(the new) bgblogging

When I first started teaching creative writing at Middlebury College a decade or so ago, I preached patience to my students, describing the “glorious failures” that awaited them during their long apprenticeships a la Charles Baxter who talks about writing for some ten years before actively seeking publication ( see the Ploughshares profile). My students would indulge me by nodding yes yes of course, but then ask about how, once they were ready, how to get their work out there and read. They wanted to know right there in the first weeks of the intro course if they were good enough for the long haul. I wanted to know if they dared put away their own sense of direction and ego long enough to learn from those who came before them. I talked about Japanese potters throwing the same shape day after day for years–could they do that? Could they write some hundred pages for every ten they kept? I made them read and read and read and write. I quoted from Samuel Johnson: “I hate to meet a writer who has written more than he has read.” They were aching to have contact with the world, and I was telling them about the young art students of Europe standing day after day in drafty museum galleries copying the masterworks, learning the grammar of the brush and the work of those who came before them as they pushed to create their own work, to exert their own voices upon their art. I likened their trajectories to those of painters and dancers and musicians, all of whom spend many years grasping the technique so they can find the art inside their instruments. I agreed with Thomas Mann, who said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than for anyone else.” My students looked at me impatiently: yeah yeah yeah, but when will we know if we can do this thing?

Now I find myself urging my students to put their work out there right away and frequently–on their blogs and the Motherblog–to experiment with media and voice and audience and genre. People mistake that for a 180 degree turn, thinking that I have abandoned my stance on taking time to learn and hone the craft, to dare make big mistakes before caring about publication. Hardly.

Blogging is different altogether, providing a wonderful balance between putting work out there and developing the practice. Yes, they get to float their young, sometimes inspired work out in the world and see what comes back. They get to read it on the Web, Google themselves, try the writer’s life on for size. They look back at old posts with incredulity–I wrote that? Argh!— but see the growth, the need for apprenticeships while reaching out with the work to see how the world responds. Through blogging, they also develop discipline, writing regularly both at as high a level as they can and freely, because no one expects you to do anything spectacular on a blog anyway. There is the freedom that comes with a medium that is not altogether accepted as a means of artistic expression. At least not yet. How immensely satisfying for the teacher and the student. We can both relax into the writing for its own sake, relishing the discoveries and the risks as they appear through our fingers and into language on our screens, and hold ourselves to a routine of writing and to a standard–the fact that our words go out into the world instead of staying in our notebooks forces us to consider them more carefully, perhaps, than we would in a journal or for a teacher alone (at least the kind of blogging I’m talking about).

My student, Megan, in a recent post on practice, writes:

We need to pay more attention to the value of this comraderie felt through Web publishing and connecting. As Megan says, students hanker after this collaboration, this community-making out there in the world. This is the arena for discussing how to share ideas and to incorporate the ideas of others into our own work, the way Will Richardson discusses in his excellent “What do we do about that?” post. Communities of practice within the Academic Commons subvert urges to “steal” or to “hoard” ideas while they encourage boldness and accomplishment. Competition becomes friendly and respectful and measured–the individual striving for excellence while benefitting the group–because students support and applaud one another in this blogging atmosphere–everything is out in the open and connected, honored and learned from and carefully considered.

And so this blogging serves the work and the students themselves. My blogging creative writing class from last spring has organized a reunion at my house tomorrow–they miss the community, but they are kept so busy in their studies that they don’t have the time to participate meaningfully in this kind of community outside the classroom, they say. Except for the group abroad. Which is a shame. Laura Blankenship’s recent post about homework in the early grades made me wonder how meaningful are the assignments we give our students in college. Do we overload them with information and tasks instead of giving them the room to explore the material and their approaches to thinking about it critically and creatively? Is this not also perhaps what Aaron Campbell discusses in his “Violence in the Classroom” post when he writes, about his EFL students:

Blogging through a course–any course–as a means of interactive reflection and questioning and experimenting with form frees students to explore, to practice, to work hard for their own reasons. There is space and time on a blog, just as there is the drive to post and to comment–to post anything if need be just to ping people’s Bloglines feeds. George Siemens’s “The Joys of Shallow Thinking” post which gets at how our we are now literally surfing through hundreds of essays, articles and posts, looking for the general idea, the bit to return to later captures half of the tension. Yes, blogs have us skimming. But through the practice of regular posting, of having something to offer the group, students can slow things down, go deeper, hang in there longer with the unending apprenticeship because suddenly what they have to say can matter now while not being held up to the kind of scrutiny it would if printed, between covers, and costing money.

