Week of 2/11

Lowe & Williams: "Into the Blogosphere"

Lowe and Williams argue that blogs can replace written journals as sites of exploratory writing and peer interaction. They claim that it's better to use public blogging rather than a private or restricted site because allows students to interact "potentially with any intersted reader on the Internet." First they offer examples of professionals using blogs "to share ideas." They move from there to discuss the ways students are required to blog publicly in their classes, and they offer rationales for the requirement. They consider blogging as a means of "public interaction," and go on to show how blogging meshes with process theory. They find public blogging superior to WebCT, Blackboard, and personal web pages, and they give some reasons for that. For them, blogging can be a site for drafting, revising, and commenting on others' papers as well as a place where students can write about personal experiences, and find and offer comfort.

I'm trying to be open-minded, but this article irked me. They deal pretty cavalierly with some serious issues, it seems to me. First, I'd be interested in knowing whether the students who speak so glowingly about blogging as a classroom tool are male or female. What class(es) do they come from? What are their ethnic/racial identifications? As Coley's blog last week made so clear, people from different cultures (and I would argue that sex/gender, race, ethnicity, and class can constitute different cultures in an important and relevant sense) are more or less comfortable with different things and approaches to writing. Women are, in general, less apt to disagree with an authority figure in a public way than are men. Public criticism can be especially difficult for working-class folks to deal with.

I think we need to attend carefully to how identity affects ability to be honest and to feel safe at the same time. People who have been sexually assaulted, for instance, might not feel particularly safe making their private self available for public consumption. I almost dropped this class because of the blogging requirement, as a matter of fact.

Now, let's consider our students' ages. How comfortable would you have been about being corrected by an instructor in front of the whole world when you were 18? How willing were you to contradict one of the "cool kids"? And, my experience as a student in online classes showed me that a significant subset of the students in online classes wait until the last minute to post to the discussion board, first reading what everyone else had to say, and then composing their post by writing about how they loved what so-and-so had to say, and how they agreed with so-and-so, and how they'd never thought of it that way until they'd read so-and-so's post. No real engagement. Real bull, as a matter of fact. Are we to think that won't happen with blogs?

It also seems to me that people develop online personae. That is, we all know that when we interact with people online they sometimes deliberately behave and speak quite differently than they would in the real world. I find myself editing thoughts and explorations and sentence constructions that I would just go with in a private journal--even one I knew would be read by an instructor or a peer.

I'm not sure it's not a good thing for student writers to be "safely sequestered from the discourse community of the Internet" at least some of the time. Young people are already blogging. They are not "sequestered." Perhaps it's more beneficial for them to come to understand the difference between public and private writing. Some of them will be employed in jobs with confidentiality requirements, after all.

The authors write that "students come to see weblogs as a fun communication medium." Are we entertainers now? Should everything be "fun"? How is this congruent with their claims that students learn, through public blogging, to take writing more seriously?

Nearly all of the advantages they find in blogging can be found in other approaches without requiring that students put themselves out into the wide, wide cyberworld. And, I'm spending considerable time trying to figure out their pedagogical philosophy. How would this work for a social-epistemic approach such as Freire's or Berlin's? Doesn't this approach depend, in part, on the sort of "deep, personal reflective writing that is not possible within the public eye"? As an educator, I want to provide students the opportunity to question and examine why they believe what they believe. How free will they feel to do that if they're aware that their parents, pastors, and friends might find and read their musings and "explorations"? The authors claim that we run the risk of forgetting that "comfort can also come from community." I respond that there are different sorts of communities, and one doesn't have to open oneself up to the whole world in order to feel connected to one.

One more thing (sorry): How are we to get students to understand that the conventions of online writing (acronyms, lack of punctuation, etc.) are unacceptable nearly everywhere else? How does blogging affect the notion of revision? From the emails I've received and the blogs I've explored, it seems that certain things do not get considered at all--fundamental things like reading what you've written before posting it.

Now, all of this said, I will probably use a restricted blog site for some of the student interaction and homework assignments in my 101 classes. I know this sounds like I'm contradicting myself, but I do think that it can be a useful technology. I just wouldn't use it quite the way Lowe and Williams do.

Did anyone else feel like it was kind of weird to be writing to each other while we were sitting in the same room on Monday? That's one of the things I dislike about this. Are all human interactions to be mediated by technology? I want to interact with real, live human beings. I think there's something of the richness of life that gets lost when I lose real-life contact with real human beings. Isn't it easier to objectify and hate and be disrespectful when you don't have to look the person with whom you're interacting in the eye? I like people. I like talking to them. In person. Human communication doesn't take place just in words. It involves bodies, too. But maybe that's just me.

More later. Peace.