Last Word

No question, blogs are an exciting writing tool, one of the most interesting and potentially most useful to come to the writing classroom since email. Blogs work well for writing projects like the two I just described, where individual students publishing texts they own. But it's become clear to me that blogs are not as useful as the relatively old-fashioned technology of electronic mailing lists for writing that is interactive and dynamic. How does the saying go? If it ain't broke...

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I don't want to conclude by giving the impression that I think blogs have little use or value in teaching or that emailing list are always far superior to them. Far from it.

I like blogs. I read blogs frequently and I keep a blog of my own. At the 2003 CCCCs in New York City, I gave a presentation about how blogs could be a very useful tool for scholars to further the discussion they began in other publications. In this scenario, blogs could be a space for the writer to publish updates, reply to reader commentaries, and point interested readers to other publications.

There are several ways to take advantage of the strengths of web logs in the writing classroom, and in some ways, I believe some of the colleagues I mention earlier in this essay are leading the way. I'd like to briefly outline two other "good ideas," one that I've been using in my own teaching after my blog failure, and one that I am planning on using this coming school year.

The first approach is one I've been using in my sections of the class "Writing, Style, and Technology," a 300 level writing class for English majors and minors at EMU. My students are using blogs as part of a project where they examine two well-known writing style manuals, William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White's The Elements of Style and Joseph Williams' Style: Lessons Toward Clarity and Grace. My goal with this project is not to simply study the "how to" advice in terms of "good writing" and style in these books-- though both do offer advice that my students find useful. Rather, the purpose of the project is to ask students to look below the surface of the advice and to critically reflect on the definitions of "style" these different books offer. For example, we discuss in class some of the cultural assumptions apparent in even the revised version of Strunk and White's book, and we discuss how the fact that Williams is writing for an advanced audience is reflected in the complexity of the examples and advice.

Blog writing enters into this project as we read and discuss the books. In conjunction with the reading assignments, I ask students to respond to several writing prompts in their blog space. In spirit, the writing assignment is not unlike traditional "pen and paper" writing journals. In practice, I think the blog spaces have two significant advantages over paper. First, each posting is date-stamped and immediately accessible to readers (including me, of course) as soon as the writer publishes it. Second, the "public" and accessible nature of the blogs means that it is extremely easy for students to read each others' writing. One of the last blog writing prompts I've used for this exercise asks students to visit, browse through, and write about their colleagues' blog spaces.

Even though I routinely ask students to look at each others' writing in peer review of rough drafts and on the class email discussion, the response students have to each others' blog spaces has so far seemed unique and, for lack of a better word, more "authentic" than in some other forums. And in principle, this is the purpose and indeed spirit of blogs: a space where individual writers can easily publish texts that are easily accessed by interested readers.

The second approach is one I am trying for the first time during the Fall 2004 semester in a graduate course I will be teaching, Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice. The course is a required one for students in our MA program in "The Teaching of Writing," and while the title doesn't imply it, there is a pedagogical emphasis in the course. As a part of the research/seminar project this semester, I will be asking students to keep a "research blog" where they will post information about their ongoing project. While there will be due dates for certain posts (for example, students will need to post an entry about the topic of their project by a certain date), I am also hoping that students will come to see their class blog space as a useful research and prewriting tool-- which is how I see my own academic blog work.

Of course, I haven't experienced any of the results of this project yet. But given what I've learned from when blogs go "bad" and also when blogs can work, I am confident that this assignment will be successful.

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Blogs are "Individualistic" rather than "Collaborative"

Blogs do not work well as a facilitator of dynamic discussion and interaction between between members of a specific discourse community (a writing class, for example), and my point here has been that, in terms of writing pedagogy, they do not have the truly interactive or "collaborative" writing potential of an electronic mailing list.

I suppose though that much of this depends on what one means by "collaboration." For example, in his essay "Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration," Bob Goodwin-Jones speaks of the collaborative potentials of a variety of different asynchronous and synchronous technologies. I don't disagree with his general descriptions of the uses and values of these technologies. However, as he describes blogs, I do question the extent to which the writing done in these spaces is highly "collaborative." Goodwin-Jones writes:

Blogs are well suited to serve as on-line personal journals for students, particularly since they normally enable uploading and linking of files. Language learners could use a personal blog, linked to a course, as an electronic portfolio, showing development over time. By publishing the blog on the Internet, the student has the possibility of writing for readers beyond classmates, not usually possible in discussion forums. Readers in turn can comment on what they're read, although blogs can be placed in secured environments as well. Self-publishing encourages ownership and responsibility on the part of students, who may be more thoughtful (in content and structure) if they know they are writing for a real audience. This same degree of personal responsibility is lacking in discussion forums.

