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Being "Present" in Blogging: Online Personas, Style, and Presentation So... Here we are, at the end of the first unit. You probably don't think that we've learned very much, at least not much that relates to the sort of skills you need to learn in a college composition classroom. Believe it or not, we *have* been practicing some very useful cognitive skills, in addition to navigating around methods of online research that may prove useful to you, not only in this class, but in your future academic and professional careers, as well. In Unit One, we were introduced to the blogging community. We learned the basic technology for creating and maintaining our own blogs, and began to explore the "current" world of blogging through shared reading (Rebecca's Pocket, Neil Gaiman's Journal, Wil Wheaton in Exile, and Joe the Peacock's Journal) in addition to your own personal choices of blogs that have kept you informed and entertained throughout the past few weeks. By reading The Weblog Handbook, we obtained an easy vocabulary to help us locate and organize different sorts of online writing (filters, blogs, and notebooks) in addition to allowing us to better analyze the rhetorical purpose and different styles of blogs. In addition to using this vocabulary to help us analyze other blogs, we also turned this vocabulary inward. We looked at our own blogs, contemplating our own rhetorical purposes for writing, and worked to create "online personas". We created these personas by deciding what we wanted to write about, what our major purpose in updating our journals would be (self-expression, building reputation, or providing information) and even by creating LiveJournal user icons to represent ourselves visually. We've learned the importance of unity in our blogs, but we've also learned the value of flexibility, and we are learning to balance writing for an audience with writing for ourselves. By reading Mentally Incontinent we were able to see how the interactive experience of writing online is directly affecting the production and style of literature, and we were able to discuss the writing process directly with Joe the Peacock in an online interview via AOL Instant Messenger. We were able to learn through Joe Peacock's blog and comments the positive and negative impacts of writing directly for an audience -- and by continually maintaining our own personal blogs, we've been able to experience some of those positive and negative effects first-hand! Believe it or not, throughout this unit, each of you has become an active participant in the "blogosphere". Congratulations! Grammar Review: Of course, it can't all be fun and games all of the time. Overall, our general sense of grammar and formatting seems to be fairly on-the-mark, but I have noticed a great deal of comma errors throughout our blog entries. Before we start composing our End of Unit Assignments, perhaps it would be helpful to review some basic comma rules. The Purdue University Online Writing Lab has perhaps the best list of comma rules available on the Web. Please follow the link and review the rules. Then try your hand at one of the exercises (Exercise #1, Exercise #2, Exercise #3, Exercise #4, or Exercise #5) and comment to my entry on the LiveJournal class blog with which exercise you did and how many you got correct. End of Unit Blog Assignment: Please choose one of the following prompts for your End of Unit One Blog Assignment:
Have a great weekend, and I will see you all in class on Tuesday! Remember that we will be meeting in our regular classroom in Estabrook! |