Newjobbin' It

Gearing up for a new job at Spokane Falls Community College, I decided it's time to enter the Blogosphere. My plan is to ask students to create and maintain their own blogs, writing about what matters to them, and commenting on classmates' blogs. School is, perhaps by definition, inauthentic. But I'm hoping the quasi-personal, semi-public writing spaces offered by blogs can be a borderland between writing-for-school and writing-for-life. Blogs have real audiences (however large or small) who are attracted to them because they discuss meaningful issues. I'm going to write about teaching English at a community college. I just hope Google has set aside enough bandwidth or whatever to accommodate the hordes of readers poised to beat a path to this new blog.