in CCR 771, Network(ed) Rhetorics
In reflecting on the article, In Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom, by Lowe and Williams, it seems to me that blogging can be a way to make the writing process more holistic. As Lowe and Williams note, blogs give students real world audiences for their writing and no longer does feedback need to come primarily from the instructor. Further, blogging de-centers the role of instructor as the ultimate purveyor of wisdom and knowledge and privileges the role of student, which requires the student to take more ownership of their writing. For me, these positives far outweigh any concerns I might have as an instructor about requiring students to do public blogging. Especially since their students are given the choice to use pseudonyms. It becomes as Terra commented, just another requirement and students can drop the course if they so choose.

Two points occur to me regarding students taking ownership of their writing. First, by making students primarily responsible for the writing and thinking that gets done via blogging, can blogging then be said to promote critical thinking between and among students? Second, when an instructor also blogs along with her classes, then blogging could also emphasize the role of teacher-as-learner much more than before, which I think puts another check mark in the holistic column.

I agree wholeheartedly with Lowe and Williams when they say that “students sometimes get carried away with the eye-candy of website design.” This matches not only my own endless tweaking of images, colors, and fonts, but also my real life experience working with professional website designers. There is always something else to be done to make a website more pleasing. However, to potentially take time away from writing and encourage endless tweaking of design privileges design over content, which is the last thing a writing instructor would want to do. So I agree and support that “when using weblogs, teachers can focus on writing for the web.”

I find their note of Ede and Lunsford helpful, “the solitary writer image permeates ‘the theory and practice of teaching writing,” for it made me realize that blogging may help explode the concept of ’solitary writer’ in really wonderful ways, especially if we give more than lip service to social construction of knowledge.

Furthermore, I find their comment illuminating that “our field’s expressivist heritage may lead many writing teachers to put the private unnecessarily in front of the public, partially because writing teachers are themselves more comfortable with the private.” I hadn’t thought of it quite like this, but I think this idea has merit, especially if readers/writers connect it with their later direction, “Writing teachers should remember that much of the purpose of private writing is to create a teacherless writing space where students take ownership.” It is quite likely that the activity of private writing has become valued without teachers remembering or being taught the theory behind the practice.