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Conclusions
To maintain a blog, I would argue, is to participate in a small-world network, one that involves both clustering and connecting. The combination of these forces (embodied in any number of different kinds of gestures) results in a different kind of writing altogether.
This is part of what I take Will Richardson to be saying when he writes:
I'm not journaling. I'm not just linking. I'm attempting to synthesize a lot of disparate ideas from a varitey of sources into a few coherent sentences that I can publish for an audience and wait (hope?) for its response to push my thinking further. That's the essence of blogging to me, and I can't do it without a Weblog. That's the distinction. That's what tells me this is different. And that's what makes me think so hard about the effects that blogging, not just using a blog, might have in a classroom.
One of Richardson's persistent themes at Weblogg-ed is not how we can change blogging to accomodate our classrooms, but rather whether and how we need to change how we think about schooling in order to tap into the energy that so many people are bringing to weblogs. This tension, between the necessary gravitational pull of the classroom and the outward-looking, exploratory possibilities that weblogs (and other social software applications) make possible, is one that will most likely remain with us for some time. Part expert system, part intelligent agent, weblogs necessarily "dwell" on the borders between our classrooms and the world where they are situated, and using them pedagogically opens up numerous risks and rewards, consequences that we are only just beginning to account for.
Perhaps it is overly optimistic of me to think so, but I believe (as Richardson does) that, rather than testing weblogs to see if they "work" in the context of our writing classrooms, we should be thinking about those classrooms and about whether or not they provide the kinds of spaces that allow for the full possibilities of blogging. At the very least, weblogs are beginning to make visible some of the constraints of an educational system grounded in print technologies.