My Personal Experience Helps Show Importance of Using Blogs in Colleges

When I was finishing up my degree in history at George Mason University, I’d frequently have an hour or two between my classes. Since I didn’t want to leave campus and give up my parking spot (parking could be a pain during the day there), I eventually started blogging as a way to kill some time. I’d head over to the student union building and whip out my computer to offer some analysis on current events. The blogging that I did in between classes eventually played a big role in me getting the first job I had after college.

My blogging was helpful in getting me the job not only because I used it as a way to develop relationships with political insiders and show that I was someone who could be trusted to portray a story accurately, but it also proved that I could think critically and offer arguments in a way that made sense to other people. I say this not to toot my own horn, but to point out that blogging can be a useful tool for people looking to secure a job in various professional fields. I therefore believe teachers who implement blogging into their curriculum are offering students a unique opportunity to advance their studies and obtain skills necessary in the 21st Century job market.

Despite my positive experience blogging providing some professional rewards and universities integrating digital media into their various programs (see GMU’s Center for History and New Media), there appears to be a lot of controversy around a proposal by Cathy Davidson (an English professor at Duke) to replace term papers with blogs.

While I’m definitely a new media guy and believe that there can be some valuable scholarly discussions online, I agree with some of Davidson’s critics when they claim that there are some benefits in still being able to write that 20 page term paper. I know having to write those long research papers taught me how to do in depth research and to organize the arguments I wanted to pursue. Where I disagree with some of the critics, however, is in their insistence of dismissing the value of blogs.

Just like some in the newspaper industry who like to promote bloggers as folks who don’t really know what’s going on in the world, some of Davidson’s critics seem to act as though blogs is only a place where you can post self absorbed rants or videos of your cat doing something adorable. While that might be true for some blogs, it completely discounts the fact that many bloggers devout hours of research to each post they publish. In other words, blogs are just a forum for unprofessional material but can provide extremely valuable content.

Teachers who dismiss blogs as a useful forum are also ignoring the skills that students can obtain while trying to write a blog post. In order to write a post that is factual and persuades an audience, after all, you have to have a strong grasp of the material you’re writing about and be able to highlight the most important facts – kind of like you have to do when making a presentation or writing a staff memo in the business world. You also have to be prepared to respond to any comments left by people with opposing views – again, kind of like you have to do when making a presentation in the business. In other words, using blogs in the classroom would actually teach students how to think quickly and do enough research to answer the concerns of your critics.

What this all means is that while I believe Professor Davidson should be praised for promoting the use of new media in the classroom, she’s wrong to completely dismiss the value of the traditional term papers. There needs to be some sort of happy medium. And as an article in the New York Times points out, that seems to have been found by an English professor at Stanford -- Andrea Lunsford.

So Professor Lunsford is playing to student passions. Her writing class for second-year students, a requirement at Stanford, used to revolve around a paper constructed over the entire term. Now, the students start by writing a 15-page paper on a particular subject in the first few weeks. Once that’s done, they use the ideas in it to build blogs, Web sites, and PowerPoint and audio and oral presentations. The students often find their ideas much more crystallized after expressing them with new media, she says, and then, most startling, they plead to revise their essays.

“What I’m asking myself is, ‘Will we need to keep the 15-page paper forever or move right to the new way?’ ” she says. “Stanford’s writing program won’t be making that change right away, since our students still seem to benefit from learning how to present their research findings in both traditional print and new media.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of this whole debate is that the education that students receive shouldn’t just be focusing on being able to regurgitate facts, but should promote skills that are useful once the students have graduated. As a result, combining traditional term papers with blogs appears to be a great way of helping students obtain the experience they need to be productive community members after graduation.