Blogs and Foucault

Welcome to my Foucault blog site - "Flog" (a bit of a joke on Foucault's interest in disciplinary practices - sorry).

I ask students to set up and write blog postings for two main reasons:

1. it's an informal space for expression that some people find more attractive than speaking in class and that in all cases allows for more creative and personal associations - links, pictures, stories etc.
2. the bulk of the assessment for the course will be based on written submissions, and I think the sooner one starts writing on the subject, having to formulate sentences and ideas, the better. Having to write something down can bring up both ideas and problems we didn't realise existed.

This actually fits into a couple of key Foucauldian themes. The first is that this is definitely what Foucault would call an "incitement to discourse", even an incitement to "confess". Pedagogical practices at all levels for some time has moved from fewer but more stringent "testing" experiences, designed as hoops to jump through or fall down on, to more "continous assessment" practices where there are more tasks set, more feedback given and which are thus designed to provide an image of the student to themselves and to the teacher in a way that is not as clearly related to success/failure. No doubt we can see both good and bad aspects of that (interestingly, this trend is often presented as a "student-driven" change).

Having said that, you can also make a connection between blogging and the development of practices of formation of the self or creating the self as a work of art. This starts from the notion that there is a raw subjective material that doesn't contain an essence but is rather the "stuff" that is progressively refined and developed into something that didn't exist before. In this sense, the blog is not valued for its confessional quality but as a starting point for further revision and reflection.

You are not graded or "assessed" on individual blogs, but rather your synthesis of the material at the end, and your level of participation overall (ie the regularity of your posting). I and everyone else in the class will be able to view and comment on class blogs at any given time because I think we can all learn from and teach other.