The Impact of Blogging on Learning and Understanding

I recall with clarity the first time a professor told me we were going to be required to blog for a class. My prior impression of blogs had not been good; I thought they were mainly places where the unskilled could show their work to the only people who cared, most likely their mamas and creepy ex-girlfriends/ex-boyfriends. But ever since I started using blogs in classes (this was the third) I've been in awe of the usefulness of the form for classroom settings. This class was not an exception. Requiring blogging for classes is genius, if you ask me. And even if you don't ask me, I think it still is. Even when I wasn't particularly excited to write, I at least recognized the usefulness of the mode. If you put a lot into a blog, it has a tendency to come right back. Let me explain why, in this particular class, it was so.

First, the blog forced the whole class to participate if they wanted to make the grade. Yeah, you can write half-assed blog posts, and a handful of people might have thrown a few into the mix when they forgot to read. However, I'm pretty sure most everyone could spot a majority of these posts. It's pretty hard to fake an in-depth understanding of complex rhetorical concepts effectively enough to convince anyone who's done the reading that you've completed the whole assignment. The benefit was that more people read at least once a week to avoid looking foolish, which made for more interesting debate inside and outside of class. And by debating outside of class on the blog, we even got to become collaborators through writing who were comfortable (hopefully) with showing our work with each other in a form less refined and formal than the average revised and edited essay. All great stuff.

But this blog was excellent for more than just making us work, share, and collaborate. The blog helped each one of us find what we care about, what is essential to us about each reading. Maybe it is frustration over disrespect for females. Perhaps it is metaphor. Maybe it's concepts connected with morality. No matter what, each of us was continuously finding what mattered to us and sharing it with others. In "Editing the Rhetorical Tradition," Patricia Bizzell points out that "it is through inclusions and exclusions in anthologies such as ours that the rhetorical tradition is established, grows, and changes" (109). I would argue that, for the purposes of our class, the rhetorical tradition was in large part shaped first by what we were made to read (teacher's choice) and second by what we posted (our choice). I lost count of how many times I heard people bring up the same topics in class that they developed through blogging, and this shaped all our learning and understandings of rhetoric by what we included in posts and what we didn't. And that, colleagues, is pretty darn cool.

Whether we discussed Truth, truth, ethos, feminism, or just hated on Ramus, it was interesting the whole way through, my colleagues. Our blogs gave us the opportunity to learn together, even if we weren't physically together. It helped us build on our perceptions of rhetoric. I wish you all the best in your future rhetorical endeavors, and may they be many and varied.