Reading, Blogging, and 'Rithmetic? (The Council Chronicle, March 05)

by Anna Flanagan

When Donna Reiss saw the announcement about NCTE's 1984+20 Project, she knew she wanted her students to participate. The goal of the project was to promote awareness, discussion, and debate about the key roles of language in politics and culture. The presidential election would make the project even more relevant for her writing class, thought Reiss, associate professor of English and humanities at Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

When she presented the idea to colleagues and deans, they responded with enthusiasm and wanted to expand the project to all four campuses of the Tidewater system. How could they build a cohesive community of student and faculty participants across four campuses and create a common space for contributions to the project?

"When we began to investigate going beyond the boundaries of an individual classroom with technology, we found that it would be very difficult to do it with the course management system we were using for our classes," Reiss said. "We didn't want students to have to jump through a lot of hoops to participate; we needed something that would allow students to have easy access online." The answer for Reiss and her colleagues was to create Web logs, or "blogs." 

What Is a Web Log? 

Though many Web log enthusiasts would argue that it is impossible to define something that continues to evolve in form and function, Merriam-Webster's online dictionary defines a Web log as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer." Associated Press writer Trudy Tynan noted in a December 1, 2004, article that "blog" was the most requested definition at Merriam-Webster's site in 2004.

Dave Winer, whose company UserLand Software makes Web site and Web log
publishing tools, prefers Link and Think's use of the phrase "personal Web publishing communities" to describe Web logs. In a piece he wrote for Weblogs.Com, Winer said that the phrase captures four key elements of Web logs.

A Web log, he noted, is created by a person, not an organization. "You see a personality," he wrote. "That's why Web logs are interesting." Second, a blog exists on the Web. "It doesn't get printed, it can be updated frequently, it's very low cost to produce, and it can be accessed through a Web browser," he said. In addition, each blog is part of a larger community of Web logs. "No Web log stands alone," Winer said. "[T]hey connect people together . . . through common interests."

Different Audiences, Different Voices

It is this last feature that many bloggers find especially appealing. With Tidewater Community College's 1984+20 Web log, for example, a student could not only post responses to assignments in his or her own class, but also to other students' responses in classes participating in the project. In addition, anyone who found the site while surfing the Web could comment on the posted writings, potentially extending the community of writers and readers not only beyond classroom walls, but also beyond institutional walls.

"Randy Bass at Georgetown University uses the term 'public accountability' to describe one of the benefits of using technology in teaching," Donna Reiss said. "Within a discussion board that's private to a class, students write to and for each other. They have another kind of public accountability if we expand to the World Wide Web and totally open access. It helps increase students' awareness of genre, audience, and purpose."

Reiss feels that her students wrote more substantively in their Web logs than they had in other electronic venues, and that they were more apt to comment on the process of learning while fulfilling the obligations of an assignment. Will Richardson, supervisor of instructional technology and communications at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, New Jersey, also has seen a positive impact on student writing as a result of using Web logs. Although his role now is to support other teachers in their use of blogs, Richardson's first exposure to Web logs came when he was teaching (he described his use of blogs in literature and journalism classes in "Web Logs in the English Classroom: More Than Just Chat," English Journal, 93:1, 39-43, 2003). He thinks writing becomes more important to students when they are aware of a wider audience for their work, and he believes students write more when they are using Web logs. He and other teachers at Hunterdon also like the opportunity Web logs offer to bring other voices into the classroom.

"When our advanced placement teacher was teaching Ibsen's A Doll's House, he got in touch with a theater group that had just presented the play," Richardson said. "He was able to get the director and some of the actors to participate with his students in a discussion of the play on the class Web log."

Because discussions on a blog can extend beyond class time, he says, students are able to think more deeply about issues. Those who are reluctant to speak in class have another opportunity in the blog to have their voices heard.

Privacy and Collegiality

For those who are concerned about publishing student work in a venue that is open to the public, as the Web is, Richardson stresses that Web logs can be made as private or as public as a teacher deems appropriate.

"Our creative writing teachers usually restrict access to the class blog to students in their classes because they are writing about things that are more personal. Blogs are still a great way to put work online, to get feedback in a way that's archived, and to extend discussions," he said. In other cases, such as literature and journalism classes, he thinks the advantages of giving students a wider audience outweigh any possible disadvantages. In almost four years of using Web logs himself with nearly 500 students, Richardson says, there was not one incident of inappropriate Web log entries, either from the students themselves or from visitors outside the school.

