I think that this blog did a great job of addressing a
couple of Student Learning Outcomes in particular:
2. the role of purpose and audience in
writing and reading and the rhetorical voices used to address the
desired purpose(s) and audience(s)
Keeping this blog was a new
experience for me because it was my first attempt at establishing an online writing identity. As Hicks (2009) points out, “for purposes of the digital
writing workshop, I consider blogs as a natural extension of the
writer's notebook. Blogs maintained by individual students who are
sharing and getting feedback on their own writing allow them to set
up their own online presence and give and receive feedback from
classmates” (p. 29). Aside from the occasional Facebook wall post, I have very
limited experience with publishing my writing in online spaces with
the purpose of having it read by an expanded audience. I'm not sure
if this is because I generally do not feel that my ideas
warrant an audience or because of my trepidations about how anything
one publishes online can potentially be misappropriated by
others. I found that in maintaining this journal,
however, I became more comfortable sharing my ideas in a public
forum, and I looked forward to having the members of our class read and respond to
my writing.
5. the role of metacognition in
writing proficiency and reading comprehension
Writing in this blog was a great opportunity for me to
push myself to think metacognitively about both my writing proficiency and my
reading comprehension. After reading in our course texts, it was
helpful to have a place to go and write about my reactions to what I had read because there was not always time during our class
sessions for this type of reflection on the course content. Writing
about my reading always seems to improve my comprehension of the author's messages as well as support the connections that I make between the text and my previous understandings (organizing new information into my schema). I liked having the opportunity to “bless, address, or press” the ideas
of my classmates because it challenged me to think about their
thinking. In regards to
metacognition of my writing proficiency, this blog gave me a reason
to write over time, and this collection of my writing served as a sort
of portfolio to assess my writing development.
Something that I learned from keeping
this blog that is not represented in the Student Learning Outcomes is that I
need to work on making my learning through writing/writing about my
learning more of a natural and automatic part of the way I approach reading. I think that this type of writing activity is
most meaningful if completed alongside reading rather than going back later and reflecting on what was read. Actively writing in this blog was a skill that I worked on over the course of this semester.
References
Hicks,
T. (2009). The digital writing
workshop. Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann.
Tompkins,
G. E. (2012). Teaching writing:
Balancing process and product (6th
ed.). Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.
