Call for Feedback and Participation from SHU Bloginators

If you started your SHU blog during the 2003-2004 school year (which was my first year at SHU), you’ve seen big changes, both in the blogosphere at large, and in our own little corner of it.

I’d like to know -- when you look back at your first exposure to academic blogging at SHU, what will stand out in your mind? My own research on the effectiveness of academic blogging would be incomplete if I didn’t hear from you.

When I started teaching at SHU in 2003, I assumed that most of the incoming freshmen didn’t know what a weblog is. Since then, blogs have gone mainstream. Blogs have also morphed – Flikr, MySpace and FaceBook are very different kinds of online communities.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone, but I’m particularly interested in hearing from the class of 2007 (because they’ll have had four years of academic blogging) and from those who stopped blogging at SHU for one reason or another.

I’m looking for two or at most three students to co-present a paper on academic blogging. Topics might include the relationship of “forced blogging” to blogging that you do for pleasure; ways that you and your peers use e-mail, instant messaging, and off-campus blogs to meet needs that the blog.setonhill.edu system doesn’t provide (such as anonymity); or changes that you’ve noticed in what you do or don’t put on your blog.

I’m planning to propose a session for the Conference on College Composition and Communication, which will meet New York, March 21-24, 2007. This is the big professional meeting for teachers of writing, rhetoric, and communication. If you are thinking of going to graduate school, having a 4Cs presentation on your CV will look very, very good. I can’t promise that the panel will be accepted by the 4Cs -- of the last two I proposed, one was accepted and one was rejected. But we will find someplace, somewhere, to present this work.

My deadline for submitting the proposal is in about 10 days, so I would like to hear from you by next Monday.