Today I break my blogging silence. It's been a year, mostly, since I last wrote on this site, and the reason is simple: so far, my work as a WPA has been something I've worked out locally--in this place (this as in where I am sitting now, not where you are reading this). My suspicion is that it will remain this way. At the same time, with time, I also acquire a language for doing this work, so it may be that I will voice my perspectives on my administrative work more here.

What is causing me to write today is that it is the first day of the 2009-2010 academic school year at SUNY Plattsburgh. It is a musty, late summer day in New York's North Country, and once again, Plattsburgh crawls with life at every turn. It's very exciting.

I am not sure, but I think much of my direction with my blog this year may be to write less as an administrator as more as a teacher. This seems like a good direction, particularly because I am asking my students to write blogs in my class. Following advice from Beach et al's Teaching Writing Using Blogs, etc. (Christopher Gordon, 2009), I am having my students write response blogs this semester, so they will not only write in response to prompts from me but also respond to their blog partners' entries once a week. This will be an amount of work equivalent to what I asked students in my ENG100 sections last year to do, but, given the response blog design, each student will know s/he has an invested audience member other than me looking at her/his work, commenting on that work, and more. It's exciting.

Well, that is it for now. In the first meetings of my ENG100 classes this term, I am having my students add their blog partners and me as readers of their blogs.

One thing I noted today during class: in having my students use for word processing this term Google Documents, when they turn in their work, they will click on "share." Sharing assignments with a teacher--it may suggest a degree of freedom of choice that in this case is not present, but at the same time, when it comes to writing, the work is always personal on some level. We turn in ourselves, to some extent, and that being the case, assuming each is her or his own, even turning work into a teacher is sharing it.

Sharing work. It's a good thing.

Tom