Both yours and Tyra's posts keep bringing me back to the exciting (and daunting) questions what is it that we do when we teach writing, and how does blogging intervene in those conceptions and make us begin to question both pedagogy and form. It is not enough to say that blogging remediates form because that doesn't take into account the classroom, audience, the public. But we cannot merely say the blogging gets rid of poetic literate culture (ala post-literacy) because we are still influenced by all of our old definitions of writing, reading, audience when we blog.

Yes the format and the idea behind using blogs changes how we as teachers and students relate, but it also draws attention to the practices of teaching writing that remain status quo -- audience awareness being one of them. So, when Madeline asks about vanity because it has been a label put on bloggers for way they write, it makes visible just how vain one must be to share their writing no matter what form it takes. (O.K. Perhaps that is an extreme statement; please just go with me for a minute on this one.)

I guess what I am saying is that all of these articles are speaking through their silences, at least to me, and exposing the embedded cultural ideology that surrounds what it means to write, especially in a classroom. Blogging makes teacher a writer, and perhaps carries the possibility of making student writers teachers in some strange form. But what is more interesting to me is how blogging chafes at the edges of our definitions of form and content, teaching and practice, illuminating a long history of embedded belief that seems to have "always been there," just bubbling just below the surface of our practices.

Derek... Okay, so take a look at Bang It Out! and The Golden Mean and tell me what you think my answers to your questions might be. I would tell you myself, but I hope the answers are "readable" on the sites w/o my intervention in your interpretation--and, also, you may read something I had not intended, which just makes the whole exercise more interesting for me :-)

Okay, here's one thing: I find that I am able to relate to my students AS writers w/o having to fake it the way I used to (before I got onto my civic kick--UMKC circa. 1997). It was mostly current-traditional before then (even with Vivion's book)--asking students to engage in the unreality of demonstrating competence in a decontextualized skill in one dialect of English. They knew the writing wasn't real, i.e. not FOR them or others other than me. Before blogs, I pushed them into the public sphere (troubling in many ways, but I did it anyway because I believe(d) in the classical tradition).

I'm not sure we "value" getting in the way of the public as we are mindful of the "privacy" issues regarding our students' writing. I think some of the threads covered this week speak to that - the long-lived nature of a blog entry, the googling potential long after the moment in which that paper/post/comment was entered. We can "tell" our students these things, but I don't think we can expect them to have a full understanding of the potential.

For me, I see blogs as a tool, one of many I'm glad to know about, have at least a rudimentary understanding of the function of, and ability to discuss in rhetorical terms. Beyond that, like any other place where student writing might be exposed to an audience that isn't "in" the room and context where the writing took place, I feel an ethical push to stress the potential pitfalls of the otherwise useful tool.

having said that, it may finally be time for me to post the comment I've been trying to draft since early in the weekend. :)

I'll start by saying that I like what Lowe and Williams had to say, particularly in regard to what is currently common practice in the writing classroom. You've commented to me before about how the use of LMSs to supplement resident courses raise concerns about restricting or limiting students to a particular process or method of generating, sharing, and thinking critical about ideas.

I think you're right on the money here in regard to the common problem with most online writing classes (paraphrasing you: student write, student submit, teacher respond, student learn). As Lowe and Williams note, the writing classroom (I’m injecting the resident, online, or blended classroom here) must be more than “a place in which the grade and the teacher are largely what matter.”

And now trying to tie back into a comment Ty made about the activity of writing: Lowe and Williams cite Catherine Smith’s comment that students “take real-world writing more seriously when it is done on the web, where it might actually be seen and used.”

To complicate Ty’s question… why is that? Why do students (or professionals for that matter) carry these perceptions about writing – about the reliance on and presence of the writing activity in almost all aspects of our modern lives? If students view the web as a public, how can we (as writing teachers) leverage that view to instill the notion that presence, identity, voice, ethos, etc. are all established by the text that is put to ether?

And now I wonder if this isn’t just an old problem with a new shiny paint job. Isn’t this what Comp has been dealing with for a long time? Seems like a lot of Comp’s disciplinary struggles have evolved around this issue of writing as "a" most relative and important activity for survival in the world beyond the academy.

re: “take real-world writing more seriously when it is done on the web, where it might actually be seen and used.”

S. Michael Halloran talks about this phenomenon regarding public declamation at Harvard in the 1800s. He discovered evidence that students took their public speaking more seriously than their writing because the speaking was public and the writing largely was not.

You'll find his essay in:

Murphy, James. _A Short History of Writing Instruction_. Davis, CA: Hermagoras, 1990.

For a theoretical perspective on this, you might consider:

Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish. _Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts_. Cambridge: MIT, 1979.

Pay attention particularly to their description of the illocutionary act.

Further, my revision of the illocutionary act (chapter 2 of my dissertation-- Understand and Act: Classical Rhetoric, Speech-acts, and the Teaching of Critical Democratic Participation)), accounts for the role of rhetoric at this point in the speech act. What I assert following my revision is that student writing MUST be public writing.

I'm curious about the values bound up in the other position, that student writing mustn't be public or that we owe it to students to keep them from engaging in communicative acts beyond the classroom (until when? semester's end?). What is the implication of accepting that student writing is "for teacher's eyes only" (+/- peer response)? I know there are a lot of other variables to consider, but, as anyone who knows me might expect, I'd agree with Andy that blogs confront us with a public pressence necessary to understanding what it means to write beyond a contrived rhetorical situation.

re: What is the implication of accepting that student writing is "for teacher's eyes only" (+/- peer response)?

Got a few hours to read my dissertation? :-)

Short version (minus supporting theory and argument): Such a pedagogy asks students to engage in unreality, i.e. to speak for no reason other than to demonstrate competence. This pedagogy treats students as "pre-people" (Ohman's term for this disrespect). This leads to low interest and poor writing.

Short on time for the reading, Andy. Now if you podcasted it? That way I could put it on the headphones *while* I read Frank Smith (_Understanding Reading_) and Steph Kucer (_Dimensions of Literacy_) this week for another course. Plus, in 711, we're peeking under the lid of pandora's box of "post-literacy," so it wouldn't be proper to deal with words on a page. Sounds really interesting re: Ohman and "pre-people."

From _English in America_. Read all of it, but you can skip right to the chapter called "Composition and Administered Thought" (if I recall correctly...my book is at the office and I am not).

Among other things, he does a takedown on comp textbooks. I did an update of the same research for one of Dan's classes a few years ago and managed to get it published.

Hmmmmmm...a dissertation podcast...