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:
The reality of the rainforest didn�t hit me until I went on my first hike. Jerson explained the different plants, flowers and trees we encountered, but we rarely saw even a bird flying overhead. The only time I actually saw any of the animals I had imagined would live in a rainforest was in an animal sanctuary, miles upriver from where we were staying. I wasn�t disappointed, just mainly shocked by the difference between what I had been expecting and the reality of the rainforest.
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:
The old dream of finding a single knowledge for the entire world � having knowledge be like reality, in other words � is dying rapidly.
But we should not be left in despair because we now also know that for as long as we manage to not to destroy this blue pearl, we’re going to be engaged in endless conversation. Conversations iterate differences upon a common ground. Conversations are themselves paradoxes. But because they happen, they’re miracles.
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:
It’s funny, in this age of globalization, of time and space compression, of mass communication and rapid progress, how far must we travel to be in a new place?
And a few posts later:
As an aside�someone posted a valuable comment on my blog. They asked if having to reflect on this experience has made it harder to actually involve myself in the experience. How do you all feel about this? About this pressure to blog, to write something worthwhile and meaningful about this frenzy we�ve thrown ourselves into. I know that I found it much easier to reflect and critique on my trip through India. On both my personal journey, and on the people and places around me. Maybe because I was only there for a month? Not enough time in a new place to formulate an actual exsistence. Or maybe because the place is part of me, flows through my blood� What about you, has this World Blogging Project, compliments of Mad Dog Ganley, added to or retracted from being abroad? Lizi, I know you had mentioned earlier that you are too caught up in your own sphere of reflection. Have you been able to step outside of this? What about you others? I would definitely be interested to hear some thoughts�
And a response from Megan:
Anyway, my point is that through my reflection, I in turn am asking more questions, becoming more excited about blogging, the students, and my overall experience, releasing fears — and really ALLOWING myself to LIVE WITH the people rather than just existing IN the school on the reservation.
So yes — I think blogging enriches my experience “abroad.”
….Oh, I totally forgot the other component I was meaning to mention.
COMMUNITY! I’m almost finished with this book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paulo Friere, the author, talks about the student-teacher relationship where it is necessary for both student and teacher to be “actors” in their discussion, to be “Subjects” — not Subject and object. He also talks about dialogue and words, how every words breaks down into reflection AND action. Thus, our dialogue is, if it is authentic, is composed of reflection and action.
Blogging provides this opportunity for reflection and action at the individual level while simultaneously connecting the individuals to other individuals forming a community that responds to one another through the “reflection-action” process. And I think that’s such a beautiful way of existing with one another.
(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 |
(the new) bgblogging 
Face to Face
I use on-line resources myself, and I love developing and providing them for the students I teach and faculty with whom I share techniques for teaching writing. Whether they access the resources at 3:00 a.m. student time or 7:00 a.m….
Barbara,
I know that many of us bloggers abroad have started writing/thinking about blogging. And I’ve been trying to also, although it’s strange to call attention to the form itself when I’m so focused on the writing still.
It’s strange to hear you admit that you’re hesitant to put words to the screen (both in emails and blogging) when you’re such an avid blogger. I expected you to be on Zoey’s side. (ie Be reckless. Don’t censure yourself. Write!) I’m starting to understand the merits of the chaos.
I think that the people that you run into who immediately react against blogging (I’ll tell you now that I was one of them) are comparing blogging to journaling as emails are compared to letters. I still sort of think of blogging as emailing. I’m typing. It’s fast. I’m not as careful with my grammar or what precisely I want to say. So yes, it’s another opportunity to use lots of words without saying anything. And furthermore, not many people appreciate reading something not written directly for them.
In projects like this blogging the world, or in class, we had a goal with out blogging, which gave us some direction. But if someone like you is hesitant to blog spontaneously, what must others think? (a lot of my friends at home are still thinking of my blog as one extended mass email.)
But I’ll also admit that I’m writing things on my blog that I wouldn’t have the motivation to set down in my journal…especially because I’m not alone in this whole endeavor and it keeps me thinking.
I don’t know when technology should be introduced into a classroom environment. Even at Middlebury technology gives a glamour to relatively simple exercises, and I sometimes wonder whething blogging is used to make courses more attractive to prospective parents. Only in your class has technology been put to use. A computer won’t do the teaching, after all. Someone had to tell us what to do with it.
Now I’m rambling because I can. This is blogging, after all. But I’m going to think more about this form of writing and maybe start to take it more seriously. 🙂
Until then, you can send handwritten letters.
Lizi
Dear Barbara,
I’m writing in response to your post and Lizi’s last comment.
Your Dave Weinberger’s quote at the end about “knowledge [as] the continuousness of conversation” immediately struck me. The parallel between knowledge and conversation is so powerful and it again reminded me of what you’ve started with blogging. Since then, I’ve been trying to define and redefine knowledge, and again and again brought back to your format for blogging—or rather the progressive track I’ve experienced since being introduced to blogging and am already seeing an evolution when comparing the EL170 experience to Blogging the World. AND NOW,contemplating and preparing to enage a group of high school students in a tiospaye blog, I’m constantly thrust back and forth between fear and fascination.
Scared, because (well, due to a million variables) I’ve only experienced blogging in two different settings; fascinated, because of the authentic transformation in communities happening right here as I type. I totally agree with Lizi and the author of the Orion article in that technology, if not used carefully, can ruin the entire goal of education, distracting the students from each other and the world and their ever-so-precious innocence and perception. But on the other hand, careless instuction via technology is not the ONLY threat to improving education. A group of students can sit in the same class every day together listening to lectures, occasionally engaging in class discussion, filling out response questions, and producing analytical essays, research papers, or labs–AND STILL leave the course with no sense of community.
