Instructional Technology

Since his start here at Washington College in 2008, Professor Sean Meehan has been exploring the future of writing and the numerous forms written expression will take. One form that has aligned well with his scholarly focus on Ralph Waldo Emerson has been WordPress blogging.  Sean has spent his time exploring the world of WordPress and, in so doing, discovered CommentPress, a plug in for the blogging platform that makes writing an even more social activity. This comment-driven, interactive model has really come together with the creation of Social Text, a CommentPress-enabled blog that Sean has been using with his English students this semester.

I recently asked Professor Meehan to explain the Social Text blog and his goals for using it with his students.

I have used [Social Text] for two classes. Primarily, in my Emerson and Whitman seminar, where I copied in several of Emerson’s essays that students were assigned. I asked them to post a comment or two to the essay, in addition to reading it in print form. The goal here was to play with an understanding of the fluidity of reading, and the blurring of reader and writer that Emerson is very interested in. So, in addition to providing a venue to generate and archive some response to readings, it allowed me to highlight the idea of dynamic reading.

I also used it for a reading assignment in my English 101 class–posting in two essays that I assigned to students. As with the use in Emerson, I also did this to demonstrate and highlight some ideas of dynamic reading and writing that, in fact, the two essays focus on. One is the essay by Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (where he talks about the ways new media, in the 1930s, is blurring the line between reader and writer); the other is “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, which imagines a machine for researching and writing that looks like the web.

I would like to further experiment, possibly for next term, with using this venue for having students respond to student-written essays and drafts [...]

Professor Meehan hopes to continue experimenting with writing formats in the coming semesters and would like to work with interested colleagues in expanding this exploration. Instructional Technology will, of course, be available for support (via workshops and one-on-one consultation) as this project moves forward.

Be sure to take a moment to read the Social Text blog to see the innovative way it has allowed for both students and professor to shape the reading of an otherwise flat text.