Excellent post, Tyra.

Let me say this: I think that this is one of the ways in which using the blog remakes (remediates) the classroom. Face it, being a teacher does not afford the convenience and neatness of a job that allows you to either be "on" or "off" the clock. You're always on.

And I think that your consideration of your students' "personal" spaces and "real" lives is quite generous; however, the university experience, the residential model where the student immerses herself in the pursuit of _____ (I'll let someone else fill that in), has been handily laid by the wayside for some time now. Using technology to better immerse students in their studies, I think, brings us back to that model where teachers and students literally lived as neighbors, shared meals (ok, now I'm waxing, uh, fictitious, probably), you get the pic. Where students learned by living through things, not by simply getting by, going to class, the library, writing some stuff, and getting the grade.

It's my job to ping my students, no? [It's VERY easy for me to say this right now, since I have no students of my own this semester.] [Wait, I kind of do. And we're blogging. :)]

re: i could certainly create an alternate "identity" to work with students online in, and never tell them that the ones i've used so far exist. there are ways to both be "out there" and invisible.

These few lines especially got me thinking again about the managed identity, psudonyms and public trajectories of the web. By no means am I settled yet in thinking this way, but I'd like to tentatively suggest that we must present ourselves in blogs as if we expect someone to make the connection (unless we leave no crumbs whatsoever). I strongly prefer to blog very little about my students because I expect them to follow the flight, piece together the clues, and discern that their teacher is, indeed, writing. And I guess this goes for other folks too (prospective employers, for another) who might Google a name and learn about web presence long before learning via any other bodily presence. I've never tried to anonymize myself online (except in a few goofy comments on other people's blogs, for kicks), and, at moments like the other day when a student *found* my blog *during* class and hollered "My god, it that your ankle?", I was in an awkwardly teachable moment--a moment where I was being read in ways I could never have predicted (could I?). Site stats tell me that my name (full and proper, first last) has, as a search query, solicited my blog eight times in January. Granted, other folks share this name (what are there, 20 other fine people named just like me), and I have no idea what these searches are for. But I try to blog as if students might search my name and, in searching, find my blog.

Hey, Tyra, you ought to think about sending a trackback to the Lowe & Williams article! The trackback URL is https://blog.lib.umn.edu/cgi-bin/blogosphere/mt-tb.cgi/5

Yeah, Derek, I definitely know what you mean. I'm something like #3 or 4 in a Google search just for "Clancy." Plus, my course site is a subdomain of my blog domain name, so if they hacked the URL they could easily find it. I write accordingly.

But I do have a pseudonymous online life too, like you said, Tyra, for far-off friends, in my case friends from home. I'm curious about the emotional reservations you mentioned; it's clear from reading your post that you don't really think the instructor has the panoptic gaze, the power to be omnipresent across the entire web. Students can have blogs and MySpace accounts and accounts on discussion boards that we don't know about, audiences of their own choosing, as you say, no problem at all.

I'm just interested in getting to the root of these questions you raise about emotional reservations and assumptions of public/private (and clarifying what those questions are), and I don't know if this response is at all helpful, but there it is.

I'm new to the blogging thing, and have many mixed feelings about it, some of which came out in the notes I took for this weeks reading. Your comment, Tyra, reminded me of the comment from the kairosnews list, I think from Jay Cross, that weblogs give students complete ownership over their texts. I'm not sure that's entirely true when the weblog is part of a course assignment, for the reasons you offer above about being mindful of the audience. I think there needs to be some space between our students and ourselves too. As Madeline points out, when one teaches, one is always "on". It takes real effort to maintain some boundaries and reatin a sense of private life for oneself. I'm pretty open with what I tell my students about my academic experiences, but carefully reserved about my personal life. Blogging blurs that in some ways, and is probably part of why I resist the notion that a blog replaces a written "diary" or journal. I can't imagine giving up the latter in favor of the former. The latter feels truly private and owned to me. The former doesn't.