CCCC06: Blogging, Part 1

This is a bit of a long ramble. I’ll offer my notes here on two panels, because I think their differing perspectives — one pedagogical, one professional — intersect in interesting ways: “Writing in Electronic Spaces: Blogs and the Writing Classroom,” with Quinn Warnick, Margaret Ervin, and Fred Johnson; and “What Does Blogging Do? Weblogs, Change, and Middle Spaces,” with Clancy Ratliff and Jonathan Goodwin. Collin Brooke has talked about some of the ways in which our pedagogy does or doesn’t remediate (in Bolter and Grusin’s sense of the term) our professional practice, and vice versa, and he’s pointed out that academic blogging enacts many of the notions of knowledge as processual, embodied, and constructed that we privilege in our scholarship. I’m sure there are some folks who would argue that such a circumstance reflects just as much wanton and silly self-indulgence as did Landow’s Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology fourteen years ago, but I think the talk about blogging — at least in our field — has remained usefully grounded and focused (and so avoided some of Landow’s high-flown excesses), and I’d also argue that some of the criticisms of Landow are themselves overblown. But I’m already wandering off-topic here, so I’ll just say: I’m curious if other people saw interesting or productive connections between the pedagogical and the professional perspectives (with all due disclaimers, yes, about spurious binaries and how the pedagogical is professional, thank you) offered by the two panels.

The first panel, on “Blogs and the Writing Classroom,” featured Quinn Warnick, Margaret Ervin, and Fred Johnson. Quinn began with a reference to Taxi Driver in his title: “Are You Talking to Me? How Academic Weblogs Remediate Human Conversation in the Composition Classroom.” Bloggers build community by inviting discussion in the form of comments, and with the repurposing of weblogs (which I know some folks worry about; the idea that we may be overly domesticating the first genuinely native online genre for school purposes) as they move into academia, how might we use them to improve classroom discussion? Weblogs facilitate the teaching of visual rhetoric, and certainly help as well with many of the goals and strategies outlines in the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments” — but we really need to get a better idea of their value in terms of classroom outcomes, argued Warnick. (Mike’s editorializing: well, Quinn, there’s that project that the CCCC Blogging SIG is trying to put together, if you’re interested… ;-)) Successful blogging involves understanding how the presentation of online and real-life identities differs (I understand Warnick’s point, but I wonder if there’s a decreasing of the distance between OL and RL identity as the use of social networking software proliferates), with the implication being that blogging can help students develop their skills at analyzing audience and projecting an ethos appropriate to situation and genre. Composing a notebook-type blog is a different rhetorical task from composing a journal-type blog or a filter-type blog, and Warnick expressed a desire for a fourth genre, a forum-type blog, where students can “just talk.” (Interesting: could one muddle Britton with Aristotle and characterize journal blogs as expressive, notebook and filter blogs as transactional, and forum blogs as epideictic, writing located squarely in the present and for its own sake?) And of course, these differing rhetorical tasks are meant for widely varying rhetorical ends: to return to the outcomes question, Warnick wondered, what is it that weblogs actually do?

I’ll cop to some vanity and pleased surprise when I saw the slide Warnick used to pose that question, given the weblog post it quoted from. (Thanks, Quinn!) Quinn’s original hypothesis was that — given many students’ familiarity with the genre and the (uh, alleged) “coolness” factor of welbogs — the online discussions would inspire classroom discussions. He then went on to describe the features he though important for weblogs and the more technical aspects of how the class weblogs worked.

His analysis of the relationship (or lack thereof) between student participation in online discussions and student participation in classroom discussions was elegant in its Cartesian simplicity: he proposed four quadrants, divided along the Y axis by online versus classroom, and along the X axis by vocal versus quiet. So one has the vocal online/vocal classroom “alpha student” whose motto is “First to speak, first to post” (and whose zeal, Warnick ventured, might actually have discouraged some of the other students from participating, for fear of feeling dorky — check out the last paragraph of my notes on Dale Bauer’s presentation for another perspective on this fear); the vocal classroom / quiet online student or “technophobe” whose motto is “The weblog ate my post”; the vocal online / quiet classroom “technophile” student who rarely speaks in class but becomes a different person online, with her (and yes, the gender reference is intentional) motto being “Can I add you to my Facebook?”; and the quiet online / quiet classroom student as “taciturn conversationalist” who simply doesn’t like to interact with his peers and whose motto is “I shall not be moved.”

Quinn’s conclusions regarding his initial hypotheses were as follows: were his students as familiar with weblogs as a genre as he’d hoped? Definitely not. Did the online discussions inspire classroom conversations? Not really. Did the verbal participation in the classroom increase? Afraid not. Did the students interact more with the “cool” technology of blogging? Er, no.

