vogwurk + werdwurk
glimpsed: [] melbourne time

hence blogs are much better research journals than ones self written and presented to the teacher at the end of class, semester, assessment period. these older style journals are really only written for the teacher and are simply treated as another assessment form whose purpose is to meet external criteria (grounded in the figure of the teacher). now the purpose of such journals is for critical reflection on learning and its processes, and it is the public blog that does this much better, and it is, as i've said, it's publicness. (lost my thread a bit here.)

by being public the student is writing for themself for an other. but the other is now no longer just or only a clear single authoritative and known individual (the teacher who will judge and mark) but is now your peers (since you always read your class friend's blogs), people out there on the www, the teacher, other students and of course yourself. because of this it does become a much more process orientated writing activity and the intersection of these horizons (your self, what you want to say, what you are required to say, what you let yourself say, what you learn to say, what you think you're readers find and do with what you say, the indeterminancy of who your readers might be) encourages a form of reflection that is perfectly suited to considerations of learning.

but it works differently to this too. on perhaps two main ways. the first is that writing in a blog, unlike a traditional journal, is not constrained to the words i write but is equally formed by the other things i link to (other pages) or in (images for instance). and the other way is that, in spite of what i've written above about writing-as-thought there is also a polyvocal openness to the blog that makes it a safe and owned writing space.

blog writing, in general, is of course a form of open hypertext writing where you link to other places as a matter of course. the ease with which you can do this with most of the generic blogging tools out there is one of the reasons why blogs are one of the major recent instances of a writing form that is immanent to a networked writing environment (the other major element is simply to ability to write yourself, the paradigmatic shift that the internet offers the world is in letting people utter, one day the dot commers will understand this and learn that it's not about publishing (reading) but about uttering (writing/making/doing), blogs are an exemplary case in point). so this openness makes the blog an open site or space for writing that makes it a excellent pragmatic tool for students as they link to and annotate content they find that they wish to keep links to (a better form of bookmark file), but this openness is also of course how they use their networked computers. writing and doing on the network is about the network, things discovered, things wondered, and blogs insert themselves within this writing-as-network by their nature as hubs or hives. it's a writing that isn't singular about this particular page, but that builds itself into the network and so of course becomes part of that network in that same moment. hence a blog isn't a commentary on something else, which is what the traditional essay or student journal might be (because it is largely outside of that which it comments on), but in its actions of commenting on constitutes the same object in that process. and of course they read and link into each other's writing, a very important event since it consitutes a form of peer reading and review in an environment where most students simply do not know what someone else's work looks like (if you're a credit student at my university, with your teachers marking your work, how would you ever know what a high distinction essay actually is? looks like? reads like? it's a contextless vacuum.)

and of course blogs are plural writing events. even with my students and their research blogs i don't assume, or expect, that the only writing that happens in there is 'academic'. it's a blog. it's their space. whatever they want to write about they can write about. (one of my students last year started using a blog for another subject, and seems to be also maintaining their own blog too.) they can use whatever tone or voice they wish, they can link to whatever they feel they want and need to. for students this is empowering because the blog really does become their blog. they begin to own the space, and an outcome of this is that the begin to develop their own voice. now this voice might be informal, given the nature of blogs, but developing confidence in their ability to write and comment, to put thoughts into words, to have permission to sketch in words rather than always having to worry about monuments (the finished ready-for-final-and-absolute-assessment-essay) is i think one of the most effective ways in which blogs teach students to write critically. they foreground writing as a process (eventful, open, playful, informal, engaged, intersecting with others writings and ideas), but not only does a blog foreground this, but a blog, when written as a blog models this.

and that is the authority of blogging.

23.2 teaching blogs
::23 Feb 2002 11:42::