I’m thrilled to be a part of Pitt’s Digital Brown Bag Series. This afternoon I’ll be offering a workshop on student blogging (a thing I think about and experiment with in just about every course I’ve taught). I’ve put together some examples to talk through on a page dedicated to the workshop, though see also my teaching.things for recent courses and blogs. Here’s the info for the workshop:

Digital Brown Bag: “Moving Student Blogs Toward the Blogosphere”
Friday 11/6, 2:30-3:30 PM, CL 435 
Presenter: Moriah Purdy

Blogging platforms offer incredible resources for teachers, especially when it comes to making students’ work more visible to their peers, for practicing responding to that work, and in getting a start at what it means for writing for the public. This workshop begins from the following questions: What can we do to bring student blogs closer to how people use blogs outside of the course context? And, why would we want to do that? In this workshop I’ll offer two different blogging experiments I’ve conducted with students, one where I framed the blog as an a digital commonplace log, and my current (still troubleshooting) experiment where I’m turning over all responsibilities for the design and authorship of the blog to students to execute. Whether you’re considering using blogs in your courses or have been doing so for years, this workshop should offer something for everyone as we rethink what it means “to blog” as an action both in its pedagogical sense and for ourselves.

Moriah Purdy is a third year PhD student in Composition. She came to Pitt after an MFA in poetry from George Mason University and after three years working as Writing Center Assistant Director and Composition Instructor at Washington College on the Eastern shore of Maryland. Her research deals with analog and digital procedural genres of writing, particularly those that have to do with the ways in which individuals read and write from others’ texts. She infrequently blogs athttps://moriahlpurdy.com, and has been having her students blog in most of the courses she’s taught in the last several years.