I think you're on to something, Derek, with the comment about legitimating pedagogy by comparison to existing (and therefore accepted) forms. It seems to me that the last thing "we" want to see happen is for blogs to become just another in the long line of pedagogical debates, that what we need instead is to preserve the sort of chaos and rejection of traditional forms that blogging offers. Someone, I think it was Mike, commented in another post about the potential conflict between the nature of bloging and teaching traditional argument forms. I submit that blogging is an argument, in that "medium is the message" sort of way.

the question then becomes, if we as teachers take to blogging as a primary form, do we risk being denied the "rewards" of the academy, or can we make the case for those rewards without falling into the "historical connection of justification" mode? This, you will recall, was a concern about online teaching (and still is, in many institutions), so it's something I'm curious about how we as students will anticipate and work with.

One of the things I notice when we (or Brooks et al.) talk about remediation, and something that you both have struck to the heart of, is that blogging mediate the writing in very different ways. I submit that blogs are conversations, as opposed to the oneway street of journals for class, where it's not just

• the teacher responding to student writing
• the students writing to/for the teacher
• the formal oranizing principles of models of exemplary writing (as Derek referred to them)

But instead should be a site

• for students to repond to each other
• for students to write to each other and for the teacher to write as a peer (in so much as that is possible)
• for invention and connection, like a giant mixing bowl

Above all I think that the nature of the writing in blogs, due to audience expanding beyond the teacher, can and should be conceived of very differently. Saddling blogs with the baggage of prior, less dynamic, forms seems to defeat one of the coolest things about them. While we can't do away with the structures of the classroom entirely (the assumption here being a blog assigned as part of a class project) we can increase students' awareness of how ideas turn into writing, how links get constructed and modified, and let them in on the dirty little secret that formal academic writing isn't so much speaking form a position of authority (a.k.a. condescending to the audience) as it is putting voices into conversation on a given plane.

Both of your comments lead me to think about the way weblogs refigure audiences. Blogging makes our teaching and, with various ethical repurcussions, out students' writing available to whatever interested audience read or comment, whether administrators, parents, colleagues in other departments, students, folks from beyond the academy, etc. Just tonight in class, I had a student who--in an aha! moment--asked how we can tell who is reading the course weblog I have going in WRT205. Briefly (we're always running out of time in class!), I said that we can look at server data to ascertain who's checking out the blog, which search terms are calling up our course blog entries, and, to a degree how long readers from identifiable IP addresses are looking at the blog (whether they're reading, who knows).

And Tyra, peer-to-peer sharing of writing is, for me, one of the real up-sides of what a blog makes possible. The comments allow for genuine, interested interchanges (although commenting is, in some courses, compulsory).

It is the step up in peer-to-peer sharing of writing that has me excited, as well, D. As we often noticed last semester, unless we were presenting in class with the obligatory handout, we seldom got to look at each other's writing--style or content.

Not only do we get to read each others' writing, but blogging allows us to do the in-the-hall chat in a form where we can lead and follow each other to various points of view, inerpretations of essays, and supplementary articles immediately.

The interesting pedagogical adjustment to think about, I believe, is to recognize that blogging leads to far more reading than before---I'm following links (not making any yet, *G*) and reading far beyond the essays assigned for this week, as well as beginning to get the hang of following all of y'alls comments....how do we adjust our reading expectations of our students if we choose to class blog?