Thanksgiving and blogging

I wanted to share with you all something that happened to me over Thanksgiving break that I think you might appreciate. My family went over to our family friends' house for Thanksgiving dinner, and I was talking with the daughter, who is my age and goes to school at George Mason University, a Virginia state school, about this and that-- how our semesters had been.

And then she mentioned that one of her classes had a blog! I got really excited (embarassingly so, now that I think back on it) and asked her how it was incorporated into the class. Apparently, their blog's purpose is to serve as a place where they post their responses to the readings, 2x a week. The subject of the class has nothing to do with technology-- it's on the reconstruction of post-WWII Japan. And it seems like the blog doesn't really change the nature of the class in any fundamental way-- I'm not even sure if they comment on each other's posts-- but that it's just a way for the professor to collect reading responses such that students can also read their classmates' responses.

Still, though, I thought it was cool to see blogs becoming present in classes that don't deal explicitly with technology. (I do know that this has happened at Pomona-- for instance, the Bible as Literature class has a blog.) Plus, I felt like my friend and I were part of some elite club of blogging, technologically literate students. (Perhaps this is an unhealthy impulse-- but it really is just amusing that I could imagine myself in a technologically elite club, given how limited my understanding of technology actually is.)