Project Reflection

One of the most challenging and liberating aspects of this project was my uncharacteristic abandonment of organization. You might still be able to argue the blog is organized—it is broken into manageable chunks that are thematic—but I didn’t write it in any order and I didn’t feel the need to work hard to connect all of the parts. I used the idea of technology, or new media, in the writing classroom as my overarching theme, or umbrella if you will, and then really worked from there. I didn’t write the individual posts in the order they are presented in the blog and in my conclusion post I didn’t refer to them in that order either. What I was trying to accomplish was a sense of intertextuality both within my blog and beyond. Much of what we read this semester challenged my ideas of “good writing,” and one of the things I hold most dear is organization. With this project, then, I didn’t want it to matter which order the reader read the posts. I figured if I wanted them to read something else I had written in order for something to make sense, I could just hyperlink to my own post. By doing this, I didn’t assume my reader would read in a particular order. As I said, this was challenging, but it was also enjoyable. I treated each blog post as an essay in and of itself, which is how I think they should be treated. In other words, each one needed to be self-contained. I felt compelled to get across a single point in each post that would cumulatively end up with a single idea for the whole blog.

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Admittedly, I may have taken on too much for this project. Everything that I talked about was interesting to me. I found that I had to force myself to stop reading my research and start writing. In fact, I still have folders of “unread” articles on my computer that I just didn’t have time to read. However, my topic is really broad. I could have easily produced the equivalent of 20 pages writing about the gap, the Common Core, or technology integration alone, but this format really forced me to narrow what I wanted and needed to say about each area. This turned out to be extremely challenging for me. As I was writing, I would find myself overwhelmed with how much research I had to talk about and not being able to figure out where to start or where to go next after I finished a paragraph. While being focused is good, I feel like I’ve barely touched the surface of all these much larger ideas. But, I’m still really interested in the topic. Talking about writing pedagogy is really fascinating to me and I found each thing I talked about to be relevant to me as a teacher. Since I do plan on returning to the secondary classroom, it is imperative that I’m aware of the Common Core and how I can integrate technology effectively into my instruction. Unless something really catches my interest in my classes next spring, I could easily see returning to some aspect of this project as a starting point for my professional paper.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed making my blog. I spent more time than I probably had playing with the gadgets and features. While this is not my first blog, having done others as a student and as a teacher, I was really focused on audience with this one. I wanted it to look and feel professional. In case somebody stumbled upon my blog, I wanted to come across as a credible professional in the field with something worthwhile to say. So, I made some deliberate choices. In my blog for the class, I was much more open to having a colored background and non-black text, but subconsciously at first and then consciously I wanted this blog to feel credible, thus the black text on a white space. I also changed the background several times and finally settled on the shelves of books. It offers an interesting juxtaposition of our reliance on print media over digital media and it also serves as something comforting. While my blog may be challenging ideas about writing, or at least encouraging others to challenge those ideas, it looks familiar. I think of this in terms of another idea that was often repeated this semester that it is important to bring elements of the old forward with the new to ease the transition, like the metaphor of the desktop on the computer screen. This also explains the presence of the “Works Cited” and “Further Reading” pages. Even though it is common practice to just hyperlink when composing digitally, that is not yet common practice when composing professionally. Most of what I hyperlinked was not cited, unless I was direct quoting from the hyperlink. Again, the blending of the old with the new. It also, I hoped, continued to add to my credibility.

It turns out podcasts are kind of fun. I’ve never done one before and had never really listened to many, either. At first I was nervous that my voice would sound as high-pitched and “Chipmunkish,” thanks Bret, that it did on the video we made, but I was pleasantly surprised. I had a little help on the technological end with recording and editing my podcasts, but Audacity is a really great program that was easy to use. I only did one full take of each podcast and then we edited them, which didn’t take longer than 30 minutes, and I think they sound great. As we discussed, one of the limitations of the podcasts is that it takes longer to listen to someone else read than it does to read yourself, so I did include the transcripts of my podcasts for reference, but I think having my actual voice on the blog adds character and helps me connect with my audience. Like Kevin said in his reflection on his video to Anna, hearing my voice in the podcasts allows readers to “imagine” my real voice while they are reading. In some ways, that’s pretty cool. It also means I was able to pronounce my last name correctly. Due to the simplicity of podcasts, I can see myself incorporating them in my classroom and using them as stepping stones to creating videos. There are some essential basic skills associated with both mediums that seems easier to learn via podcasts first, but that could then be transferred.

My old high school classroom.

Finally, I’m still very intrigued by the idea of using blogs in my WRIT 101 classroom and I have a clearer idea of what that needs to look like thanks to this project. I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a blog for my students to use as a resource that looks at some of the issues I’ve discussed here: how do we treat citations; who is the audience; how should it be formatted; what type of language (formal, informal, mixed) should be used? Ideally I still want to accomplish this for next semester, but it might be something that ends up getting postponed until next fall. I’m afraid to rush in without enough thought and planning because I don’t want to set my students up to not succeed, while I also realize that whenever I implement it, it won’t be perfect the first time, or ever. What I’ve really enjoyed discovering with this project, and through the course readings, is a better understanding and appreciation for the difference between giving students an assignment and telling them how it should look compared to giving them a problem and seeing how they solve it. That seems to be an important distinction to be made and something I need to work on more in my own classroom. There is always the fear that some students will be paralyzed by not having constraints, but I think it is an important principle that I should be teaching.

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To effectively start implementing these ideas in my own classroom, I need to keep pushing myself to try new ways of writing. This project was not “normal” for me, as I’ve already discussed, and I think that is really good. I often fear that I impose my own template on my students and judge them too harshly when they don’t write the way I write, which is both natural and worrisome as a teacher, but this project has forced me try composing in a different medium and with a different set of values. In short, it has allowed me to acknowledge other ways of writing that I can value in my classroom. It is easy for all of us to become comfortable with our own processes and approaches to writing, but as teachers, we really need to be aware of other possibilities because our students should not just be clones of us.