I certainly agree with all of the possible and valuable uses for blogs that Goodwin-Jones outlines here for blogs, and I think these are some of the ways my colleagues and Iare using blogs in our teaching. Blogs, as Goodwin-Jones points out, foster an ownership of text, a personal responsibility for writing that is distinctly different from the give and take interactions of the discussion in forums like email.

But in my way of thinking of it, these are not writing activities that are "collaborative," "interactive," or "dynamic." Quite the opposite. Blogs have the distinct advantage of allowing individuals to easily publish texts that can be responded to by others to be sure, but those texts are no more "collaborative" than texts published in conventional print.

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Deliver and publish; Discuss and interact

In the end, I think this student made use of the emailing list in this instance because she understood something about the difference between a blog and an emailing list long before I did. If you have a piece of writing that you want to "deliver" or "publish" as a more or less finished text, put it on a blog. If you have something to say to a particular audience in order to enter into a discussion with them, put it on a mailing list.

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Email as discussion space; Blogs as publishing space

My students' email exchange-- how it came about and how I think we should understand it-- is very much in line with what we have understood the uses and dynamics of email discussions to be for quite a while. As I noted in my 1995 essay "'How Will This Improve Student Writing?' Reflections on an Exploratory Study of Online and Off-line Texts," there were numerous studies in the late 1980's and early 1990's that specifically argued that email discussions fostered dynamic, interactive, and "real" writing activities.

Michael Spitzer suggested in his 1990 essay "Local and global networking: implications for the future" that networked communications could encourage a greater sense of audience by fostering an "online discourse community" where writers and readers are genuinely communicating with each other and see a purpose behind their writing beyond the assignment itself. He argued that because computer networks change the dynamic of the classroom to an interactive and social one, they "have the potential to transform student writing from listless academic drudgery into writing that is purposeful and reader-based" (59).

Gail Hawisher noted in her 1992 essay "Electronic meetings of the minds: research, electronic conferences, and composition studies" that online environments provide "a real and expanded audience" that student writers can return to with minimal restrictions on time and place (86). And in their 1989 article "Computer conferencing and collaborative learning: a discourse community at work," Delores K. Schriner and William C. Rice note that when students posted messages to each other via a computer network, "they knew they had an audience beyond the teacher, and as a result their writing emerged as 'real,' 'volunteered,' even urgent" (475).

There have been refinements over the years in our understandings of the discursive dynamics of email exchanges of course, but the basic premise of these articles (articles that, in computers and writing terms, are "ancient history") is still valid. I would argue that the student posted her message to the class electronic mailing list instead of to a blog space-- even though there were very few messages posted to the class emailing list previous to her post-- because she intuitively knew that her message would actually reach the "real audience" of the class community. She felt her message was urgent, important, and beyond the realm of an assignment, and that her best option for getting her message to her specific audience was with the class emailing list.

Blogs, on the other hand, do not foster this sort of dynamic discussion very well. The jury is still out, of course-- blogs are still quite new, and as I hope I've made clear, my classes' failure with blogs had as much to do with my poor structure of the assignment as it had to do with the technology itself.

Nonetheless, while blogs are interactive and dynamic texts in the sense that there is a dialog between bloggers and their texts, the dialog is not the literal sort that is fostered and promoted by email exchanges. Email posts to mailing lists are drafts or works in progress, they are conversational in their direction toward an audience, and more often than not, they demand a literal response. Blog posts are more finished, are more personal in that the audience is the writer as much as it is a potential reader, and while readers might "respond" in some sort of metaphoric way, they are not as likely to write a direct response to the writer. Certainly, blog writers can enable commenting features that allow readers to respond on the writer's post (4). But even when readers are invited to comment on blogs, they are only allowed to comment on posts initiated by the writer, and the writer can ultimately control who is or isn't allowed to post comments.

Finally, to the extent that collaboration is fostered by the "interaction" and "discussion" characterized by the exchange of ideas and the give and take of a group of writers, I think that email offers a much better opportunity for collaborative writing. After all, blogs are in their most basic sense electronic journals; more often in not, they are spaces for publishing highly individualistic writing.

