Where are we, what's happening, why are we doing this?

Hello and welcome to the great blog experiment of 2010. The purpose for gathering you all here to do this weird, weird thing is many-fold. You're probably wondering why I don't just assign you reading and writing assignments like a normal person. With all the initial set up and hassles, I'm beginning to wonder that myself :) Still. Let me list off a few reasons why I think this experiment might be fruitful for all of us.

1. Firstly, I want to mess with your heads a little bit and take you out of the normal academic setting for a moment. Something about the educational process gets us all thinking in fragmented ways about what writing is. Many of you talked about wanting to learn better "technical writing" skills or "academic writing" skills. Some of you said you were better at personal writing or "writing for fun" compared to school writing. My goal here is to teach you that there is really no difference between these seemingly disparate kinds of writing. Yes, there are conventions and nuances to different genres, but essentially, it's all a process of communication. The writing you do for your blog will be excellent practice for any other kind of writing you attempt to do, including the major papers we'll be working on in class.
2. The blog will give all of you a chance to get to know and to learn from each other. You'll get a variety of different voices, and further, you'll learn what other people think about the different topics. You might find that others in the class approach a reading we do radically different from how you did. You might even change your mind about something, and changing your mind is exhilarating.
3. The student-teacher writing relationship exists in one place and one place only: school. It's made up; it's not real. When you do "real world" writing, the audience matters. Your words will make a difference and will be designed to influence, inform, entertain, whatever. With this blog community, you will have a real world audience: each other.
4. I understand that writing for your peers is scary, intimidating, etc. Courage, man! We should relish the opportunity to overcome fears, because it can only make us stronger, better people. All of you tested into writ101, so that means you're all more or less at the same skill-level. I can promise that no one is judging you for misplaced apostrophes or weird sentences. We're all in this together, and we're all going to become better writers as a result of this process. Myself included.
5. Finally, blogs are fun. The philosophy behind blogging is that it's quick and dirty writing. The writing process isn't just about writing what you know - rather, through the writing process you come to discover what you know. It's an act of inquiry, of curiosity, of engagement with your subject. You might not understand what I'm talking about now, but I promise, you will.

Phew! I've said a lot. In fact, I never got around to the topic at hand, which, what was it I assigned? Introductions. Well, Hi, it's me, Molly, and I am the Messiah of Writ101. I love writing, reading, and persuading others to love it too. I look forward to reading everyone's first blog posts. I'll leave lots of comments, and hopefully together we can decide where this experiment will go from here. Feel free to leave any questions or comments you have about this post in the comments of this blog. I'm going to end by leaving you with this link about web literacy and some of the other topics I've introduced thus far.

Studies explore whether the Internet makes students better writers.

Namaste.