I think blogging, if carefully guided, can only improve the classroom setting. And when the classroom setting is a community, then the students within that community care not only about each other, their studies, but also how their community/conversation relates to the larger world and community around them.
Blogging gives me a sense of infinity. The curriculum relies on ritual and strucutre, but through blogging this curriculum is constantly expanding.
I thought Lizi’s comment on how her friends still think of blogging as one long email was very interesting, and her (or yours, Lizi :)) comparison of journaling and blogging to emailing and letters. I completely agree that when I approach a letter, it feels totally different than when writing an email. Although, that process and perspective as evolved as well. I still think that blogging, when thought of as a commnunity, is less comparable to journaling. Journaling is a differnet process with a different purpose, I think—and one that is very valuable, but gives the writer an entirely different experience.
My first instinct is that blogging is a more advanced form of journaling, because unlike a journal, writing in the blog requires thought to the audience, not necessarily limitation, but more reflection perhaps. And unlike an essay or research paper, the blog provides as Weinberger so eloquently stated–the ongoing conversation.
I think our analysis in all subjects would be richer if we were enaged in this kind of conversation.
Anyway! I’m realizing that my experience “abroad” here is equally frustrating, invigorating, and dialogically challenging when reflecting on education, writing, and blogging as when I’m confused and lost to my place and understanding of the Lakota culture. Yet, the experience feels so much fuller I think by documenting my own education while reading and reflecting and responding to the other student’s and their completely different yet fascinating experiences.
Thank YOU so much, Barbara for beginning this journey at Middlebury with us!
Barbara!
I am surprised you let so much spam creep on to your blog! Shame Shame…haha..anyway I too find this conversation about blogging pretty fascinating. I think we learned from the conference in California that blogging means a million different things to a million different people and maybe this is the beauty of this medium. It can lend itself to students, professors, scientists, teenagers, adults, writers, philosophers, politicians, the list goes on. Maybe a decision has to be made when a blog is set up, What kind of blogging will this be?
For me the frustration with blogging lies in the fact that I refuse to consider myself a blogger, I am a writer who blogs, but this does not change the nature of the writing itself. It just makes it available to a wider array of readers.I cringe when I tell people I have a blog, because I know the first thing that comes to their mind is that I am spreading my personal diary on the internet. Their is actually a term coined for this..I think its called egoblogging or something of nature, basically just say anything and everything even if you have nothing to say. And this is absolutely not the goal I have in mind.
Unlike Lizzie and Zoey I cannot just sit down and type an entry into the movable type program. I have to think about it first, treat it like a real piece of writing (not that theirs arent!) and find some sort of distinction between an email or a journey/diary entry and a blog entry. Kind of like our EL170 blog I suppose.
For me the purpose of my blog is to make me keep writing, a practice space if you will. And I have found this time around that I’m not as intersted in engaging in discussion. Yes my blog is open to comments but somehow this journey through Italy, through reflecting and writing has become very personal- this might sound selfish, anti-community oriented, but I think I have really found what kind of blog, in this situation, I would like to have…it takes time I agree, and maybe this is something everyone, in the classroom and out should think about…what kind of community if any do you want to create with this blog, what kind of discourse do you imagine taking place, how do you develop a very specific voice, and who exactly is it all for?
Piya
I love that the three comments left here all come from my students–I am often asked whether my students read my blog and what effect that has on me. I feel fortunate that Lizi, Megan and Piya, you have all taken the time to leave me such thought-provoking comments. You always push my thinking. It makes me want to run right over to your blogs and do the same!
Lizi, I’ve surprised you with my confession that I am not writing as spontaneously as you or Zoey. Sometimes I do write off the cuff–here in comments, certainly, and when I’m at conferences or when I am traveling. But in large part I am writing the kinds of letter-essays, I hope, that ask me to pull together various threads that dangle out there in my work week, and thus, I try to write a bit more carefully than I perhaps would if I were blogging the journey. Because I am constantly asking my students–you–to reflect, to be conscious as well as to be bold and spontaneous, I am looking for ways to combine those seemingly opposing urges. I do not compose my posts the way Piya does, off screen, and then paste them, but I do usually post things in draft form and leave them for a few hours before switching to the publish mode. But not always. I think that during EL170 this spring I’m going to try something new–have a bg creative writing blog alongside the students’ blogs, where I try out all the exercises I ask them to do. That ought to humble me, eh?
So, keep on blogging the way you have been doing–it’s glorious stuff precisely because you are writing what you are thinking as you are thinking it; but because you do have a shared purpose with this blogging, you only reach for the internet cafe when you really have something to say.
Megan,
As usual I find myself learning from you–I like the thought of “Blogging gives me a sense of infinity. The curriculum relies on ritual and structure, but through blogging, this curriculum is constantly expanding.” Beautifully put. And that is what makes blogging so threatening to some because once you open the doors to the bigger world and the conversations unfolding out there, it’s tough to control the progression of thought and learning. I am really looking forward to reading along your journey with tiospaye.
Piya, you have blogged (or used blogs) now in several different situations, and your writing shifts with each one–that makes sense to me. From the EL170 blog–a place to post work and get feedback more than anything, to the India blog which was a real reaching out to a community about a very important personal experience which was itself your academic course, to the Italy blog which is not really about the academics at all. Fascinating to hear you articulate how you are feeling about your new blog.
I’ll be interested to see what you all make of your blogs five, ten years down the road. Blogging will by then most likely be a thing of the past, but will you still be referring to these moments or will they sit unopened like my college notebooks in the bottom of some forgotten box in the attic…