New Spaces for Writing: Using blogs to promote writing in classroom settings

I never thought a technology would be new to me. Yet, here I am about to deliver a presentation on blogging and I am about to publish my first post. How could this be new to me? After all, I grew up with Atari; I remember designing spaceships out of keyboard characters and launching them with the "if, then" commands of BASIC; I spent countless hours in middle school study halls reading posts on prodigy when I found time to leave the Oregon Trail. The World Wide Web was born when I roamed the halls of my high school and students began to chat synchronously with AIM when I entered college. Still I had never blogged....until now.

Today, as a type my first blog, I realize that today it is almost impossible to keep up with the changes in literacy. The blog has metastasized from texts that have evolved from the past because new texts will always emerge with new technologies. For example once a few years back i am sure some cereal farmer notched a stick or a stone to keep track of surpluses of the agricultural revolution Also just yesterday cursive writing gained popularity as speed was needed to dictate the first synchronous messaging system to emerge during the industrial revolution, the telgraph. That brings us to today, when new texts emerge with every spiraling advance of the Informational Revolution. The blog has risen to the forefront of these texts as the virtual soapbox. As an educator and researcher I hope in my journies I visit some students and collegaues who are willing to climb onto their Ethernet connections and engage in discouse.

I will see how this journey goes. I will see if anyone wants to come along. After all the author and the audience has never been more connected. Sure Rosenblatt coined the transactional nature of language and literacy long ago. Language as we are beginning to realize been contextual. She wrote in her book,

I knew I had to start blogging because I had to understand this phenomenon. The blog has forever changed how we write and new writers will always change how we blog. It is the essence.