenkins (2007), who found that many of his students "were making valuable professional contacts; some had developed real visibility […]; and a few received high-level job offers based on the professional connections they made on their blogs" (p. B9). A caution, nonetheless, must be sounded. In my approach students are granted much agency, but with it comes a corresponding responsibility to generate work that does not erode their status or their aspirations; students must as a consequence remain aware that there are some in academe and the professional world who view blogs skeptically. The primary objections center on a point that is captured by Daniel Drezner (2006), who notes that "[a]ny substandard publication creates a black mark that is difficult to erase" (p. B7). While I recognize the consequences of careless posts, such risks do not represent, in my estimation, a sufficient argument against the use of blogs for educative purposes. To reinforce this point, the University of Southern California has recently launched a campus-branded blog, built with Movable Type, for its students.