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Turning point: discussion and the class emailing list

One of the last assignments I had for the blog groups was to come up with some readings to share with the rest of the class-- essentially, I was asking for students to come up with relevant and current readings. One of the groups suggested the Susan Herring essay "Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage to the New Frontier." Now, I wasn't very happy with this group's choice because while I think the basic premise of the essay is true, I think it's very dated (it was published in 1994) and I think that Herring's approach to issues of gender online are a bit simplistic. At the risk of being reductive myself, her reading is more or less an essentialist one, where men are aggressive and uncooperative and from Mars, and women are kind and cooperative and from Venus. Again, it's not that I completely disagree with her; it's just that I think it's more complicated than what she seems to be suggesting.

We didn't get to talk about the essay in class because we talked about other essays that students had suggested, and without thinking very carefully, I off-handedly and inappropriately referred to it as "that feminist essay" at the close of that night's class. The next morning, I checked my email and found a message posted to the class mailing list from one of the more vocal female students in the class(3), a post that was made at about 1 o'clock in the morning. She begins by qualifying herself and noting that this wasn't a criticism of me as the teacher, and also by noting that while she considers herself to be a feminist, she didn't want to come across as a "feminazi," so to speak. Then she wrote:

I just wanted to draw a parallel to the one big article that we did not talk about tonight, just about the only thing the semester that I actually cared to read (which is odd because I'm interested in the topic, hmmm). It's the article that Steve called 'the feminist article,' the one that Lisa suggested, about gender differences in communication on the internet. I found it quite fascinating and wanted to discuss it tonight. But did I even feel comfortable enough to bring it up? Nope. But I think that it applies as accurately to "The Rhetoric of Cyberspace" as anything else we've read.

She went on to do a reading of the blogs, noting that there was some subtle flaming by the men in the class in the blog spaces, and some of the patterns of communication in the blogs was very much in line with what Herring was talking about in her essay. Finally, she noted that the male dynamics on the blogs ended up appearing again and again in our face-to-face class meetings as well.

As you can imagine, this email opened up quite a discussion, one where just over half the students in the class offered their take on the discussion practices in class and on the blogs, the Herring article, and what this student originally said. The email discussion carried on to the face-to-face meeting the following week, and all of this was done in a more or less polite though pointed and intellectually rigorous way. I found it to be a real turning point for the better in the class because it was the first time during the semester where I thought students fully engaged in the subject matter, and also the first time in which there was a connection between what happened in our face-to-face class meeting discussions and our electronic discussions.

I don't want to dwell on the specifics of this discussion, though it is arguable that it is indeed the specifics of the discussion that motivated this student and thus put this exchange in motion. It's arguable that it was not the mechanism being used or not used, but rather my bad treatment of an article this student was very interested in discussing that got the ball rolling here. However, it is very interesting that the student put this message on the class emailing list and not in a blog space.

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A "non-dynamic" failure

I thought this blog assignment failed most interestingly in its inability to generate a dynamic discussion, particularly in comparison to an emailing list. This is the first class I have taught in a long time in which there was quite a bit of reading and there wasn't some sort of required discussion taking place on an electronic mailing list. In my other advanced writing classes, the mailing list is the place where students talk about the reading before the class, giving the group a starting point for discussion and giving me an idea about where students are "coming from" on the readings. But that wasn't the use of the mailing list for this seminar. In fact, before the events surrounding the Herring essay, there were fewer than two dozen messages sent to the list in three months worth of class.

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Failure, Part II: Defining a desire/need to write/blog

Certainly, much of the failure of this assignment can be traced to its open-ended nature. As I already said, I purposefully gave my students minimal directions with this project because I didn't know what we would come up with (after all, I hadn't attempted blogging in my teaching before), but also because they were grad students (i.e., "grown-ups") and I thought in less need of the forced motivation by assignment than some of my undergraduate classes. I also thought that the blog technology very much called for this sort of open-ended and unformed writing assignment. My goal was to create an opportunity/space where my students would simply just want to write.

But what I found is my "open-ended" non-assignment translated into "vagueness."

Maybe I should have known before I began that this wasn't going to work, but I was disappointed that my students didn't "just write," if given the opportunity. I still feel a bit disappointed, actually. Every once in a while, in conference presentations or in essays in journals like Kairos, someone idealistically suggests that writing teachers ought to focus on fostering and nurturing an atmosphere where students can "learn" instead of being "taught," where students can write not because they are being required to do so by some sort of "teacherly" assignment but because they want to write, where students aren't required to write old-fashioned essays, but where they can create and explore new forms. And so forth.

