Originally posted: June 28, 2016
Blogging is a frustrating, anxiety producing, time consuming, and ultimately rewarding activity. When it was all new to me, I was apprehensive–“The world can see this. Whether anyone will look at it is another story, but still.” The authors of this week’s chapter–Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy–expressed the same reservations.
I only started understanding the act of blogging by doing it. I’ve done some research on what’s effective and read books on marketing and social media. That doesn’t mean that I know what I am doing, just that I understand the gist and that it is a constant learning process. It’s more than just a textual practice, it is a social practice as well–publishing your thoughts to the world in an instant. Your ideas don’t exist by themselves. By linking your post to other resources and information, you create greater context and meaning.
I was hung up on one thing early in the chapter. I did have to look up the word: autoethnography. That clarified the idea of the author’s position as both subject and object of their research. Since I have been blogging for a while (with less than stellar consistency) I think I can relate to the perspective of their research better than if I had never blogged before. This chapter expanded my view of blogging as a social practice. We can comment, share, make connections and create communities or affinity space with our blogs. A blog post isn’t a static text. As a new literacy, blogging and the tech that makes it relatively easy for anyone to publish themselves, is a new mode of behavior and interaction.
The issue of identity was interesting to me. That is something I struggle with in relation to my online self. Struggling to maintain a balance of the personal and social, or the private and public. We may express ourselves differently if we are commenting on someone else’s post, creating content for a specific audience, or participating in an affinity space. Our identities are multiple online as they are in the real world, though there is still the recognizable person that is you expressed through those identities.
I was searching for an article that reflected this week’s reading and related to my course focus of video games and found, Reflections on Play, Pedagogy, and World of Warcraft . The article describes the results of a class that used World of Warcraft as the environment for learning “to critically investigate topics including subjective culture, personal and group identity, gender and stereotypes, language, citizenship, and technology” (Pirius & Creel, 2010). This looked to me to be another way to research our behavior in cyberspace and the real world. Games can provide this framework of researcher as subject and object. Students were expected to make connections “between game play and real-world events or applications” (Pirius & Creel, 2010), much like our researchers did with their blogging activities.
One of the students commented about the nature of the course and the learning curve he experienced by saying,
As a novice, I had no idea how to interpret this language. However, as the course continued and Landon created a framework for studying WoW as a culture, I was becoming integrated into that culture and learning the language (and the culture) through a dance of immersion and analysis.
Blogging takes us into a virtual world where we create and maintain an identity or ten. We learn the language and behaviors adjusting our interactions accordingly. This may have an effect in our behavior in the real world. I routinely take pictures of random surfaces when I’m out that I can use for digital 3D content. I wouldn’t do that if I wasn’t publishing myself online. Maintaining a website and blogging can change how you behave and interact with others. It gives you an outlet and opportunity to reflect on what it means to be “me.”
References
Davies, J., & Merchant, G. (2007). Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy. In M. Knobel (Ed.), (pp. 167-197). https://narrateannotate.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/dm2007ch8.pdf Accessed 27 June 2016.
Pirius, L. K., & Creel, G. (2010, September 22). Reflections on Play, Pedagogy, and World of Warcraft. Retrieved June 27, 2016, from http://er.educause.edu/articles/2010/9/reflections-on-play-pedagogy-and-world-of-warcraft