I just read Charles Tryon’s “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition,” and I was amazed with how public his course became right away. His first assignment to students was to post a blog post analyzing the rhetoric of another blog. When those blog owners realized this was happening (by checking their referent lists), they begin to interact! One blogger, Rachel Lucas,responded by writing, “How do I make my arguments? Why, by calling people ‘asshats,’ of course. Actually, I have no idea how I make my arguments except that I try to stick to the facts and I always admit when I’m wrong, which fosters credibility in alll future arguments, I think” (129). Tryon seems to have gotten his students very engaged in conversation about current topics, and I like that “many of the course’s topics were students generated” (131).
Sara Jameson and I have been talking quite a bit recently about what makes a blog successful in a course, and I think Tryon’s was successful for one of the reason’s we’ve discussed: the content of the course revolved around it. Tyron’s classes seem to revolve around blogs and blog rhetoric. In English 595 last fall, we focused on language, technology, and culture, which is why that class blog seemed more successful than our one in Writing 512 (current compositional theory). I’d love to teach Writing 121 again, through the reader out the window, and just talk about blogs – well, and write a few papers.
Tryon, Charles. “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Culture, and Composition 6.1 (Winter 2006): 128-132.