Well, in the nutshell, that's what I felt I tried, and, in the nutshell, it didn't work. And when I talked with my students about this, they more or less said that they needed the direction of a teacherly assignment to write, and they weren't going to "just want to write" in a blog space (or anywhere else, for that matter) just because they were given the opportunity. Perhaps this is common sense, but it is a piece of common sense I think is too often forgotten in ideas about fostering student writing in general, and fostering student writing with various computer tools like blogs.

Students (or anyone else) don't just want to write, and certainly not in a blog space. As Walker puts it in her "Talk at Brown" notes, "How empowering is it to be forced to blog?" And yet, that is ultimately the power and even charm of web logs: it is very easy to master technology and interface in which just about anyone who wants to can post their writings and thoughts about anything. However, like the paper diaries and journals that web logs are so often compared, the writer has to have a reason-- and generally, a personal reason-- to write in the first place.

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Failure, Part I:Bad blog writing

As of August 2004, the class blog spaces are still up and running and available if you follow the links on the class homepage, though some of the archives were no longer functioning. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I thought the blogs turned out poorly. Some students posted repeatedly, while other students barely posted at all. The amount of text per posting varied considerably. While there were times in which some students wrote longer messages, more often than not, the posts were short, merely links to other documents, or text that was "cut and pasted" from another source. There was very little writing that could be described as reflective, dynamic, collaborative, or interactive. There was almost no exchange or conversation between posters, and no"themed" group writing project emerged from any of the blogs, which was one of the goals of the assignment. It wasn't even clear if the students were reading other posts. Individuals made their posts in an erratic and inconsistent manner, and then they moved on.

In other words, the experiment failed.

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Hindsight

I need to acknowledge three issues that, in hindsight, helped to make this blogging exercise turn out badly. First, we used blogger because it is extremely easy and it does not require any sort of server access (if using the blogspot option). It does support collaborative writing to the extent that blog writers can "invite" other users permission to post on the blog, but this project may have been more effective had I used a different blog-type option that better facilitated collaborative writing.

Second, this assignment did not have any specific requirements in terms of the number of postings, the subject of the postings, or just about anything else. While we set up subject groups on the first day of class, this was a quick and somewhat haphazard exercise, and I tried to make it clear that students were more than welcome to drift away from this initial focus.

Now, it's clear in hindsight that I could have headed off both of these problems had I pointed students to an example of a successful collaborative blog like Kairos News or Crooked Timber. However, I didn't do that at the time, in part because it simply didn't occur to me then, and in part because I wanted this assignment to be as"open-ended" as possible. I was unsure what the results of the assignment were going to be and because of that, I wanted the students' blog spaces to evolve more "organically" than they would have had I established more strict requirements.

Third and most important for my purposes here, the blog spaces were the only element of the class that was a full-fledged "electronic discussion." While there was a class electronic mailing list, one that figures prominently into my discussion here in a moment, there wasn't a specific requirement or expectation that students would post messages on the mailing list. The list was supposed to serve as a class housekeeping device where I would post updates to the evolving class activities and where students could post links or announcements of their own. The discussion and interaction was supposed to take place on the blogs.

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Beginnings of my "bad example"

The source of my bad blogging example was a graduate seminar called "Rhetoric and Culture of Cyberspace." While it was a course part of Eastern Michigan University's "Teaching of Writing" MA program, our readings and discussions approached the idea of "cyberspace" from a lot of different directions: computers and the Internet of course, but also contemporary media, technical innovation in everyday life, technology and security/counter-terrorism efforts, and so forth. Most of the course work and course grade focused on fairly traditional assignments-- a seminar paper, a book review presentation and essay, and a final.

The collaboratively written blog space was a small part of the class and described from the beginning as an "experiment" for me as a teacher. I thought the collaborative writing experience would be best if the groups were relatively small and if the subjects of the student writing spaces were not merely a response to the assigned reading. So, toward the end of our first class meeting, we brainstormed on the general topics of the blog spaces and then formed three collaborative groups each made up of four or five students. Their loosely defined subjects/topics for their different blog spaces were "Cyber-Communication," "Cyber-Terrorism/War/Surveillance," and "Cyber-Media." On this first night of class, I also introduced students to blogger.com and blogspot, the popular ad-based blog software/server we used for this project.

When I described this project as "an experiment," I meant just that. This is what I wrote in the course description which is available on the class web site:

You may be wondering "what will this project look like?" and "what is he expecting from us here?" Quite honestly, I'm not completely sure yet. This is the first time I've tried this assignment, so when I describe it as an "experimental" writing assignment, I mean it. We will have to see how it goes. All I ask is that you give this experiment a chance by staying involved with it, that you be willing to take some chances, and that you remain open-minded.

