Introduction and Rationale

I have to admit. Blackboard is an effective virtual classroom space that serves the needs of many institutions. It provides a password, gated community where students see a uniform interface for all of their classes. It has the necessary administration tools that make teaching online easier: grading lists, testing modules, a GUI email interface for teachers and student to send emails, and automatic student registration from registrar records. The institution sets up and administrates these spaces. For the most part, teachers need only plug in content, configure the site for a short time, and teach.

But is this what writing teachers need for teaching their classes? And I'm not asking about writing features such as text annotation or rich text format editing online. Rather, is this the best environment in which to teach students how to write?

After all, the Internet offers a place for rhetorical analysis of electronic communication and digital culture. A place to allow students to rhetorically situate themselves within many real conversations while learning to write for the web.

Imagine building an Internet weblog community using an open source content management system instead of merely configuring a virtual classroom space in Blackboard. Many students enjoy surfing the web. By far the most active users of instant messaging, and even frequent email users, students regularly make use of electronic communication as a social medium. Weblogs, too, are inherently social. By using a weblog community, we place students in a writing context which will be familiar to them--the Internet--even if the blogging genre is not, and which, I might add, may seem to them as "not writing."

Last fall when I asked my students if they wrote outside of school work, most said no. But when I asked them if the sent email and used IM regularly, a large percentage said yes. Writing for the web, then, provides students with an opportunity to write in a venue that they might choose for themselves. And let's not forget that in the future, as part of both their professional and personal lives, many of our students will be reading and writing online even more frequently.

On the other hand, a virtual classroom using Blackboard or WebCT emphasizes control within in a gated community space over interaction with the rest of the Internet. There is the sense of leaving the Web when entering a proprietary courseware site. It's not the information super highway, but rather a one way street that only pulls from the World Wide Web without giving back.

For instance, at Florida State, students first see a picture of a teacher greeting them on a login access page. They, then enter a gateway which lists announcements and links to their classes. Upon selecting a specific course, a teacher-generated announcement page is the first thing that they encounter. Above the individual course site hangs a navigation bar with links back to the gateway and instutional support. Everything about it speaks of institution, classroom, teacher. How can our students ever feel real ownership of their writing with this kind of presence when all student writing is several pages inside the site?

While certainly a weblog community created by a teacher is ultimately designed and managed by the teacher, the software itself was created by developers to foster and manage a community, not a classroom. Using a platform designed with the intent of community building must necessarily change the way that a teacher can conceive of and structure the course. In this instance, the technology which influences the pedagogy will do so in a positive way.

One could also reason that collaborative-based community learning should be more effective when students feel part of a larger, real community, rather than merely completing a Blackboard forum posting assignment. In a private space, the teacher as grade giver is the ultimate audience. Attempts to provide imagined real world rhetorical situations can never fully negate that effect. In a public space, such as the World Wide Web, the teacher's authority is lessened by the existence of real world audiences. I know this because some of my students share the website address, as well as their personal blog sites, with family and friends. And other teachers have linked to the site and shared it with their students.

We, too, could share our teaching more easily via weblog communities. They offer the opportunity for interaction between classes, within and outside of institutions, and a way for interested colleagues to see not only course syllabi, but also class interaction. Seems reasonable to imagine that sharing more of our teaching could help to expand our understanding of teaching practices.

Some teachers may be concerned that weblog communities offer little opportunity for private writing. Students in my class do share early drafting via email, instead of posting to the web. But at the same time, exploratory writing also occurs through weblog posting and commenting on others posts. As a result of their experience with online writing, I'm becoming convinced that there might be worthwhile tradeoffs for having more real public writing at the expense of private writing.

My concern here is also that a lot of what we know about private writing spaces evolves from the classroom, not from writing in the public sphere. The focus on private writing may be influenced by the image of the creative writer toiling over the penultimate American novel, not the practical concerns of writing for professions in the digital world. The average business professional does not always get to choose whether or not to make something public (except when drafting) as writing in the professions is aimed at specific communication tasks, not expressivist opportunities for finding one's self as a writer.

At the same time, within the context of the classrom writers may need more private writing as protection from the teacher, the ultimate authority in a virtual or physical classroom, protection that may not be needed as much when the teacher's authority as audience is diminished on the Internet. For many students, the Internet is a more comfortable place to be, a virtual space with which they are familiar, a place that they want to be, thus reducing apprehension about writing, normally the motivation for creating private writing spaces.

But regardless of the potentials and pitfalls of public and private writing, in my opinion, I firmly believe that using a weblog community as a platform for class interaction has resulted in a more enjoyable experience, for myself and students alike.

Looking More Closely at PostNuke

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