Filed under: Discoveries in the Blogging World | 1 Comment »

As usual, I find myself sifting through the past several days, finding connections between seemingly dissimilar experiences: a moment watching the slide show of a former student just returned from a Fulbright year in Syria, a lively conversation over the dinner table about journals vs. email vs. blogs when you’re traveling abroad, reading my students’ blogs (make sure you use Mozilla as your browser if you want to see their blogs listed on the right sidebar) and the article my friend and colleague, H�ctor Vila, threw my way as he urged me to look up from my blog and ask some essential questions about the impact of my technology use on my students’ lives and on my own. I’m interested in the correspondences arising from the very tensions produced by this dizzying range of experiences, and how they bring me back here to the blog.

Watching the slideshow and listening to the accompanying Syrian music transported me to a place I wouldn’t have access to without the stories, the images and the music. Every evening after dinner, the young poet/scholar has been telling us stories about her life in Damascus. This is what happens when people get together around a table and spend time with one another–the magic of stories. But two nights ago, she said that without the images–her photos–we couldn’t really feel it. She couldn’t tell us another story without first showing us the images. It was time to see the iPHOTO slide show. For a moment I was surprised: this young woman is one of the best storytellers I know. Her words create worlds. Her facial expressions and graceful, punctuating hands pull us in, make us listen as hard as we can. She teases me about blogs. And yet, we sat around her computer,listening not to her, but to the music she had selected to go with the images of young girls studying the Qu’ran, children playing in the squares, monks in the monastery, people going about their lives. Staring at that computer screen added something essential to the stories. They brought real people to me. People I will never meet.

My young friend doesn’t like how long it takes me to respond to email–for all my blogging, I am rather slow to commit words to the screen. She loves books and paintings and even email but dislikes blogs as though they were tainted, not real. I get that same response from colleagues sometimes–why blogs, why would you ever use blogs?–as though somehow having students talk to one another and the world about their subject matter through writing online is less valuable than to fill a notebook with notes during a lecture. But last night, she had to admit that to find out what’s going on in Syria and Iraq–what’s really going on–she reads blogs. (I think she does it with a flashlight beneath the covers…) These contradictions mark our age as we struggle to get our heads around what we’ve wrought with technology.

The article, Lowell Monke’s “Charlotte’s Webpage,” from Orion Magazine, would have us do more of this blog resisting, I believe. At least he would have us resist bringing computers into classrooms–at least elementary school classrooms–at least without thinking far more carefully about what we’re doing with computer technology in education than we have to this point–, making a compelling argument about “why children shouldn’t have the world at their fingertips.” He puts his own finger right on an enormous, vexing problem: how we are putting the tools in front of our thinking about the effects of these tools, and now we are seeing the results of our headlong rush into the arms of our technological innovations. We do NOT want to mediate the experience of elementary-school children through computers instead of or even alongside direct, real, lived experiences with the world, he contends, writing:

This is a thoughtful, thought-provoking article I urge everyone–in particular educators using computer technology–to read. His experience with students avoiding face-to-face discussion of important and difficult issues is particularly worrisome:

He concludes:

I agree that we must slow down to consider the impact of technology on our students’ ability to engage with the world around them, the direct experience with people and place. If our use of technology serves to distance our students from the physical world and their own responsibilities within the world, then we are missing the point of using technology in the classroom. And so, yes, we should pause–big time– before we send our elementary-age students to computers. And we should teach our high school students critical approaches to using media of all sorts. In our college and university classrooms, we need to find some kind of balance between sending our students to texts of any sort, and asking them to engage directly with the world and one another–integrating experiential learning into our classrooms. Indeed, the more I use computer technology in my courses, having students roam the Web, podcast, make digital stories and blog, the more I also find myself sending my students out into the world more than I ever did before, conducting interviews, observing, and then coming back to write, to record, to share these experiences via the Web. I also meet more often with them in class–without computers– and one-on-one than I ever have in the past, and students are ever more likely just to stop by my office to say hello. (I never did that with my professors, and no one else did as far as I knew.)

But it’s ridiculous to shun or to vilify the Web-mediated experience. The Web can (just as books and stories can) point students towards the real, have them dream about the world, prompt them to explore it and revise their sense of it. I wish Monke had gone further in his article to discuss ways in which computers in the classroom–coupled with the experiential learning he promotes– can lead to essential discussions about society and expectations and relationships. Why not take those moments in high school when students turn from f2f conversations with members of their own community in favor of the blog or email discussion with someone halfway across the world as opportunities to talk about the reasons, the repercussions, the differences between these experiences? Why not even have elementary school children examine the computer-generated spider next to the real thing?

