hector's blog

We have a very interesting experiment going on at Middlebury College:

three different writing teachers exploiting the best blogs can offer,while also placing the form on notice: we are moving beyond it! we need to move beyond it!

Co-blogger, Mary Ellen Bertolini, in her class WRPR100-FO4, a Middlebury College Writing Program Course,conflates the writing course and the writing center in her uses of a blog and our CMS tool, Segue.

What's interesting -- and very useful -- are the different features endemic to a writing course thatare pushed further and used more fluidly because of the dynamic integration of two sophisticated communication/composition tools.In Mary Ellen's blog,we can see several essential things: a subtle, sophisticated but very nurturing management of a course--tips,guidelines, questions. And in the CMS site, we see more defined work, as in Journalsor Writing Guides,some Mary Ellen's own.

But the most significant part of this synthesis is that, for the student, s/he gets the sense that there is a real professional holdingeverything together; this is essential in a writing course where, typically, students feel vulnerable and are apprehensive about sharing work.Immediately, students are confronted with the "open web." They have to discuss,among themselves, ideas prompted by the professor; also, some posts are the traditional" reader-response," but with students also reacting to one another's posts, thus setting up the "next class," future writing: nothing is wasted and the emphasis is on looking back to move forward.The web, here, enables remediation (see Jay David Bolter's,Remediation: Understanding New Media).

We have here a model for creatively using the best available technologies to enhance the learning in a writing course.Mary Ellen is also extending the writing course into a media production course, enabling students to re-examine their writing,and themselves, through Digital Stories.Students are therefore evolving through or because of e2e interactions, personal communication with the teacher and other students, f2f--and emerging via different genresof writing, learning to see technology and writing as a synthesis that engenders the creation of ideas.

Barbara's Arts Writing coursecontinues to scream across campus, exploiting the best blogging can offer. The management of this course is solely relianton the creativity of the subject, "writing across the arts." These students are each exploiting hypertext writing in neverbefore seen ways, moving across the arts, across their side-blogs, as well as their personal blogs.Arts Writing course is now a portal,visited by experts in the arts! The blog, then, has metamorphosed the class into a professional " outlet," run by student-experts-critics.

The classroom's walls are non-existent; this blog is the "go to" place to see the latest trends, ideas,feelings, and so on...and composed by undergraduates. The students are teaching us! The classroom has been reversed,challenging staid notions about the role of the teacher, the role of the student, the functions of technology.Look at how a Five Minute Writing Exerciseexploits the form--writing--by expanding it through a data base that, in turn, lends us some extremely valuable insights when art forms are synthesized.

Are we seeing the birth of another art form, the data base driven, hypernarrative course?

We've seen the beginnings of this in George Landow's Victorian Web,of course, as well as in his Post-Colonial Web. Likewise, early on,we can see the beginnings of this in Michael Shumate's 1996, The Cartography of Narrative where he maps out his "Holier Than Thou"project following Michael Joyce's use of Storyspace.Now we're seeing, in these courses, the birth of the art of the hypetext-driven course.These are the young models, employing hypertext, yes, but also the data base and multi media--all in one in anattempt to break the tight hold of the ivy walls.

Finally, in my own course, Future Communities: Technology and Social Revolution,of which I've written about here,I too have used the synthesis of the blog with the CMS tool. The more static or traditional segments--syllabus,assignments,students' notebook-like spaces-- are all housed in the CMS tool. Dynamism, however, comes from the blog--and the blog has moved from a node to create a community, beginning with theKnowledge Tree,to now a portal on the course's subject(s) and themes, relying on the students' blogs coming through in side-blogs. The course began, metaphorically,with the summer assignments and the course description featured prominently, high up on the left-hand navigation.As the course developed, students managed the main blog--a source for training on blogging--and then, eventually,moved to their own blogs, each describing and chronicling their community-based experiences. Students began from home,came to the college for their traditional educations, but were quickly and systematically forced to point their learning outward, to the community.The left-hand navigation thus moved from a course management system to a portal; this coincides with how the students took over the class, as well,leaving the course behind, a memory.

The technology is assisting the endeavor. In fact, it would have been very difficult to do this without it! Thee technology is collaborating in the move from inside theivy walls to the outside--and very real--community where knowledge must eventually be placed and utilized. Thus, technically and literally,we see a switch: where the blog was a course management tool, a community building tool,it also became a vehicle for students to find their own voices and focus; now out in the community,the blog serves as a portal to the students' community-based projects. In turn, the students' own personalblogs are nodes--portals too--that draw viewers and outsiders into resources on their particularly subjects.

Emergence theory in action? Links as entries into universals--six degrees of separation and the new science of networks slowlybut surely connecting once disparate thoughts and ideas across the physical world? E2e to f2f and back again?In a desire for a more ecological democracy, is this not a move in this direction?