Ten Reasons Why

Will Richardson, who writes non-stupidly on this stuff, has summarized a conversation about blogging in schools that has been taking place across several weblogs over the last couple days.
I’m far from a Luddite, having made been involved with educational technology for more than a decade, made my living off it most of that time, and have worked with 1500+ faculty in 4 or 5 countries. Likewise, though I’ve been out of the teaching game for several years, I’ll put up five years of teaching several sections a semester of freshman comp or intro lit as reasonable cred to discuss writing pedagogy somewhat intelligently.
All of which is to say that this is stuff I’ve spent my entire adult life thinking about, so I don’t take it lightly when I paraphrase a former President:
It’s the writing, stupid.

Will says:

“[I]t seems the characteristics of writing that make it useful are too much in contradiction to what public schools expect of their teachers and students. For writing to be of value, I think, it has to be born of passion. Look at the best writers out there, the ones you read on a regular basis. The reason I stick with them is because of their obvious passion for their topics, their sense of purpose for their spaces. I think of A-list writers like [list of writers]. And I come across new ones every day. They write because they want to, because they want to invest in the conversation, not because they are required to do so.

By its very nature, assigned writing in schools cannot be writing. It’s contrived. No matter how much we want to spout off about the wonders of audience and readership, students who are asked to write are writing for an audience of one, the teacher. (A related question might be whether or not students who have become so attuned to the game of pleasing the teacher can even conceive of what it means to write for an audience…) I try my best to pretend it’s not so, and maybe on the elementary level where kids are less focused on playing the grade game this may not be as true. But my students drop writing like wet cement when the class is over. And it’s because I can’t let them write in the first place. I can let them write about their passions, but I can’t let them do it passionately due to the inherent censorship that a high school served writing journal carries with it. I can tell them the process will strengthen their writing and their intellect, but I can’t tell them I won’t assess it or else they won’t do it.”

Except, of course, that’s not what Will said. Substitute “blogging” for “writing,” “blogger” for “writer,” “blog” for “writing journal” and you have Will’s thoughts.
See, what Will is describing is not a problem of incorporating blogging in the classroom, but a problem of teaching writing. And this is nothing new. There’s several decades of theory, research, and application in the field of composition that have addressed these problems. And continues to address them, because they’re not universally solvable problems and the individual students and student population as a whole keep doing silly things like, oh, I don’t know, growing and learning and changing, damn them. ;-)
IMHO, there are only two formal qualities of weblogs that are inherently distinct from other writing forms — hypertextuality and an expanded audience. (More accurately, these are characteristics of writing on the web, whether a weblog or a corporate website, not formal characteristics specific to weblogs.) I tend to think that, expect perhaps with adult learners, the generation gap makes most of us fairly ineffective teachers of approaches to hypertextuality. Most of the kids grew up on this stuff and understand it better than their teachers ever will. And with regard to an expanded writing audience, I’ve written about that before in response to Will. An expanded audience certainly changes the way we write, but it may be more of a chiling effect than a boon for developing writers.
The other stuff — RSS, permalinks, Trackback, threaded vs. flat comments, reverse chronological order, etc etc — are just features of web publishing software that really have very little to do with what happens between the four walls of the text entry box. Oh, sure, you can talk about social software and how all these features of blogging can create an intertwingly net of loosely joined pieces yadda yadda yadda. But none of that actually works — for us or for students — until an individual sits down at a computer and opens a vein. (A reference to a quote from Red Smith, one of the last century’s most respected sports writers: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typerwriter and open a vein.”)
And here’s the rub: it really doesn’t matter whether you’re bleeding on a page or a screen and whether you’re calling the result a novel, an academic essay, or a blog. Only us academics get hung up on the sociological and philosophical impact of the form and the tools. To normal human beings, it’s all just writing.
It’s all just the same blood.
 

Greg Education