Digitizing Dewey: Blogging an Ethic of Community

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2011

Publication Title

Computers and Composition Online

Issue

Special Issue: Ethics in a Digital Age

Abstract

[First Paragraph] This webtext discusses two elements of writing classroom pedagogy which at first glance might seem at odds with one another: blogging and community engagement. Blogging is typically used to facilitate periodic student writing about personal interests. In a recent Computers and Composition Online webtext, Geoffrey Middlebrook (2010) argues that if we as compositionists wish to provide students with meaningful opportunities for writing, then “blogs should be perceived as a rich and flexible resource waiting to be wielded for the personal, intellectual, and vocational benefit of students.” Overall, Middlebrook’s articulation of the potential use of blogs in the writing classroom echoes the way teachers in our field typically understand the rhetorical exigence of blogs: the cultivation and validation of the self in digitally public ways within the ethical framework of negotiating the intersection, indeed the conflation of private student voices and the digital publics (Miller & Shepherd; Benson and Reyman, 2009; Lindgren, 2005).

Comments

Computers and Composition Online uses a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) in support of the open source in academia movement.

ORCID

0000-0003-2155-3416 (Richards)

Original Publication Citation

Richards, D. (2011). Digitizing Dewey: Blogging an ethic of community. Computers and Composition Online. (Special Issue: Ethics in a Digital Age, Virtual Classroom), http://cconlinejournal.org/ethics_special_issue/richards/

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