Rather obtusely, I’ve decided to address this week’s worth of blog questions individually. Otherwise, I fear plunging into eldritch terrors of the mind that can only be described as “Lovecraftian” in their twisted malignancy. So! Here I go:
What is the pedagogical value of asking students to write in public spaces?
Foremost, accountability and investment, say I. Why the monetary terminology? It’s difficult to get away from banking models of anything, especially when speaking in Modern English in 21st-century America. However, when students see that their works are being viewed and potentially commented on in a public forum outside of a potentially solipsistic classroom environment, the stakes are higher for them. Fewer people, especially those who fashion themselves as university students, are willing to post just any tripe when they’ve put some measure of intellectual investment into it. Sure, plenty of people could argue that the internet—regardless of how public it is—fails miserably in quality control. However, students are putting their educations and erudition on the firing line when posting publicly; just as many people on the net are willing to scathingly comment as they are to ignore the errors. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen debunking an argument purely based on quality. While this severe copy-edit fear isn’t necessarily the most viable motivation, ensuring one’s logic is sound and supported is better.
What successes or failures characterize your blog/wiki use?
Last year, I attempted to use Facebook’s “note” system in English 201. The idea was to create publicly (to the class anyway) accessible insight into student research processes. Essentially, the assignment consisted of weekly entries into a research journal. Topics could range from anything from trips to the library and choosing topics to venting frustrations over having difficulty in tracking down sources, or even prompting fellow students for feedback on ideas. In short, the ongoing assignment was overall a disaster. Students were resistant to post personal thoughts on the work process itself—for some reason, this method violated their sense (I think) of what blogs/notes/Facebook is used for. Essentially, I tried to create a community from nothing using the wrong tool. I’m not finished with blogging, however, or at least a modicum of it. Communities must be fostered and share mutual interests in order to survive. Twitter hastags—though far more succinct—may foster a better space for conveying questions, thoughts, and insights into the research process. Technology (I say again), is only as useful as it is useful in context. Hammers are a wonderful technology, but they make terrible pencils.
How would you overcome technological barriers using blogs or wikis?
Technological problems are manifold, especially with tools as complex and expensive as computers. Not all students will readily have access, and visiting a campus computer lab every time an assignment is due can grow both tedious and logistically problematic. Therefore, many online assignments and activities should be collected and reviewed on a weekly to tri-monthly basis, giving students who don’t own computers more time to get their affairs in order. Also, an optional paper component should be arranged in special cases. Otherwise, practice makes better: students should be educated on how to access campus resources along with materials on blog/wiki use. Time should be spent in class on navigating blogs and wikis, discussing the format and its strengths—students should understand *why* these particular tools are useful.
How would *I* go about using public writing in the classroom?
Rebecca Wilson Ludin poses that wiki-use in the classroom can help to re-structure power relationships, to shift traditional models of teacher-students authority (443). This notion is of particular interest to me—transparency concerning the core classroom mechanics will hopefully help students to better understand the game. In the case of wikis, users can edit content at any point, destabilizing on one had the all-pervasiveness of the author while calling attention to the core issues of collaboration and accountability. Were I to use a wiki, we’d spend a significant amount of time discussing the implications of collaborative authorship, especially in cases where the authors didn’t necessarily agree with one another, much less having established an agreement to *work* with each other. Instructors could develop a game—compose an article for Wikipedia, simultaneously. Students must then reconcile all of their articles into the larger framework of a core article. Surely, this is a daunting and confusing task at first, and nobody has complete license over the truth, not even the instructor in this manner. Using Wikipedia’s discussion pages, students could engage with one another’s arguments: congruent and opposing viewpoints would clash publicly and critically. While the instructor would be outsourcing the classroom space as such, this broadened classroom context could destabilize (in a potentially good way) the authority of instructors over student work. To actually shift authority and power, the instructor *must* meaningfully relinquish some aspects of control. For blogs, as Charles Lowe and Terry Williams suggest, students can to tap into the “valuable public,” and not necessarily the classroom public. As I mentioned before, public ideas require at least some form of intellectual investment as to avoid, minimally, ridicule. There’s probably a good reason why some people are more afraid of public speaking than death. As grim as this sounds, I had far more stellar research projects the semester I required my 201 students to present at a research colloquium of our making. That, and the audience was required to respond with well-crafted, critical questions. How’s that for shifting authority?
