Learning to Write Publicly: Promises and Pitfalls of Using Weblogs in the Composition Classroom

As noted above key differences exist between blog technology and previously adopted technologies for teaching. First, blogs are more seamlessly connected to existing web content and users, facilitating interactivity and two-way feedback within a larger community of Internet users. Blogs are characterized by frequent links to other sites and commentary on the other sites’ content. As such, they offer the opportunity for students to interact with texts and users outside of the classroom, in addition to interacting with their classmates. This level of interactivity serves to facilitate the kind of collaborative and social writing that is inherent to the age of Web 2.0, in which the web has become an endless web of links and relies on multi-way communication among users. Blogging thus has the potential to help students become more adept at participating in the knowledge-building activities that commonly occur online.

The relevance of this kind of interactivity and collaboration with existing texts and writers is acknowledged by rhetoric and composition scholars like Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede, whose study of collaborative writing (1990) reveals the highly collaborative nature of typical writing tasks even in off-line settings. And Karen Burke LeFevre (1987) asserts that even invention is a social and collaborative act, and stresses its dialectical nature. Her Invention as a Social Act places writing within a social context and as part of an open, two-way system

in which an individual who is at the same time a social being interacts in a distinctive way with society and culture to create something. Viewed in this way, rhetorical invention becomes an act that may involve speaking and writing, and that at times involves more than one person; it is furthermore an act initiated by writers and completed by readers, extending over time through a series of transactions of texts. (1)

The interactive nature of blogging has the potential to help students to understand writing, in both print and online settings, as a social and collaborative process, rather than a solitary and individualized activity.

A second key distinction between blog technology and other class tools such as private discussion boards and password-protected class websites and social networks is its public nature. Unlike a password-protected class online space, blogs are publicly accessible and subject to response and scrutiny from virtually any user of the Internet. As such, blog authors must assume a new sense of authority and responsibility for what they write, anticipating response and two-way dialogue concerning what they post. Research in composition and writing studies recognizes a value in having students sharing written texts with readers beyond the classroom setting. As Emily J. Isaacs and Phoebe Jackson (2001) note in their introduction to Public Works: Student Writing as Public Text, the work of composition scholar Kenneth Bruffee contributes to our understanding of the importance of public writing by arguing

for students to go public with their writing to receive feedback, on the grounds that public writing in classrooms deemphasizes teacher authority and promotes student- writers’ abilities to see themselves as responsible writers and to view writing as a social activity. (as cited in Lowe and Williams, 2001, p. xii).

It was our hope that these two unique characteristics of blogs – its placement within the larger Internet and its public nature – would contribute to student learning of network literacy. By extending the classroom conversation to a larger community outside of the classroom, as the class blog does, student writers had the opportunity to more regularly confront real rhetorical situations in a social and meaningful setting. Further, by making their writing public, students could begin to take responsibility for and ownership of what they have to say, rather than writing simply to receive a grade from an instructor. Such writing practice gave them practice for the type of networked writing that is now common to many social and workplace interactions.