A Guide to Weblogs in the Classroom and in Research
for Compositionists, Rhetoricians, Educators, &c.

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This article is an updated and expanded version of “The Year of the Blog: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom” (Spring 2003). In writing it, I want to make two arguments. The first, a largely implicit one, concerns the life cycle of online scholarship and is marked by my added emphasis on the word “article” in the opening sentence of this essay. My second argument, the explicit one, is about the value of blogging in the writing classroom.

The Life Cycle of Online Scholarship
As soon as "The Year of the Blog" was published, I started finding emails in my inbox from people who wanted me to add their particular blog resources to the collection (and, in fact, I received yet another such email while working on this essay). It became clear to me through these emails that this audience did not see the piece as an article, but as a Web site. Articles are archived; Web sites are updated. And so they wrote expecting I would update "The Year of the Blog," not realizing that as a published article it was too late—the piece had been archived at the very moment it appeared on the Web. At the same time, because of the pace of technological change and the ephemeral nature of the Web the resources in the original article became outdated, a point made in other emails I received which noted some of the broken links in "The Year of the Blog."

Taken together, these email responses from readers suggested a number of important questions about New Media scholarship:

  • What is the audience for electronic forms of scholarship? Or, more properly, what are its audiences?
  • How does this scholarship circulate within and outside of academic communities? How is that circulation different from traditional print scholarship?
  • Is the function of scholarship to archive the knowledges of a historical moment, or is the function of scholarship more active, meant to impact our day to day lives and our teaching?
  • Should articles on the Web be updated? Especially when some of the links begin to point to obsolete or possibly inappropriate (even pornographic) Web sites?

The very existence of this article provides some provisional answers to these questions and so just in writing this essay I am making an argument about one possible life cycle for New Media scholarship. Yet I want these questions to linger beyond this essay. While, clearly, I feel that scholarship should act pragmatically, circulate widely, and address audiences broadly, the questions raised still haunt my own thinking about the value of New Media scholarship. This essay, then, is only a partial answer, meant to prompt more questions than answers about the life cycle of online scholarship.

Another Year of the Blog
The second, more explicit argument of this essay has to do with blogs in the writing classroom. The technologies of blogging have changed, with new blogging tools and new developments such as RSS syndication, and blogging itself has risen even higher on the cultural landscape. In the original article, I noted several important events that marked 2003 as the “Year of the Blog,” but I might just as well declare 2004 the Year of the Blog. Witness these moments:

  • In the summer of 2004, in an unprecedented move, bloggers were given press passes to first the Democratic and then the Republican National Conventions. These press passes, normally reserved for select journalists of the mainstream media, implicitly legitimized blogging as a form of journalism while simultaneously recognizing the power of popular blogs to shape public opinion.

  • Throughout the year bloggers broke several important news stories. Perhaps chief among these was "Rathergate," in which bloggers raised questions about the authenticity of documents relating to President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. These documents, used by Dan Rather in a 60 Minutes Wednesday segment, turned out to be forgeries—much to the embarassment of Rather and CBS.

  • In December, Merriam-Webster named "blog" the Word of the Year for 2004, meaning that it was the word most searched for in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary.

  • Also in December, ABC News named bloggers, collectively, the People of the Year in recognition of the impact bloggers had on several news stories ranging from the election of 2004 to the South East Asia Tsunami.

Given these developments, these days I like to tell people that the only thing missing for blogs is a sweet romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan. On the web, in the academy, and throughout the world, blogs continue to make a name for themselves. And so, as in "The Year of the Blog," I provide these collected resources so that you can find a way into a blogging and a way to bring blogging into your writing classroom.