I'm heading out to the NTS for a fun visit.
While I'm going, I'm going to be thinking.
There's housecleaning to do, and some thoughts about blogware. I'm also going to be putting the links back up upon my return.
I've happily noticed that we're going to the second-tier adoption stage.
We the "early adopters"have been playing with blogs in our classes for awhile now. We're loved them just for the sake of loving them. We've evangelized them to our peers and our students, with mixed success.
But now, blogs must pull their pedgagogical weight. It's no longer enough to just put a student blog collective online and see what happens, or to send your students to Blogger and allow them to pretend like it's the same experience as writing a paper journal that they turn in to their teacher.
It's irresponsible to just dump students into a public arena without really taking some serious time to discuss the consequences of compeltely public and potentially permanent writing. Some students recognize the responsibility of publishing online, but most students may not yet appreciate the consequences for themselves both now and later in life.
I like talking about this public/private issue in the context of the expectation of privacy in a digital world. Basically, once something is put on a computer, submitted to the web or sent via email, one should assume NO personal privacy. Email gets forwarded, listserve can be publically-archived, and email is stored in university archives indefinitely.
Blogging forces students to consider their writing in a public arena, which they've been unknowlingly participating in for some time.
I think those consequences are a good thing, and I think it's vital to educate responsible online ethos and to prepare them for the eventuality of having to defend their words in a context that they did not anticipate.
Interesting blogging experiences at CCCC.
At both the Workshop (on Wednesday) and the SIG (Friday), the audience seemed pretty evenly divided between newbies desperate to use blogs in their classes and experienced teachers currently using blogs and looking for deep discussion on pedagogy.
The workshop happened first.
We were expecting more "experts" and fewer "newbies" to the first event, so I don't think we were as prepared to answer basic questions as we should have been. Luckily, blogging prepares us to change course frequently, so we altered our plans to accommodate the excited new people, and we took our discussion back a few notches to discussions about "what is blog" and "sub-genres of blogging."
We broke up into four groups and rotated people around those groups. Each group was supposed to talk about something different; pedagogy, technology, etc.
Instead, we all ended up spending the first "round" or two having to define blogs in a way broad enough way to accommodate the project we were using. The panelists were too used to thinking "It's like porn; I know it when I see it." and glossing over the details. It was a useful exercise for us, to have to go back and clarify some of our expectations and theory, because of course we were all rather different. It's hard to be precise when defining blog because it invites so many other conversations into the process that things get muddy.
I think the best part of the wednesday workshop was the handouts. They're robust well-thought-out, and we're going to be distributing them as widely as possible to serve as a reference for some of the basic blogging questions about software and resources. I'm going to make sure that it's ok and than release all of those handouts here, mostly so I can keep track of them but also for everyone's reading enjoyment.
Charles Lowe gave a fabulous talk today about blogging as a knowledge publishing platform for the non-techie publisher.
I was all there and with him, and then he said it: the "J" word.
"Journal"
I get nervous when people bandy about the word "journal." I don't EVER link to think of myself as a journaler, and I don't want my students to think of our blog spaces as journals.
If I was teaching composition this semester, maybe I could be more comfortable with the idea, but my my students have such a hard time distinguishing between the personal and the professional that using "Journal" to describe what we do together online just seems to invite some of the LiveJournal-type correpondance that, while valuable, is suitable for an entirely different audience.
In the same panel, Tara suggested that using both a personal blog and a community blog together would allow students to toggle between a professional space and a personal space. I think there would be a lot of value in that, since there is this difficulty in perceiving audience.
Clancy's presentation today talked about women apologizing for their aggressive comments/posts in the blog-world, and she noted that their male counterparts (see Dave Winer) almost never do (See specifically the section on case studies).
Is there something to that? Is blogging an aggressive form of communication? Is the active solicitation of readership an aggressive act, and does that make men more successful (meaning they get more readers) than women? Is that why men get linked to more than women?
Dennis Jerz from Seton Hill University talked about "Forced Blogging" whereby he created a blogging community at his university through "seeding" it with his students. He put many fewer restraints on their participation than I would, but I wonder if my students skew younger than his.
San Antonio is...moist.
This year, blogs too are hot. I'm in two blogging events, and there are at least three more dealing with teaching with blogs.
I just came back from the "Teaching the Blog" panel.
The audience for these things seems to be an interesting mix of "I want to get started but I have no technical expertise" to "I use them now but I'm concerned about how I'm using them and how I could better use them." Many who used the journaling approach to blogs in their class have been disappointed by the disenchantment of their students or with the quality of their production.
One panelist brought up an interesting point though. Just because it's trite and simplistic to us doesn't make it unvaluable.
Another brought up that class blogs should have rules whereby the instructor defines the rhetorical situation more specifically for the student, rather than letting the student roam.
There seemed to be a concern about being "true" to the blogging format by avoiding borders between the personal and the professional. The space between them is so-often navigated by bloggers that it's sometimes hard to reign it in for a class blog, but I think it's vital if instructors want to have a mature cross-blog dialogue going on in their class. Students should learn to recognize that different rhetorical situations demand different things of their ability to communicate. We are not being untrue to blogging by asking that they honor this. The format serves us, we do not serve the format.
This afternoon, there will be a "Forced Blogging" discussion of more structured ways to use blogs in classrooms. More then...
Like an iceburg, I've been working away though you can hardly tell it here.
Technical issues (comment spam), teaching weirdness (two sections of Technical Writing in the WebCT environment) and a couple of big other jobs are getting in the way of blogging, my one true love.
I'm going to be better...starting now.