My (So-Called) On-Line Life

Posted on January 18, 2007
Filed Under Blogging, Teaching |

I’m not exactly sure how it has come about, but I seem to be participating it two on-line communities, one old school & one very cutting edge. The old school is the Poetryetc email list I’m now co-managing, the cutting edge is the NewsTrust journalism filter, where I have been posting pretty much daily. That’s in addition to trying to keep up a reasonably regular pattern of posts to this site. And considering taking up not dead yet Philosophical Investigations again with my colleague Chris Robinson.

Oh, & that’s not counting the two ~~Blackboard sites~~ WordPress blogs for courses I’m teaching this semester. As for Blackboard, all I can say is that it looks & feels like it was designed with an ugly stick. As I was going to sleep the night before last, it occurred to me that I had adopted Bb for spurious reasons. It’s true that I will have to use the program for my completely on-line version of Understanding Vietnam this summer; there is much less reason, especially given its recalcitrance, to use it for my classes in the brick & mortar classes. I was originally going to use Bb for Intro to Lit & The Lit of American Popular Music as a way of getting to know the program and in the case of the latter course because I could legally upload copyrighted material behind its password protected barrier. My revelation came in three phases:

I spent part of the afternoon last Friday in my office with our Bb consultant Nancy trying to figure out the best way to upload sound files. You can embed them, you can attach them, hell, you can probably tie them to a kite & hang them over the student union. But everything we tried seemed like a workaround. In fact, that’s my beef with Bb — it forces me to create workarounds in order to teach the way I want to teach. I told Nancy that whereas I conceived of a course — any course — as a conversation, Blackboard conceives of a course as the delivery of a certain number of discreet units of information. Nancy, in the meantime, went off to sit at her computer in order to come up with a solution that would work for me, but by the time I came home I was suffering from ontological overload.
I had a beer. That usually quiets the angst. I decided to work on some unrelated things that evening & come back at the Bb problem the next morning. Mostly, I just did some background reading of the Pop Lit course. Sometimes it’s better if I just put a problem out of my mind for a while. And as I was falling asleep Friday night, it came to me that I didn’t need to use Bb for the Intro to Lit course. I could do everything I needed with a blog from Edublogs, whose service has gotten a good deal more robust over the last few months. I fell asleep with a sense of relief that at least I’d only have on Bb site to build & manage, the one for the Lit of American Popular Music.
When I sat down at the computer yesterday morning, I logged into Edublogs & created a blog for the Into course & in doing so I realized something consciously that I had known peripherally all along: I can password protect individual posts in WordPress. That means I can legally post copyrighted material for students in my classes as long as the pages are restricted to those students. And that meant I could also use Edublogs & WordPress for the Lit Pop course. I spent most of Saturday & part of Sunday putting that blog together.

As of today, the Thursday following the above madness with Bb & Edublogs, both my class blogs are up & functioning. I am beginning to get comments from students & I amn content with my decision to go this route. Once I have a little more content & I’m sure that the blogs are secure, I’ll post links here. This will be an ongoing experiment, so I will be interested in people’s reactions & suggestions. I’ve tried to use blogs with students in the past, but one thing has become clear to me this time around: the teacher who wants students to blog for class really has to start in the first week & then keep selling the idea every class meeting. In the past, I have created course blogs, announced them, and hoped students would be so interested they would flock to the site. Obviously, I needed to get real with myself. I had been imagining a kind of utopian learning community in which everybody is as interested in my subject as I am. This semester, I’m just flat-out requiring that my students post to the course blogs. They’re getting graded.

Grading, of course, produces one kind of ~~(instrumental)~~ motivation; it’s not what I would want in an ideal world, but it’s what I have in this world. And the problem is not unique to blogs, though blogging’s idealistic origins highlight the issue — giving writing assignments, whether for essays or blog comments, involves an element of coercion. I’ve talked about this with students pretty regularly over the years, pointing out the inherent contradiction of what I’m asking them to do. I talk explicitlly about how we are all embedded in an institution & the fact that institutions have their uses, but also their requirements. Sort of a reprise of the first two chapters of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, basically. I’m asking students to write in order to discover & express their own views of the world, albeit in relation to the things we’re reading & talking about, but that writing inevitably becomes a product to be graded. Blog comments are very informal, of course, and unless a student is completely incoherent, I’ll accept quantity while encouraging quality. In both my classes this semester, students are writing essays, but I have replaced exams with a blogging requirement. And I’ve made the bargain explicit: we talked about it on the first day of class & I repeated it on the second day. Ultimately, the success or failure of the bargain will be determined by how much students take away from the course. And that is a very mysterious quantity, a kind of pedagogical dark energy, to draw a metaphor from cosmology.

Note: I began this post several days ago — if it’s temporally incoherent, that’s why. Note also: I think I was using the therm instrumentalism incorrectly. Here’s a quick & dirty web definition. I think Dewey was mostly right about ideas; I was using the term more pejoratively to mean something like coercive.