Educational Blogging:
A Forum for Developing Disciplinary and Professional Identity
Geoffrey C. Middlebrook
University of Southern California
Educational Blogging as a Professionalizing Experience
In this exemplification section I employ a host of evidentiary support in the form of static screen shots, dynamic screen recordings, my experiences and observations, and the remarks of other scholars to argue that if used purposively, blogs function nicely as a forum for the development of students' disciplinary and professional identity. As a preamble, however, I wish to say a word about interface. James Farmer (2006) notes that, "blogs become an important indication of digital identity," in part because "[a]uthors are not simply able to represent themselves through the content of their postings but also present much about themselves through aesthetic design, choice of media" (p. 98), and more. My students have utilized Blogger, which as most know allows for a modicum of control over the template, and I thus require them to be mindful of the options they select, guided by the intention to make the blogs a manifestation of their higher-register selves. That this matters has been shown in studies, reported by Barbara Warnick (2004), which divulge that visitors to a site make determinations of credibility based on a number of variables beyond an "author's identity, motives, expertise, and associations" (p. 257), and those visitors "are more influenced by […] professionalism of design, usability, […] and other factors that operate as signs of trustworthiness" (p. 262).
Blog title and subtitle
The animating premise of the evidence to follow is Kathleen Blake Yancey's (2004) assertion that the "relationship between identity [and student work] is reciprocal" (p. 757). With that in mind a logical point of departure is blog titles and subtitles, where students are encouraged to name their sites in a clear, concise, and creative way. Here, for instance, is a major in health promotion and disease prevention who is now in medical school, and whose blog explored how health care policies, social issues, and the mass media affect medical treatment.
Sidebar profile
Beyond naming protocols, I ask students to craft a crisp sidebar profile that indicates their academic program(s) at the University of Southern California, their career trajectory, and their goals with the blog, witnessed in a music industry major who, as his brief biography reveals is already active in the field. It is worth noting that when I first began to implement educational blogging these profiles used initials rather than names, and thereby resulted in blogospheric anonymity (within the course itself students were fully aware of one another's identities). Anonymity is an occasional and sometimes spirited topic of discussion among bloggers, with the vast majority apparently opposed to "ghost blogging" under most circumstances and for many understandable reasons, among them being the tension that was recognized by the Supreme Court of Delaware in a case involving blogs (Doe v. Cahill, 2005).
The Court's decision affirmed the right of anonymous free speech, but in doing so pointed out a discord between anonymity and credibility. That is, in civil society one way to increase the latter is to reduce the former. Against this backdrop my claim to elevate the disciplinary and professional stature of students through the vehicle of educational blogging was seemingly undermined. Students no longer withhold their names, but when they did my rationale was the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Though FERPA's implications are not entirely understood, I nevertheless felt compelled at the time to align strictly with Shirley Waterhouse and Rodney Rogers (2004) on the need for privacy and confidentiality policies in e-learning. My concern for boundaries remains, however, in that each student adopts a Creative Commons license that permits non-commercial and non-derivative sharing of his or her blog with attribution. While the Creative Commons movement is not without critics, the employment of one of its licenses by students not only delivers a safeguard on their content but also a suggestion of their legitimacy. Phrased in another way, the placement of a Creative Commons logo on an undergraduate's blog offers a teachable moment about how to operate responsibly, as an author and by extension as a user of online content, in the increasingly contested space between full copyright and public domain, and the logo indicates those students are at least cognizant of the need to be responsible performers in a zone of contestation.
Labels
Departing from the profile but staying with the sidebar, are three other page elements: labels, news aggregator, and linkroll. The first of these, labels, is a way for students to make use of metadata and categorize their posts with two or three descriptive tags so that readers can find an entry on a theme, or entries with a shared theme. As Farmer (2006) states, "blogs offer significant opportunities for users to project themselves as 'real' people" who "are primarily writing in their own area and context, designed to their liking […], and expanding from their previous postings the online persona they have developed" (p. 96). This can be observed in an international relations major with a minor in human rights who examined how young people around the world are deploying different forms of technology and media to address the issues that they face locally, nationally, and globally. Internal or blog-specific tags do at present have limitations, primarily because they are not codified to allow for cross-blog nomenclature, yet they make possible a granulated way of configuring content that is potentially useful for searchers. Furthermore, and from a writerly perspective, labeling one's posts is a constructive exercise in synopsizing and reflection.
News aggregator
Regarding the aggregator and linkroll, these are meant to make the students' blogs not just a repository of their efforts, but also a resource for others. In the first of these, students add a widget that draws fresh news of salience to their fields, which can be seen through an architecture major whose blog was devoted to the design and development of "green" projects. The pull technology of a feed reader is a mechanism for making a blog beneficial to readers beyond the posts themselves; it is in addition a means of complementing the students' proactive quest for lively topics on which to post.
Linkroll
Concerning the linkroll, students are required to search intensively and extensively so as to discover sites and blogs of the utmost quality and relevance in their focal area, one example being an art history major who addressed the current arts climate, ranging from politics to the market to the affordances of web 2.0. As is apparent, a robust linkroll brings important resources to the attention of a blog's readers, and at the same time expresses connections between an undergraduate blogger and web-based entities of merit, which is significant because if one aim is forging at least a formative scholarly and professional identity, familiarity with the players in a given realm is obviously essential.
At this juncture I transition from blog components to blog entries, and from screen shots to screen recordings. To situate this shift it would help to unpack the aforementioned course structure. Simply put students publish weekly and the posts fall into two clusters that require inquiry, interpretation, and evaluation: one where they make arguments on current and consequential phenomena in their fields, with reference to and use of multiple online sources; the other in which they locate and leave comments on recent posts at external blogs, preferably prominent, in their domain of inquiry (in both clusters, students offer substantive commentary and constructive critique on one another's entries). The curriculum thus established I turn to an instance from the first genre, a computer science and video game design major's thoughtful discussion on the artistic legitimacy of those games. As the screen recording reveals, the entry resides under a title and subtitle that command attention and communicate the thrust with brevity, clarity, and panache. With regard to the entry, it is driven by a succinct and plausible thesis; rhetorically animated by qualifiers, concessions, and refutations; supported by quotes, details, examples, and data extracted from high quality resources to which it links; and reinforced by well-chosen and nicely positioned graphics that route to their source pages.
Whereas the exemplar above entails initiating an argument, insofar as the second genre is concerned the task is to respond externally to the positions of others. With this in mind, the exchange that a student who works as a DJ for the USC campus radio station and who strives for a career in the radio industry, had with a Canadian musician at her site concerning the future of the single, is impressive. Here the screen recording displays a lively post title and subtitle, beneath which is a brief contextualizing entry at the student's site whose function is to set up the subject, alert readers to his comments at the external blog post, identify as well as state the credentials and affiliations of the other blogger, and link to the outside post and comment (with the latter crafted to be expansive, substantive, inquisitive, and respectful). The student's interlocution with this blogger, comprised of his musings on her entry, her reaction, and then his reply (all this located at her site), nicely demonstrates Johndan Johnson-Eilola's (2004) point about effective blogs and simultaneously illustrates the potential of educational blogging as a professionalizing occasion: "They exist [in…] complex rhetorical situations [….] They make concrete intertextual connections and analyses. They provide interaction among multiple authors in a community" (p. 214), and they "require authors to read other texts, to analyze those texts, and to respond to those texts in writing" (p. 215).