Most of the students in my class, therefore, had experienced no small amount of frustration that morning. Much as I loathe the phrase "teachable moment," I quickly found it to be one and we spent most of our class considering how and where the morning course broke down, and what this breakdown could tell us about this particular use of a course blog and about weblogs in general. One of the terms that van Dijk uses in her piece is Bolter and Grusin's "remediation," and in many ways, each of our articles for this week were about remediation. But rather than considering them in detail, our overarching question for the week was to what degree a course weblog can remediate the classroom experience.

I won't repeat here all the stuff I say in the document on course rhythm, except to note that this was one of my personal themes. There are specific elements in weblogs (MT doesn't allow rapid posting, for example, in an attempt to discourage auto-spamming) that work against trying to hold a virtual class in one. Nor does it track conversations especially well if they are happening quickly and in several places.

One of the themes I've hammered at for the past couple of weeks is the way that weblogs work against the product-oriented, "binge-and-purge," event model of academia, and in many ways, we benefitted from the concrete example of an attempt to replicate/remediate the event of a class meeting in the context of an environment that is only partially friendly to such an attempt. Many of the issues raised in our discussion (the multiplicity of channels, the difficulty of control, the learning curve both for the technology and the course material, etc.) connected in interesting ways to the question of what a weblog is and does.

I'd love to share more, but I'm working from memory, and my recap is far from exhaustive. Anyone else who'd like to contribute should feel welcome...