One of my summer reading books for teaching is The Digital Writing Workshop, by Troy Hicks of the National Writing Project. He suggests moving the writing workshop process online so that students can inquire, collect sources, keep a writer's notebook, and so on all on the internet. There are many advantages to this, but one is that using a blog as a writer's notebook will make it searchable. Students can tag each post with the topics they've written about and easily return to them by searching for that topic instead of turning pages in a notebook.
In order to apply Hick's ideas during the next school year, I plan on practicing them over the summer. A second benefit to this could be that going through the writing workshop process itself will give me more insight into teaching writing in general, be it online or on paper. A final goal of this blog should be to work out, formulate, and synthesize the thoughts and ideas that I have been entertaining or reading about.
One of the topics I've been entertaining, for example, the Myers Briggs personality typology, types me as an INTP type. The two strongest "cognitive functions" of the INTP type are Introverted Thinking and Extroverted Intuition. I will not go into detail on these now except to say that the Introverted Thinking seeks convergence, seeks decisions on beliefs, seeks a philosophy of life. The Extroverted Intuition, however, is divergent, is naturally branching out into many ideas and worldviews. One of the defining conflicts within the INTP mind, according to the author of the Personality Junkie blog, is between their desire to settle on accurate beliefs and their desire to broaden their understanding of the world. I hope to exercise these two functions on this blog.
