TELL Grant Project: Creating an Internship Opportunity: Student Blogging Interns for the BSU English Department

M C Morgan
Dept of English
mmorgan@bemidjistate.edu

Project Summary

This project is to establish an English Department Weblogging Internship for undergraduate students. We seek to establish a weblog, linked off the English Department's home page, to be posted to by current students, selected as weblog writing interns. While the weblog will provide the Department with promotional opportunities, the interns, rather than faculty or the Department at large, will decide what to post about, and when, and how. The purpose of the weblog is primarily to give selected students online opportunites to practice professional writing in a real-world situation, and to become visible as writers to the University and the general public.

Startup Project

I am looking for a TELL grant to provide the time to

• set up the weblog
• recruit and train student bloggers
• develop guidelines, suggestions, and strategies, and
• promote the weblog.

At the end of the semester, the interns and I will assess how the project went, but I am hoping that the English department will make it an ongoing offering to students.

Educational (and promotional) aims

The English Department is educating a number of skilled online writers in courses such as Weblogs and Wikis, Elements of E-Rhetoric, and Web Content Writing. We want to give these students extra-curricular professional and educational writing opportunities. External internships are good, but they don't accommodate many students. So: a public, collective weblog, sponsored by the English Department, and written by students.

Weblogs have become a popular way of promoting businesses not by marketing but by establishing a conversation with clientele, which is the role our weblog interns will play. The weblog I'm proposing will also serve current and prospective students, as well as alums, by giving them student-centered insight into classes, procedures, activities - the daily life of being a student in the English Department.

Extended guided experience in public weblogging will be invaluable to students in professional writing. As in any writing internship, students will have to learn to negotiate particular rhetorical situations. For the blog to work, the postings have to be authentic: one whiff of marketing damages the credibility of the blog. The posts have to be timely responses to immediate local events. The blog will be open to comments from readers; so writers will have to learn to write to encourage feedback and to respond to comments. There is no denying that bloggjng about the English Department, classes, events, even faculty, can be a delicate matter. It's a situation that teaches the rhetorical practice of decorum: appropriateness of time and speech - one of the more difficult practices to teach in a classroom, and one of the most demanded in professional and business circles.

Selecting students

I will select a group of students with experience in online writing - weblogs, wikis, web content writing in general. I would like to bring in students from a range of Department programs (two or three students from each), as well as a range in class standing (from first-year to grad).

• BA
• BFA
• BS
• Grad MA
• Mass Comm with New Media emphasis

I will not have to recruit widely this year. We have a lot of students who have taken courses in online writing to draw from.

Workshops

I expect to run three to four workshops with the interns. Learning to use the weblog software is trivial, but students will need to learn how to handle some of the management features. More importantly, we will want to try some run-throughs of rhetorical situations and discuss ways of meeting them.

Workshop Schedule

• two near the beginning of the semester as students practice
• one a few weeks into the project to compile and exchange good practices
• one near the end of the semester to discuss assess the project and consider how to proceed next

These workshops, like the rest of the project, will be student-driven and experiential. Students will be involved throughout in establishing what's appropriate in posting and what the limits are. I will pose scenarios and ask students to practice and discuss ways of meeting them.

Safety

I will manage the weblog software and monitor the postings students make. While the blog can be set up to moderate postings, requiring that I approve them before they go out, I would rather select students who are responsible enough to practice decorum and rhetorically sophisticated enough to negotiate the perils.

Assessment

Students will be integral in assessing the success of the internship and how - or if - to continue it. Near the end of the semester, I will run a set of discussions with the weblog interns to determine

• how the internship went for them
• what they learned from it
• whether we should continue the internship
• how to improve the internship and modify it if we do continue

I will also interview those department faculty who have followed the project, and seek followup email interviews with some of the expected commenters on the weblog.

To determine rhetorical issues and to further develop the educational aims of the internship, I will review the student postings and expected exchanges via comments for their appropriateness and effectiveness.

Budget

$600 - $1,000 for student remuneration at the rate of $100 / student for the semester.

We have a server and server space available at biro.bemidjistate.edu. The weblog software (Word Press) is open source, and available at no charge.

I seek only remuneration for students to get the program started. If the internship works well, the Department or College might be persuaded to pick up remuneration, or we may offer internship positions for credit, or blogging for the department may become its own reward.

To create a broad view of the Department, and to foster frequent postings, the project needs a good number of participants. To start the internship, I would like to work with a minimum of six students and a maximum of ten, budget allowing.

Publication

One aim of this project is to create an internship model that might be useful for other departments and university business units. In keeping with that aim,

• I will compile a narrative and report on the project (30 pages expected), including workshop materials, sample postings and exchanges. Published online.
• With the interns, we will present on the project at an appropriate forum, or forums, on campus. Published online.
• With the interns, we will compose a handbook or brief guide to Weblogging for the English Department, published online, that can also be distributed in print.
• I will submit the project as a co-presentation at this year's Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing Conference (MSU Mankato, November), including myself and at least two of the interns. If accepted, I'll seek funding from the College and Department to defray costs for the student presenters.

Signatures

Faculty member: __________________________________________________________

Chair: ____________________________________________________________________

Dean: ____________________________________________________________________

Date: 21 April 2006

Updates

• May, 2006. Grant awarded
• Aug, 2006. First email requests sent