Weblogs as Deictic Systems

To be fair, as teachers, we don't experience our classrooms this way. A given course, from our perspective, is one node among the various courses that each of us has taught in his or her career. It is one node in a vast network of courses offered each semester on our respective campuses, themselves nodes in a network of higher education that spans the nation and even the globe. Intellectually, the practices in our courses are drawn from a disciplinary network of knowledge, and they are embodied in documents that themselves circulate throughout departments and disciplines as well. From our perspective, then, the classroom is a highly porous space, shaped by networks and forces of every sort.

But for our students, particularly those in first-year writing classrooms, exposure to these various networks is limited, as is our own exposure to the networks that our students participate in. And so to accomplish the various goals we set for our courses--the demands of the institution, the curricula of our programs, and the educational needs of our students--we imbue our classrooms with that centripetal force. We subject our students to a certain, necessary degree of standardization--shared texts, assignments, activities, evaluation criteria, etc. There is certainly more to the classroom than its status as an expert system, but the ethos of centralization and expertise underwrites this space.

The classroom is a social space as well. Even the most univocal, lecture-oriented classroom brings students together and unites them through the shared reception of lectures. In the writing classroom, students must be able to work together, to respond to each others' writing, and to hold discussions both about their own work and course readings. In short, much of the work of the writing classroom depends upon a certain amount of social cohesion, of clustering, to use Watts' term. In a first-year writing classroom in particular, most of the students are likely to begin a course as strangers to each other.

It's no accident, given this context, that one of the primary uses to which technology is put in such classrooms is the buliding of community. Chat spaces, MUDs and MOOs, bulletin boards, listserves--there are any number of applications that predate the development of "social software" which themselves can serve social functions. In part, this is why social software would be so appealing to writing teachers. Steven Krause's essay "When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction" is partly his account of the appeal of weblogs, and his eventual disappointment with them, concluding:

...many writing teachers seem to be using blog spaces as places to facilitate dynamic and interactive writing experiences....But after a failed experiment in teaching with blogs, I have begun to wonder if it is advisable or even possible to see blogs as a collaborative or especially "interactive" writing environment. Or, more accurately, I've come to believe we shouldn't substitute blogs for other electronic writing tools that foster discussion and interactive writing, particularly email lists, commonly known as "listservs."

The assumption that lurks behind this claim is one that we don't often question in pedagogical reflections. Specifically, it is the notion that "dynamic," "interactive," and even "collaborative" writing, to be recognized as such, must occur within the conceptual space of the classroom. And furthermore, that such goals are the result of a certain level of community that has emerged there. Clancy Ratliff puts it more explicitly in a handout for her students, posted at her own weblog:

Weblogs allow a high level of interactivity; in your posts, you’ll be able to link to other web sites, other blogs, or other news stories. If you want to respond to your classmates’ posts, you can do that easily as well. Sharing your writing with others in the class and reading what your classmates write is also an excellent way to build community and get to know each other better.

There is nothing "wrong" with either of these passages, but each envisions a particular pedagogical role for weblogs, one that is largely centripetal. Weblogs may sit on the periphery of the physical classroom--I'm assuming in both cases that very little non-introductory class time was spent on the blogs themselves--but their function is to face "inward," even as the weekly assignments are completed "outside" of the class. And that function is grounded in a particular need, the need for a certain amount of cohesion.

And insofar as that is a central pedagogical problem, weblogs may not provide the best solution. But where Krause writes that

we shouldn't substitute blogs for other electronic writing tools that foster discussion and interactive writing

I would say instead that

we shouldn't expect from blogs the same kinds of discussion and interactive writing we associate with other electronic writing tools

This is a small change, perhaps, but a crucial one, I think. This observation, that weblogs are not as effective as listservs at doing what listservs do, leads productively to the question of what blogs qua blogs can accomplish for us in our classrooms.

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