Ok, now I know Alan likes the “chaotic, unorganized thread of this discussion across multiple blog spaces,” but I need organization, dammit. :0) So, just to keep it all in one place, here’s an updated list of the commentary in this discussion, since it seems like one that has some importance:
There is a lot of very thoughtful and relevant discourse going on here and it’s difficult to distill it down into conherent summary (which may be a response to my organization gene.) At some point when I get four or five free hours (lol,) maybe I’ll attempt it. For now, here are some of what’s resonating with me from the most recent posts.
Greg, who took every instance of the word blog in my original post and substituted the word write (or variants thereof)j says:
IMHO, there are only two formal qualities of weblogs that are inherently distinct from other writing forms — hypertextuality and an expanded audience. (More accurately, these are characteristics of writing on the web, whether a weblog or a corporate website, not formal characteristics specific to weblogs.) I tend to think that, expect perhaps with adult learners, the generation gap makes most of us fairly ineffective teachers of approaches to hypertextuality. Most of the kids grew up on this stuff and understand it better than their teachers ever will. And with regard to an expanded writing audience, I’ve written about that before in response to Will. An expanded audience certainly changes the way we write, but it may be more of a chiling affect than a boon for developing writers.
The other stuff — RSS, permalinks, Trackback, threaded vs. flat comments, reverse chronological order, etc etc — are just features of web publishing software that really have very little to do with what happens between the four walls of the text entry box. Oh, sure, you can talk about social software and how all these features of blogging can create an intertwingly net of loosely joined pieces yadda yadda yadda. But none of that actually works –for us or for students — until an individual sits down at a computer and opens a vein.
That about the clearest distincition that I’ve read yet in terms of how Weblogs change the writing classroom. And it ratchets up the whole discussion another notch, I think.
Oliver talks at length about the many paths of learning and asks a really good question about what students take away from blogging:
In other words what is the revenue of an investment into blogging for students? The problem is that there is no direct revenue – and sometimes there may be none at all. The whole blogging point seems just be too time consuming and “webbish” to keep attention to it. Like Stephen Downes said: there would also be no point in requiring him to practice field goals.
There is still some things to decide upon for me. But currently I am thinking about how to blend the weblogging activity with the campus environment more. I want to plant this tiny local blogsphere into the real spaces. The whole idea of the blogging for me was to nurture discourse among students and researchers. And that will going to happen sooner or later – this way or the other.
And Ken, who has been doing some of the best pushing on this topic, weighs in with this:
Let me step back for a moment and speak from another perspective. For more than a decade I was a writing program administrator. If one of my faculty members had come to me and said, “My students are writing unguided weblogs, with goals of their own making, and if we are lucky in a few months they will become part of a vital blogging community where they will learn much about reading and writing and their blogging topic,” I would have had to ask some very hard questions about whether the teacher’s course design was going to achieve the department’s course goals.
That puts me on one side of the discussion, clearly, an anti-utopian side. But I think those are fair questions for the tuition-paying students and their tax-paying parents to ask. A faculty has to have an answer to those questions by the time the inevitable complaints come in, or (I hope) sooner. Being in the schools instead of at college, Will has to answer even more questions and be ready for even more complaints, as he has documented very well.
And yet, and yet. I think of the huge amounts of energy high school students commit to sports and theater productions and newspapers. I think of some of the times I’ve most loved my job, when colleagues and I have made something worthwhile together through thoughtful and playful collaboration. I find myself thinking that the real and utopian space of blogging resembles in some ways these other real and utopian spaces I’ve known. They have in common at least one thing: we were making something together. As Will said, we were willing to invest in the conversation.
So, do I believe in a course weblog that resides in a Summerhill-like free space, untainted by the teacher’s evil grading pen or the school’s pedagogical plans? Right at the moment, no, I don’t believe in that, because it leaves me no answer if the tuition- and tax-payers call to ask a question. And because I suspect that it is, for many students, an unreal utopian space. But I do believe in the real and utopian space bloggers sometimes describe, because I’ve seen it elsewhere in life and because I recall the electric charge of starting to give enough readers something worth their time to comment on.
I think I come from that Utopian space first in my thinking. I know I have a tendency to do that with just about everything…it’s tough when reality settles in. To me, it’s this true love of the genre that I need and want to have students experience. Nice to be reminded that there are other areas in life as well.
Finally, here’s a paragraph from Mario. I have no idea what it means, but I’ve always found his comments on my site to be extemely worthwhile, so I’ll just assume this is as well.
Sur le plan de l’analyse réflexive , j’ai lu cet après-midi de beaux exemples de textes qui témoignent de l’engagement émotif des jeunes dans leurs apprentissages. Je pense à ce texte, à celui-ci et à ce dernier (et il y en a d’autres…). Dans ces trois cybercarnets publics, les textes qui émergent des ateliers d’écriture m’émeuvent beaucoup également. Bref, les jeunes s’investissent au-delà des tâches demandées par les enseignants parce qu’ils “font siens” les projets d’écriture des ateliers. De plus, la réaction de la communauté agit comme catalyseur de cette motivation. S’il n’y avait pas de communauté, je ne pense pas que ces textes (1, 2 et 3) en provenance de Londres auraient été écrits…
I’m off to BloggerCon later this morning where I hope to corner some unsuspecting educators and beat them over the head until we get some answers to all of this…
I’ve used Babel Fish and the help of a friend to assemble a rough translation of Mario’s passage:
“While analyzing and reflecting, I have read this afternoon beautiful examples of texts which testify to the emotional engagement of these young people in their education. I think of this text, this one and this last (and there are others like them…). In these three public cybernotebooks, the texts which emerge from the writing workshops also move me very much. In short, the young people have invested themselves beyond the tasks requested by the teachers because they have made the workshop projects their own. Moreover, the response of the community acts like a catalyst of this motivation. If they did not have this community, I do not think that these texts (1, 2 and 3) about London would have been written…”
Well Ken, it’s a pretty good translation. The main point I wanted to bring is that the emergence of a learning community is the key factor, I think. Our goal in our school was to create a kind of different way to learn : be part of a community who put in front learning using tool who can help us to converse and getting down the walls of the school. Weblogs became more important than we thought because the importance of the audience we developped in the process. The teacher kept his importance in that strategy to bring people part of the community reactive and proactive in the authentic task we “put on table” who generate the process of learning of our student. Academic program still there but he is not the beginning of the learning process. Students can’t be “fuelled” of knowledge. We should bring them to ask for knowledge and blogs help us in that sense. Young boys and girls want to write and publish correctly because the existence of large audience who are there to read or react… The emergence of a large community is responsable of the results we have in our blogging experiment (more than 4500 posts in public and private spaces and more than 7000 comments; and I dont talk about improvement of quality of those dialogues ) !