Are You Serious?

The one blog entry that caught my eye was “Aboard the Ideological Hot Air Balloon,” by Nicole Converse Livengood, Ph.D. Candidate, of Purdue University, because some of the ideas express in the piece felt relatable to me. Nicole Livengood talks about how she introduces blogging in class semester after semester and all of the different reactions and feedback she gets back. Going into the academic blogging, Nicole was skeptical of it because she had bias feelings of it. Overall, she felt that it would give her students more freedom to express themselves in their writing. She wanted her students to take this opportunity to make the blog their own “space” and feel comfortable with their writing. But it had the opposite effect some students felt like they didn’t learn anything from blogging and that it didn’t help their writing at all. And the reason for that was that people would blog about anything. Another problem Nicole encounter that the students liked the idea of blogging but wanted more structure, more focus and relatable questions for the class to write about. Nicole found this surprisingly shocking because she would have thought that students would have wanted more freedom.

I felt the same way as Nicole; wouldn’t students want more freedom in their writing? But I guess the students felt if they were not learning anything, it wasn’t worth it. Reading about Nicole’s made me feel like the rules have change, some of my fellow peers and even close friends would say that Nicole’s class was an “easy A” where all you had to do was blogs. It just like a beginner computer course at UCSC, where all you have to do is show up to class for the final and midterms. Other than that you do all of your work online, how easy is that. No one really thought about if they were learning anything or if the way the class is taught was beneficial to a student’s ability to learn. But since Nicole’s class was a Professional Writing course I can fully understand their reasoning, on wanting more from the blogging experience.