John Lovas, who teaches English at DeAnza College in Cupertino, California, and is a past chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, agrees with Richardson and Reiss that Web logs have a significant role to play in English classrooms. In his experience, the reality of a potentially wide audience has made many students more conscious of and careful about the conventions of writing. However, there is another role for blogs, he says, one that he finds even more interesting: blogs as tools for informal professional and personal development.

"People find one another and read one another's blogs and then begin posting on them. They get to know each other, and it's all electronic," he said. He started his own blog for "primarily documentary" purposes--nearly every day for more than a year, he recorded his thoughts about being a teacher of writing. In the course of that first year, he and other bloggers at Purdue University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Wisconsin engaged in extensive "conversations" about pedagogy in general, the teaching of writing, and the role of blogs. "These are three people I never would have met, even at professional meetings, in quite this way," Lovas said. He has more recently developed almost a mentoring relationship with a blogger who is a new graduate student and teacher in Texas.

This month, Lovas will be among the panelists in a session about "The New Collegiality" at the 2005 CCCC Convention in San Francisco. The panel focuses on the ways Web logs are used for professional interchange. He says a number of two-year college faculty bloggers have already established a Web log called "Community College English," focused on the teaching of writing and literature. According to the site, however, "Topics may include--but are by no means limited to--classroom pedagogy, current trends, technology, and workplace/workload issues."

From the Classroom to the Library

Pat Delaney was a librarian at Martin Luther King Academy, a middle school in San Francisco, when he learned about Web logs. On assignment to the Bay Area Writing Project in 1999, he was charged with figuring out a way to integrate technology into a middle school collaborative project involving social studies and English classes. He eventually "stumbled upon" the content management/Web log tool called Manila, attended a three-day training course, and was "completely blown away."

Back at Martin Luther King Academy, Delaney set up a Web log to provide information and news to members of the school community, guide them to resources on the World Wide Web, and provide them with online work spaces. The challenge to integrating Web logs more fully at the middle school level, he says, is the dearth of both hardware and software, as well as technical support. He has found that there are more resources at the high school level. In fact, at Delaney's current employer, the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology, the resources are "exceptional." Even so, he says, in K-12 education, blogs have been difficult to integrate into challenging pedagogy.

"A lot of educational blogs will have purposes in terms of classroom use--posting handouts and lessons, for example. The whole notion of sharing professional development among teachers--that works really well. But if you're talking about student publishing and how Web logs can actually impact their writing, I think we're just starting to explore this," he said. It's easy to publish on the Web, he says, but easy publishing doesn't mean anything without good teaching. There is a potential for Web logs to be effective tools in the teaching of writing "if teachers master enough of the software to be able to teach students how to use the software to write on the Web at the same time that they're teaching students how to write."

When he started working with the technology four years ago, it was his dream that all students would soon be using Web logs to blossom into fantastic writers. The reality of infrastructure problems and overtaxed teachers led him to rethink his goals, and he has embraced Web logs as a way to build community among teachers and students at Galileo and to extend an "easy invitation" to teachers to explore the use of digital tools in their professional practice.

What's Next?

"It's interesting when you step back from this and you wonder, where is it going?" said Pat Delaney. He continues to be involved in the Bay Area Writing Project, which supports teachers in exploring a wide range of digital tools for teaching and learning, and he will continue to nurture the growth of Galileo's Web log community.

John Lovas says that while some people see Web logs as the digital equivalent to hula hoops, he believes they are more akin to e-mail: rather than fading away after an initial period of intense interest, Web logs will become so routine that people will accept them as part of everyday life. Both Lovas and Will Richardson are now getting interested in a new tool called a "wiki." While anyone can comment on content contained in a Web log, a wiki allows readers to change content, even if they did not create it. Students at Richardson's school are using a wiki to write a media literacy textbook, which can be modified or overwritten by future students.

But no matter how the medium changes--from pen and paper to word processors to discussion boards, blogs and wikis--some things remain the same, says Donna Reiss.

"We help students understand the purpose, the context, the audience, and what voice is appropriate for different kinds of writing," she said. "We have to learn about the new technologies and the way they impact what we understand as literacy, but I think our obligations and responsibilities are fundamentally the same."

Anna Flanagan is a freelance writer for The Council Chronicle.