Margaret Ervin presented next, on “A Blog of One’s Own: Student Perceptions of ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Cyberspace,” and she described how her teaching with blogs has changed: her initial hope was that blogs would change student writing, but she came to understand some new things about the genre. First, weblogs tend to take an intimate and anonymous tone, for the most part. (This is another reason I’d like to get that CCCC Blogging SIG outcomes study going, so we might usefully quantify some of this stuff.) According to Ervin, there’s an odd oscillation between the public and the private on weblogs; a place with qualities similar to that of the stage in western drama, where people know they’re being watched but there’s also an implicit sense of rhetorical abandon. As examples, Ervin offered the first three weblogs that came up on her Technorati search for the term “CCCC.” First, there was jo(e)’s> wry post about the “Wildly exciting” events of CCCC, about which I think I misinterpreted Ervin as saying that it had little sense of public exigency, and that its tone belonged to a more rhetorically private style. The next example was Donna’s post about the mediated cat, and then Clancy’s thoughts about a possible tech comm article. I think my misinterpretation of Ervin came from my mistakenly ascribing to her an over-emphasis on the split between public and private based upon that early comment about “rhetorical abandon”: no, I wanted to argue, there’s actually very little of that abandon, and the rhetorical self that Clancy composes online is as carefully crafted as that of Jill Walker or anybody else. We consciously share what we want to share, and release our information carefully and idiosyncratically, whether it’s as Krista’s references to “Mr. Boyfriend” and “Mr. Husband,” or Amanda’s descriptions of “Collegeville,” or my own characterizations of My Attorney (whose birthday is coming up, so I’m doing research into Massachusetts laws about large-capacity magazines for long guns) and My Imaginary Colleague. (Now there would be another interesting project: an investigation of the degree of fictionalization and pseudonymizing that takes place around personae persistently referred to in the third person online. Hm.)

Ervin argued that weblogs shape both writer and writing, and that they’re not just the online equivalent of paper-notebook journaling, but also cited Steve Krause’s Kairos indictment of the ways in which blogs don’t necessarily foster community — particularly in the ways they’re not as likely to get solicit responses directly addressed to the writer in their comments. (Really? I don’t know — my own experience, and that of many of my students, would seem to offer some alternative conclusions: but, again, perhaps a strong reason for that study.) In a move from practice to theory, Ervin demonstrated and complicated the notion from Krause that weblogs trouble the traditional divide between expressionist and social constructivist ideologies, and asked as a consequence: how do (digital) genres place limits upon writing, and how do they open up possibilities for writing? Because, Ervin argued, looking at genre is absolutely central to how we understand the functions of weblogs in the composition classroom. While they might not necessarily be a labor-saving (and therefore transactional?) device, they’re certainly a genre with which students feel comfortable (contra Quinn’s findings). Margaret concluded with a brief discussion of the manifesto as weblog assignment, and the ways in which writing a weblog manifesto might help students make the leap from writing for a private audience to writing for a public audience. Now, I like manifestos, and I’ve studied them and their generic history some, and even talked about them in a forthcoming issue of Pedagogy, so I’d love to hear more from Margaret about how she connects them to weblogs — perhaps particularly as Packer’s “spasms of assertion.”

Finally, Fred Johnson invoked the “long tail” argument in his talk about “How Blogging and the Internet Make Little Things Big.” His presentation wasn’t so much about students writing blogs as it was about how they use blogs as research sources, and about teachers’ attitudes towards crappy research sources available on the web. He began with the so-called “Wicked-pedia” argument about Wikipedia’s temporal unreliability (which has been demonstrated to be remarkably silly, given the much more severe temporal persistence of error in print sources) and the contentions that weblogs are unreliable rubbish and unreliable. Certainly, he acknowledged, they can be “bad sources” — but they can also be “excellent resources.” According to Johnson, there are three rules about the Long Tail (and he made a fine, brief joke about Gremlins here): make everything available, slash the price, and help me find it. For the information age, the third rule is so important, particularly given today’s proliferation of sources and ways to get to them: Help Me Find It (and, I might add, Help Me Sort It). Academia is facing rubbish overload with all the online and conventional resources available, and while this isn’t a new research problem, it’s the research problem, made visible today — like so many other things — by digital technologies. Today, our academic recommendation system isn’t as slick as Amazon’s (but with the work of Collin and Derek, it’s getting there), but as academics, we know that monograph introductions are helfpul, that repeated instances in various works cited are helpful. Still, in some ways, academics don’t have much that’s as easy as Amazon’s “You might also try this” function, and the importance of reference works — even allegedly sucky or shallow ones — can lead one into the long tail. Furthermore, if many tail sources (including, perhaps, minor blogs like this one) can point scholars towards head sources, that would likely be a good thing. And maybe we need to focus some of our teaching around how students students might use long tail sources to facilitate understandings of the workings of systems of academic credibility.

That’s as fine a proposal as I’ve heard at this C’s.

And right now, this post is turning into a long-march slog for me; something I’m no longer enjoying writing up. And probably something you’re not enjoying reading, either, dear reader. I’m gonna hang it up for tonight: more, on Clancy and Jonathan, tomorrow.

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