when blogs go down in the classroom

I just came across this post on Konrad Glogowski’s Blog of Proximal Development, in which he discusses how the blogware (blogging software) for the composition course he teaches crashed, and how he had to replace it. A few excerpts…

On students writing in MS Word instead of the blog:

“You know that assignment last night that we did on Word?“
“Yes. Did you do it?“
“I did, but writing it felt strange.“
“How so?“
“It was like – like talking to someone who was not listening.“

After he set up a new server and blogware:

The new space, I realized, was not really a blog or a community. It was an empty space and almost all of them were overcome by a need to populate their new blogs. They have been working very hard since but many also insisted on transferring their old entries to the new blogs. Their blogging identity, it seems to me, is so inextricably linked to their writing that abandoning their old work seemed somehow wrong. Many were very disappointed that the comments they received cannot be automatically moved with the posts.

Isn’t this fascinating? These students’ identities were tied up in blogging, which compares to Gee’s book. And the way that writing on Word felt like “talking to someone who was not listening”!

EDIT: I had accidentally linked to a band website instead of to Glogowski’s. I guess I need to proofread my html a bit better, huh? It’s fixed now.