Mike seems to be engaged in a little fisking action regarding my post on Kairosnews and here, as well as Clancy's two posts, about open source software use in weblogs of copyfighters. Needless to say, I don't want to fisk back. If he wants to overstate the obvious and try to rhetorically take me to task with some "argumentative slip" reader response of his, that's fine. But it would be nice if he would engage with the larger point, reiterated in both posts, that copyfighters use of open source software could be better represented than it is. This is particularly true in light of the MT licensing scheme (do I have to keep saying that without anyone responding to what is a major issue?).

Alexander, Jonathan. (2002). Digital spins: The pedagogy and politics of student-centered e-zines. Computers and Composition, 19, 387-410.

Anson, Chris & Beach, Richard. (1995). Journals in the classroom: writing to learn. Norwood: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Ballenger, Bruce. (2004). The curious researcher: A guide to writing research papers. (4th ed.). New York: Pearson Longman.

In "Digital spins: The pedagogy and politics of student-centered e-zines," Jason Alexander's introduction talks about how "staged" audience is in first year composition. Alexander points out that even just sharing papers among students on the Internet is not enough, and goes on to problematize posting to the web, suggesting that students realize that their only real audience is fellow students and the teacher. However, we would say that by using weblogs in our classrooms, we've turned ownership over to students and given them a real audience. In life outside of the classroom, much like on the Internet, writers will not always know who their audiences are when they write. A report, memo, letter, or fax might cross the desks of numerous people that the writer has never met during the course of a workday. Risk is part of writing, and our students experience that risk within a very supportive community of writers. When we first began teaching with blogs, Charlie recalls being apprehensive himself about putting course syllabi, feedback on drafts, and other teacherly responses up on the web for everyone to see, even though he had been posting to an academic blog for almost six months. But we both feel now, that the shared meaning we and our students have gained from blogging our courses makes it all worthwhile. Imagine. Classes within and among institutions could interact through the use of weblogs as more institutions integrate student blogging into the curriculum, such as the University of South Florida's First-Year-Writing Program's Writing Blogs site.

As writing teachers, we typically feel it our duty to protect our students, to create safe writing spaces where students can enjoy greater risk-taking. Traditional print journal writing, used as a private writing space, typically embodies this notion. It is no wonder that teachers fear having students post personal reflections, drafts, reading responses, and other writing assignments and exercises to the public Internet, preferring instead the locked doors of a Blackboard or WebCT site. For example, Charles Moran's "experience with Web publishing has made [him] consider a rather frightening possibility: that computer technologies, as we are presently using them, move all of us in our first-year writing courses toward the production and publication of 'documents' that will live in the public sphere, and away from more or less private writing that will help us compose our lives" (Moran 40).

Moving journal writing to the Web using weblogs where Internet surfers can read and link to student writing potentially opens our students' texts to the unknown outside of the classroom, but our experience with student blogging has shown that "less private writing" may equally help writers to compose their lives, albeit in a social, more public way. And even though this speculation about the positive aspects of public writing may disrupt established thoughts on what should be public and private, it is not out of line with collaborative process views. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford (1990) note that the solitary writer image permeates "the theory and practice of teaching writing" (6). Composition has traditionally privileged dialectic and Platonic perspectives on invention in writing (LeFevre, 1987, 49-50). The scholarship often depicts the writer, working alone, drawing on deeply divined personal truths or engaging in inner dialogue as the means of creating knowledge. While composition theory and practice now recognizes the importance of collaboration and social interaction more than it did twenty or even ten years ago, we still suspect 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. As a consequence, many writing assignments include opportunities for deep, personal reflective writing that is not possible within the public eye. But what is the tradeoff for that kind of writing opportunity for students? Isn't it possible that the paradoxical situation of creating a risk-free space in which to enable risk-taking has led compositionists to forget a primary purpose of privacy, which is to provide a comfortable writing space, comfort which can also come from community?

Sharing journals within the writing classroom is not a new concept. Well before weblogs became popular, Chris Anson and Richard Beach (1995) encouraged teachers to extend the principles behind the dialogue journal to peer dialogue journals, where, working in pairs or groups of three, students share journals entries. Like weblogs can, peer dialogue journals provide students "with the social interaction and motivation to extend their writing" not available through private journal writing (65). However, as Anson and Beach caution, the logistics of sharing print texts could make it difficult to coordinate and exchange dialogue journals in the classroom. As an alternative, they suggest email peer dialogue journals, "interactive environments" that can create "a strong sense of community in which students can assume an active role as a participant" (76). Though they make sharing more logistically sound, email peer dialogue journals still keep sharing within the walls of the classroom.

By Charles Lowe and Terra Williams

This paper is a final submission draft which was accepted by the University of Minnesota Blog Collective-- Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman, editors--for inclusion in the forthcoming collection Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs.