Since their inception in the late nineties, blogs have been heralded as a dynamic online space for teachers to engage students in collaborative projects. Indeed, blogs would seem to be a model environment to help transform current ideas of the classroom. In its ideal conception, blogs would serve as a chance for students to take in class discussions out of the classroom, allow for greater diversity of opinions, renegotiate the student-teacher relationship, and foster a “network literacy: writing in a distributed, collaborative environment.” Unfortunately, in spite of his excitement for the potentiality of teaching with blogs, Steven Krause found it to provide very little to his or his students’ experience in a “Rhetoric and Culture of Cyberspace” graduate seminar. In fact, Krause advocates for NOT using blogs as a teaching tool. Krause arranged his students in small groups and, in a strictly and expressly exploratory manner, asked them to post to a class related blog. He gave them little to no guidelines – no required number of posts, no required topics. The project went nowhere fast. Blog posting varied in frequency among students, as did posting lengths. Some posts consisted of information cut and pasted from other sites. It was unclear whether or not students were reading each others’ posts. And though Krause expected and intended to create a blog-space where students wouldn’t write because they had to but because they simply wanted to, the “open-endedness” of Krause’s assignment gave them little motivation to post. They seemed to want to be instructed when and how frequently to write. Without that, they weren’t going to write just because they wanted to write – they had no personal reason to do so. Much to Krause’s surprise, it was his class’ e-mailing list that became the focal point of student online activity. After making an “off-handed” remark about an article the night before, Krause found an impassioned email from one of the female students in the class, expressing objections to the comment he’d made about “that feminist essay.” That message when on to spark further discussion on the email list. What struck Krause is that the original post and subsequent discussion took place via email, not the class blog. Based on this experience, Krause made some observations:
· The student directed her message via email because she knew it would reach her “real audience” – it’s more immediate, conversational, and personal.
· Blogs do not foster this sort of dynamic – blog posts tend to be “polished” and individualistic and the comments left for them tend not to be direct responses to the text.
According to Krause, if you have a message you want to “deliver” or “publish” as a finished text, you would post it on a blog. If, however, you were directing a message to a specific audience with whom you hope to interact, you would post it on a mailing list.