Case in point–my own sixteen-year-old daughter, in an article she recently wrote for our local newspaper about her spring semester spent with The Traveling School in South America, provides an example of just these kind of conclusions our computer-dependent children are drawing and then what happens when they confront the real:

And she’s a well-traveled person who went to an elementary school without computers and which prided itself on an experiential, community-based curriculum. It was in the clash between the two experiences that a number of interesting discoveries took place.

The same day I read the Monke article, I saw that Will had linked to
a recent post by Dave Weinberger in which he writes:

And of course, leave it to my students blogging away out there in the world, and my young traveling and writing daughter, and my young scholar/poet friend to feel and examine these tensions– observing them interact with one another around a dinner table, reading their blog posts, and listening to them talk about their desire for the direct experience makes me smile again. They’ve got a good chance of fulfilling James Martin’s hope that this generation coming of age will put the world to rights, this world that we have come close to destroying. They immerse themselves in place, with people and with themselves while also connecting virtually to one another as well as to themselves and to anyone else (parents, family, friends, interested strangers) to collaborate in an intellectual commons, a collective intelligence. They’ll revel in both kinds of experience.

My abroad bloggers are talking about just these tensions between the lived moment and the virtual communication: take, for example, Piya’s blogging as she sat in the airport:

And a few posts later:

And a response from Megan:

(I swear I didn’t put her up to that post!)

Ron Burnett on his blog <a href=”http://www.eciad.ca/~rburnett/Weblog/”target=”_blank, Critical Approaches to Culture + Comunications + Hypermedia, on October 6, in his “Dilemmas of Learning and Teaching” post, writes:

These students are actively engaged in this struggle, trying to find a balance between the lived and the virtual–and learning more about the world and themselves in the process than I certainly did at their age. So I don’t advocate removing computers from classrooms, but rather to wade right in and talk about the confusion, the dangers, the possibilities–the uneasy space we are in right now.

Last night at the dinner table (and our ranks are growing with each evening as our young traveling friend attracts my students and friends of my daughter to our home) the conversation among us turned to forms of capturing and reflecting on travels as the experience is being lived. My daughter had just received a letter of acceptance to a semester program in India for the spring and was trying to decide if she really could get her head around being in India at age sixteen. I laughed and said that this time, instead of emailing wonderful missives back home, she should blog it, the way Piya blogged her month in India last year. She looked at me and said, “I have to blog it–blogging is required on this program.” One student (who has blogged brilliantly in a couple of my classes but avoids it when she has the choice) said that she uses a journal, and hates the thought of blogging from abroad because she doesn’t want to share her private revelations. Blogging is too exposed. Another young friend asked my daughter if she had kept a journal in South America. She said that she could never get into journaling because she didn’t see why she needed to tell herself what she was feeling–just feel it, and be present in those feelings. Writing to others, though, having to explain to someone else what is going on and what it seems to mean, well that, she said, makes a lot more sense to her. Our young scholar/poet agreed. Our journal-keeper did not.

And I sat quiet, just listening, thinking about the article that had left me unsettled earlier in the day, and Dave Weinberger’s post, and the students’ blogging from abroad about blogging from abroad, and the eight of us sitting around a table talking about blogging and emailing and journaling from abroad, and I thought how lucky we are to have all these ways of connecting with ourselves and one another: face-to-face AND virtually. My sixteen-year-old daughter is able to think critically about both kinds of experiences, about how to be present within the moment, responsive to the people and environment around her, and to use computer technology to extend those experiences, to reach out to others within her community and beyond it, and to think about how both affect the other and her own perceptions. Her enormous spirit has room to range in and a means of connecting. She gets what Dave Weinberger says: “So knowledge has become the continuousness of conversation. It has become a miracle. Knowledge can no longer fix the meaning of a thing with a single pin of meaning. To understand now means to hear the multiplicity of meaning talked about across the world…The more of the world we get into the conversation, the more the world will mean.”

And so here I am, back to the blog, back to having my students blog–but also insisting that they get out in the world, and talk to one another face-to-face. There can be a balance, a lovely kind of tension between these two sides–the Web writer who wants to throw open the doors to discussion via the Web, and the experiental learner, who needs to throw open the doors of the classroom. Our students need both experiences.

Filed under: Discoveries in the Blogging World | 5 Comments »