In giving a little more thought to the concept of "networks" and teaching -- or more specifically learning that occurs online or in other distributed formats...

Designing an online writing class (with or without the use of blogs) is a little like designing a distributed computing network. You have nodes (students) that access and use functional objects (course content). Although the content may be centralized on a single server (the LMS), each node accesses and exploits the objects differently (the student's learning style), leveraging the object on an "as needed" basis.

This analogy, I know, is extremely rudimentary, but I think there is space in any discussion of networks to consider how one learns as part of a network. I'm also wondering if discourse community research also lends itself to these discussions.

There was a lot of buzz a few years ago about neural networks and the ability of a computer to understand -- to derive meaning -- through pattern recognition. Certainly, blogs would facilitate "learning" through similar methods. Students consider information and match or diff it against existing knowledge to situate or predict possible outcomes or applications for the new information.

Generically, it seems that all types of networks are possible sites for adaptive learning -- learning how to do something based on the information available at the time of learner/information contact.

I see your point about blogspaces being different from lists, but I'm not sure I agree about the measurability. Some lists, at least, have archive that would reflect numbers of posts, etc., although it would certainly take some work to compile them. And even though list membership isn't publicly available, would it make a difference? It seems to me you can't really track who actually reads the material, no matter who is subscribed to it. Blogging seems to me to be similar. If you're not an active poster, how does anyone know what you've been reading, rather than just subscribed to?

I can already see that blogging is more time-in-front-of-screen than I like, far more than former online class environments required of me. This is going to be a challenge.

i've spent a lot of time this weekend posting to, reading posts in, commenting on, reading comments on, setting up, editing posts, comments, and set-ups, and talking (okay, also arguing, especially where formatting and machine/user/software capatbilities are concerned) with my darling spouse about blogs. it's been a very bloggy weekend. & coming out of this weekend, the thing that's the most striking to me about the difference between blog participation/membership/listed involvement/etc. and listserv participation is the degree of time and investment it seems to take.

this feels more serious somewhow. even though, were i on an academic listserv involving field giants, and i posted to it knowing that my words could end up in the mailboxes of the (not so) rich and famous, and even though i might agonize over the details posting here that, really, 15 people in the whole wide world might ever read, there's more of a sense of permenance (yet? now? still?) to "web publishing" to me than there is to e-mails to listservs. e-mails have that stigma of reactionary writing--you shoot something off before you've thought through it, and want to take your words back, and can't. here i have to take much more deliberation and effort to get it out there in the first place, which makes my weighing things i say more necessary & automatic, but i can also take them back. i can't un-read them for other people who've actually read them, but i can remove them from the record. or edit them to make a point more clear, to remove something that on reflection seems to intense, to re-think a position. and when i do that, the original disappears from the public record (we'll forget web archives for the moment, okay?), and the new impression i want to make is what remains. so it's both less permenant for being change-able, and MORE permenant, in that you have the ability/option to go back and solidify your "publications." e-mails are always drafts (even when they aren't, they're always read that way, because once the send button is pushed, they're irretrievable). whether other people read this or not, *i* am aware of my accountability to my intentions and my audience, and the fact that i *can* make changes compells me (is that just me?) to do so if/when it's appropriate or necessary.

I continue to be interested by the suggestion that blogs are unlikely to garner much of a widespread audience (now where'd I put my server data?!). Sorry to respond to several issues at once but, well, that's what I'm doing. First, the time switch involved is a (not-so?) basic adjustment from the interface of the page to the interface of the screen. Still experiencing the production of text, albeit in a more meted, evenly distributed kind of way. But reading and writing, yes? It's what we do in graduate programs concerned with composition and rhetoric (as well as many other fields), and I think the ways weblogs encourage such acts is exciting, not least of all for the interest-motivated networks that assemble in unpredictable ways.

A few scattered thoughts on audience: develop a meaty blogroll of folks you actually read and engage with regularly--because you like what they're writing or, at the very least, find it *interesting*. The culture of reciprocity will do most of the rest (you still have to write). Search around the web for a free sitemeter to dump into your index template. It'll tell you who's visiting your site, how long they're staying for, and, depending on the sophistication of the data, it will reveal all kinds of things--about the search terms leading people to your site, about the other bloggers who are linking back to you (because you are a thoughtful, engaged, emerging scholar...or just somebody with groovy ideas from time to time). I promise not to always, endlessly defend blogs and their potentials to enable what we might generally agree to be good stuff (regular, incremental writing, potentially readable by *interested*, ever-shifting discourse communities; developing projects and sensibilities about audience; and self-publishing so that what we write is timely, rather than depending on the publishing elite {I oversimplify} to carry our ideas forward).

My greatest hope for blogs is precisely the excerpt Collin has chosen here. The intangible aspect of starting a conversation, working dynamically on ideas with others, or simply having a space to patch together previously disparate ideas has great potential. However, I am concerned primarily with it ceasing to be a free space. If it becomes a part of the academic advancement scheme, I am worried that the ideas will not flow as readily because it could "break" a career. Also, there is the potential for it to revert to the standard (current) system of journals and publishing because there will be guidelines and conventions and people who are "in."

it seems to me that blogging allows more space for something that academic, traditonal, old-school notions of academic writing and publishing do not. and since we spend so much time talking about the importance of understanding an author's subjectivity and how that informs/influences text and its construction, it makes sense to me that bloggers include "100 things about me."

it takes us, meaning folks in our discipline, a minute to catch on, right? we know that folks are blogging and networking and writing. and that's a good thing. whether or not the academy decides to recognize that blogging...now that's the question. many of our colleagues see the pedagogical merit in blogging. lots of good stuff going on. in fact, i first learned about blogging thru academic channels. i didn't know that others folks, non-academic folks, blogged.

as i learn more about network theory, i'm sure that i'll be better equipped to articulate the academic merits of blogging. for the time being, i'm content to say that it has its place.
it'll be interesting to see how our field makes room.

On what Ty said about blogging breaking a career: this list points to a few folks outside the academy who've been fired because of things they wrote in blogs. This opens up a bunch of other issues--among them: cautionary wisdom about what we disclose about students or colleagues, for example, as well as the real import of the information that gets circulated via weblogs.

Blogs seem to have vast potential as development tools. That alone could be value enough.

Academic merit systems privilege select activities and intellectual artifacts. I don't think the blogosphere in its present form weighs in heavily on either count. The type of activity I see it producing right now would be construed as brainstorming or research networking in an intensive form--collaborative, process work. I don't think that usually gets credit. And the artifact it produces would be hard to get a boundary around, interlinked and transclusive as it is, and radically new in terms of its audience(s) and purposes. Hard to present.

I think academics, as TM and JW suggest, would have to hijack the medium, shake off the journaling metaphor, and either (1) produce an artifact that could be shown to be (or have been) consumed for its intellectual merit, or (2) justify the activity represented by blog transcripts. Of course, there is radically changing the standards for merit. Good luck on that one.

For blogs to move up the academic vita in importance, do more academics need to use them in their classrooms?

We teach composition as a process and value higher-order concerns of thesis, organization, introductions and conclusions, over lower-order concerns of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The thinking goes that once the higher-order concerns are addressed, then the lower-order concerns will almost take care of themselves.

Is using blogs in our classrooms a higher-order concern? That is, if we use blogging more in our classrooms and privledge this organic brainstorming activity, will it's importance on vitas grow in correspondence? Still, I think it will only be as we are able to publish our findings that it's importance will grow.

I think we need more data to convince the skeptics. One of the questions I am asked is, "what good are blogs in comparison to other tools?"