Brooks, Kevin, Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe. “Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs” Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. June 2004. 6 Nov. 2005 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/remediation_genre.html.
Their research question: “which weblog genre(s) (if any) engage or motivate students to make significant contributions to their personal or class weblog?“
On remediation: “The web is remediating all media that has come before it (print, music, film, television, radio, paintings, email, etc.); therefore in our teaching we wanted to emphasize for our students that weblogging is not a radically new way of writing, but a repurposing of familiar (we hoped) print genres.”
I just put a link up for their teaching/research blog: The Comp Blog
For Remediation, it appears that of the three genres (among others) that the authors propose weblogs remediate (personal journal, academic notebook, and note cards), I think research blogs would fall under academic notebooks, because “Sometimes personal, sometimes focused on the outside world, notebooks are distinguished from blogs [journals] by their longer pieces of focused content” (quoting Rebecca Blood).
It seems that when the weblog was individual, students preferred to use it as a personal journal, and when it was a class weblog, students liked the use of it as an academic notebook.
Specific findings and claims:
Journal weblogging is likely to remediate a familiar print genre that has positive connotations, but the prevalence of this online genre will likely cause a certain amount of generic interference for instructors asking students to write notebook or filter weblogs.
Notebook weblogging is more likely to succeed as a genre within a collaborative weblog than when assigned as an individual weblog project. Notebook weblogs might take as their guidepost online discussion boards rather than print notebooks.
Filter weblogs have the potential to be an intellectually rich genre for students to work with, but their complexity is buried beneath a deceptively simple presentation of link(s) and analysis.
I got a lot of links on the sidebar from this article. It’s exciting (and once again, makes me want to incorporate weblogs into my teaching!)
