A Review for an Article on Blogs

Review of
Tim Lindgren’s “Blogging Places: Locating Pedagody in the Whereness of Weblogs”

Edit: I've just made some grammar and punctuation changes to my review, thanks to the editing feature the blog provides me with, that the blackboard does not provide as far as I know.:)

Edit 2: Someone posted an inappropriate ad as a comment to my post.:( I don't know if the blog provides the feature of deleting a comment, but it definitely provides the feature to hide the comments, so I do it. Sorry for the second interruption before the review, but I thought this is still about the blog-space, so wanted to share it.

Here is another article review about blogs. The article itself is put on the web in the form of a blog, where features of blogs are used such as hyperlinks to all the blogs that the author talks about.

This article is about blogs and writing pedagogy in relation to the concepts of place and identity. The author suggests that the role blogging might play in the writing classroom depends on "the pedagogical approach one adopts and the kind of blogging one has in mind." He aims to look at the “pedagogical relevance of blogging from the perspective of those committed to place-based pedagogies.” He summarizes the most pressing concern of them in the question: "In what ways can blogging help foster a deeper sense of place and encourage reflection on the relationship between place and identity?" In order to understand this, he looks at the bloggers associated with the Ecotone website, since they write regularly and especially about place. The author sees their experience with blogging as a genre of place-based writing as a valuable resource for those who want to learn about the role blogging might play in the composition classroom. Thus, throughout the article, by means of these people’s blogs, he tries to give ideas about about how these people start blogging, what reasons stimulate them to have blogs, and how, in different situations, different forms of place and identity are realized through blogs.

With this article, we, one more time, get the idea that blog is a medium where one performs a daily writing practice through which he registers his experience to share them with an online community of interested readers. Yet, one of the points the author makes is that it has become too general to talk about blogging as a single genre, and now there are distinct varieties of this genre such as war blogging, political blogging, academic blogging, etc. Here, the author brings up the term “place blogging’” and suggests that it has the characteristics of other blogging adaptations as:

"...the short, regularly updated content posted in reverse chronological order, the emphasis on personal voice, the development of relationships between like-minded bloggers who read and comment on each others sites. Under this broad generic umbrella, adaptations distinguish themselves in many ways: by the kinds of content the blogs tend to produce, the qualities of interactions that occur between like-minded bloggers, the genres that are remediated, and the affordances of blogging that writers choose to emphasize."


He gives examples from several blog names to show how to identify such blogs- such as: Fragments from Floyd, Bowen Island Journal, Mulubinba Moments, London and the North, The Middlewesterner. He also gives a list of genres that blogging remediates such as journal, logs, and field books, personal essays, ethnography and journalism, and travel writing giving examples from the blogs of various bloggers. In the article, we can see that a blogger can make use of his blog space for observations of his backyard, the affects of spam on online communities, the political situation in Iraq, and corruption on the earth and on each other, which confirms that blogs enable us to form a stronbg bond between physical places and online rhetorical places. It even comes to a point where the difference between two are blurred, because online experiences are already based on the material conditions of physical places and they, in turn, mediate our experiences of phsycial places. Overall, the author thinks the web, in this case through blogs, create a deeper sense of place, and place blogging “become pedegogical places where students and teachers collaborate to figure out where they are in a rapidly changing and globalized world.”

I guess this will be the third article review about blogs on the blackboard. There were already articles about using blog for classroom and also a general one which gives us all about blogs, how it is used etc. I liked this article, because it was mainly about the importance of the concept of “place” on the webIt is really interesting for me how we create a blog on one of the blogging places, give a name that reflects our stand in the world in some way, and how we put forward our existence in cyber world, which is a remediation of the flesh and blood world. And today we have come to such a point that the difference between these two worlds are blurred, they mingled. For one of the bloggers Lindgren used as an example in his article, it had no difference whatsoever from the actual world. Thus, in general, I thought this article is good to look at in terms of the examples from various blogs that might enhance to the concept of a "blog" we have in our minds in relation to place and identity.

Lindgren, Tim. (2005). Blogging Places: Locating Pedagody in the Whereness of Weblogs. Kairos, Fall 2005. Retrieved Oct 01, 2005, from http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/10.1/coverweb/lindgren/index.htm