Blog Community Analysis

Distance Learning Writing courses, Blogs and Community:

A community could be defined, and is defined here, as a group of people who feel an affinity toward each other and share a purpose. It also happens to be a hot button topic in discussions about distance education. Distance instructors are often encouraged to “build community” amongst their students in order to enhance learning and retention. The question is: how do we “build” it? Additionally, how do we know when it’s been done successfully?

Blogs have been touted as one way to build that community in a distance education setting because of the interactivity they enable (Deng & Yeun; Wei; Ellis; Tyron). Students can post their thoughts/ideas and their classmates or group members can respond. The nature of the blog also allows for the student writer to continue the dialogue with his/her classmates. This dialogic ability makes the blog especially conducive to building community in a writing classroom (DePew, et al). For example, peer review can be done on a blog and can create a community in the process (Breuch).

Blog Project for 7/895: Community Created?

Overall, I feel that community was “built” in this class because of the community already established by the program as well as the common purpose of having to complete this analysis. However, the blog was a small piece of a large puzzle in this “building.” (This will be addressed in the next section). While the assignment did not require us to respond to each other, we, as grad students, don’t typically need the extra prompting to read work done by our fellow classmates, nor do we need to be prompted to give responses that are more in depth than “great job.”  The comments made by classmates did things like thank the writer for the review because it was legitimately useful to the commenter (i.e. Angela’s comment to Mark’s 4^th post), complement each other on particularly well reviewed articles (i.e. Sarah’s comment to George’s 5^th post), and ask questions to probe the topic further (i.e. Mark’s comment to Cheri’s 3^rd post). These types of comments let the reader know that there is a real audience (outside of the teacher), and seemed to have led to completing the initial blog posts for the rest of the class.

Community may have formed out of this desire to help our classmates, which may be a direct result of the program we come from (as mentioned below) as well as our level of schooling and other activities in the class. I hadn’t thought of this until Megan McKittrick specifically mentioned in our group work on Wednesday June 13, 2012 that she had made a point to make a comment to every single person so that when we went to write this assignment, we had something to work with.

The students in our class also come from a program that is not only built on a fairly strong community, but is welcoming of new additions to the group. This may have helped to foster that desire to help our classmates from the get go. The class is also small enough to be a reasonable group size and we were able to work together for the majority of the semester, which is important to fostering a community (Breuch, 148). 

Additionally, some research suggests, based on student responses to a survey about community, that reading each others blogs is enough to foster community (Deng & Yuen). This is something I found to be true in our own class blogs. While I didn’t respond to each classmate blog that I read, I did read them all and so was able to get a clear idea of the projects that my classmates were working on. I was interested in reading what my classmates had researched despite not being required to do so for a grade.

The class was also able to learn from each other by reading the blog posts. For example, on Angela’s third blog post, she responded to Megan’s Soundcloud audio comment with Soundcloud (something that Angela appeared to be unfamiliar with before class based on her own comment on my third blog post). Despite this apparent dialogue, it isn’t certain that dialogue played a large role in community building.

The majority of the dialogue that occurred typically stopped after the blog writer commented on a classmate response. For example, I received a question on my first blog post from Patricia, to which I responded, but did not receive further comments. Additionally, I did the same to my classmates-didn’t continue the dialogue. However, this may be the fault of the blog. For example, I wasn’t notified when Patricia responded to my comment on her third blog. There were also instances were the blog writer did not respond to the comments made by classmates (for example, Nancy’s posts and all of Mark’s posts but the first one). It begs the question: would the community be stronger if these things were done? Which in turn leads to the question: would it have been more feasible if we were put into smaller groups (of say three) to respond to? Putting us into smaller groups may have resulted in more active discussion because the blog posts were difficult to keep up with because of the length of the course.

As far as improving the community building of the assignment, it’s possible that posting our proposals before our blogs might have enabled us to give our classmates more constructive feedback and allowed us to treat it like a peer review, which can create community (Breuch).

Other 7/895 Community Opportunities:

In this class, we were also able to foster community in other aspects of the course. For example, the most used community builder was the chat feature in Webex. This feature enabled us to put our own personalities into the course discussion. This is something that may not have happened by raising our hands and un-muting our microphones (how many classes get to talk about leopard pants on more than one occasion?) 

Additionally, our play outside of Webex enabled us to work in smaller groups and take advantage of the affordances of those other technologies. For example, working in GoogleHangouts allowed for a smoother audio interaction (no muting needed), which enabled us to have a more realistic f2f conversation (hearing the laughter you see on the screen makes a big difference). Our work in GoogleDocs also aided in the creation of community. GoogleDocs allowed us to give up ownership of our own writing to our classmates in order to create a single product to present to the class,

This is something that Rik Hunter found to be central to a specific voluntary writing community in an analysis of WoWWiki. He says that “…collaboration was more successful when individuals focused more on the welfare of the group or project over personal advantage” (54). This is something Sarah, Megan and I found to be true in our pedagogical tool review group as well.

Application Outside of Class:

In an FYC course, however,  the desire to read and respond to classmate’s blogs may be non-existant. "Requiring" classmate responses may lead to community building in order for the class to build a rapport for each other. It’s possible that if we required it at first and then made it option for the rest of the semester the community would remain. Additionally, establishing a common purpose for the blog would aide in the development of a community for the FYC distance course. However, the blog should not be the only form of communication for distance writing students as establishing a community takes more than just responding to a couple of posts.

Works Cited

Breuch, Lee-Ann Kastman. “Enhancing Online Collaborration: Virtual Peer Review in the Writing Classroom.” Online Education. Ed. Kelli Cargile Cook & Keith Grant-Davis. Amityvlle, NY: Baywood Publishing Co., 2005. 141-156. Print.

DePew, Kevin Eric, T.A. Fishman, Julia E. Romberger and Bridget Fahey Reutenik. “Designing efficiencies: The parallel narratives of distance education and composition studies.” Computers and Composition. 23.1 (2006): 49-67.

Deng, Liping & Allan H.K. Yuen. “Towards a framework for educational affordances of blogs.” Computers & Education. 56 (2011): 441-451. Web. 6 June 2012.

Ellis, Josephine. “Student writing blogs: Apprehension, ambivalence or appreciation?” Communication Journal of New Zealand. 11.2 (2010): 7-29. Web. 19 May 2012.

Hunter, Rik. “Erasing ‘Property Lines’: A Collaborative Notion of Authorship and Textual Ownershp on a Fan Wiki.” Computers and Composition. 28 (2011): 40-56.

Tyron, Charles. “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition.” Pedagogy.  6.2 (2006): 128-132. Web. 19 May 2012.

Wei, Zhang. "Blogging for Doing English Digital: Student Evaluations." Computers and Composition. 27.4 (2010): 266-283. Web. 19 May 2012.