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What this is all about

This text, which has grown out of my own experiences and a presentation I gave at the 2003 Computers and Writing Conference, offers a reason and a way to NOT use blogs in the writing classroom. Blogs certainly have a place in writing classes, and I discuss one such example in my concluding entry for this essay/blog. But I still see the dynamic and conversational exchange made possible by a rather "old fashioned" electronic writing genre, email-- specifically, an electronic mailing list discussion-- as uniquely valuable in writing classes. In fact, as I think my example of blogging gone bad demonstrates, I think my students' return to email as a discussion forum resulted in a reborn sense of collaboration and interaction.

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Writing teachers using blogs

And, of course, composition and rhetoric specialist have started to use blogs for their classes. For example, the students in Derek Mueller's Winter 2004 section of "Writing Purposes and Research" at Park University are writing in this blog space. Mueller's syllabus makes clear that from the third week of the class on, students are expected to post four times a week. As is evident by her links to "Class blogs" on her own blog space, Samantha Blackmon is using blogs as part of the class discussion for her classes at Purdue University. And then there are the numerous examples of weblogs developed primarily for writing classes at Joe Moxley's Writing Blogs space. Quite literally, hundreds of different blogs are hosted via Moxley's site, most presumably having to do with various types of writing and composition courses.

Clearly, the role of blogs in different writing classes varies considerably. However, a quick glance through these examples (especially Mueller's and Blackmon's) would suggest that many writing teachers seem to be using blog spaces as places to facilitate dynamic and interactive writing experiences. This approach to the use of blogs is consistent with what at least some advocates of weblogs in educational settings have suggested for a while now. In their T.H.E. Journal Online essay "Content Delivery in the 'Blogosphere,'" Richard E. Ferdig and Kaye D. Trammell claim that the benefits of blogs in classrooms include giving students a "legitimate" space to participate in discussions and to share diverse perspectives with readers in and outside of the classroom. Ferdig and Trammell argue that, "While blogging, students quickly learn that posted content can be read by those other than the teacher and their classmates. Blogging opens up assignments beyond the teacher-student relationship, allowing the world to grade students and provide encouragement or feedback on their writings." In a December 2003 "Talk at Brown" University, well-known blog writer Jill Walker suggested that blogs are one important way to "teach our students ... network literacy: writing in a distributed, collaborative environment."

I am as excited about the uses of blogs in my own writing and teaching as any of these other innovators. But after a failed experiment in teaching with blogs, I have begun to wonder if it is advisable or even possible to see blogs as a collaborative or especially "interactive" writing environment. (2) Or, more accurately, I've come to believe we shouldn't substitute blogs for other electronic writing tools that foster discussion and interactive writing, particularly emailing lists, commonly known as "listservs."

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Introduction

Like email and the World Wide Web in their times, blogs have become the "killer app" of the moment. Three years ago, all but the most hardcore of followers of Internet phenomenons would not have thought much of the term "blog," other than perhaps it was a misspelling of "blob." Now you know you are most certainly not a mainstream Internet user if you are unaware that "blog" is an adaptation of the term "Web Log," and that blogs exist as personal journals, professional writing spaces, news sources, or some combination of all of the above.

In their short history (Rebecca Blood pegs the beginning of sites we recognize as blogs as about 1998), blogs have been labeled as a form of "new journalism", and they have been a part of the news coverage of the war in Iraq (see, for example, "Where is Raed?" at http://dearraed.blogspot.com/, and the March 29, 2003 NPR "Weekend Edition" story "News By Web Log"). As reported on NPR's "All Things Considered" on July 28, 2003, blogs were instrumental in democratic candidate Howard Dean's fund raising efforts, though not as important in his fall from political grace. Even Dear Abby (actually, the daughter of the original Abby) has weighed in on proper blog conduct.

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Is this an "essay" or a "blog?" Your reading choices...
About this essay, about this blog

Read as an essay (right now, you are reading it as a blog)

Entries:
Last Word

But Blogs aren't all bad: two "good" ideas for teaching with them

Blogs are "Individualistic" rather than "Collaborative"

Deliver and publish; Discuss and interact

Email as discussion space; Blogs as publishing space

Turning point: discussion and the class emailing list

A "non-dynamic" failure

Failure, Part II: Defining a desire/need to write/blog

Failure, Part I:Bad blog writing

Hindsight

Beginnings of my "bad example"

What this is all about

Writing teachers using blogs

Introduction

Notes

Works Cited