In composition we are often trying to get our students to come up with something provocative. I’ve struggled a few times with students who want to write an argumentative paper as a report and a few times with students who want to argue something that no one would argue against, e.g., smoking is bad for you and you should quit.
Although Will Richardson discusses mostly K12 education, I think what he writes about in his post Discovering Content is useful when thinking about college composition too. When thinking about teaching, and about the Read/Write Web with students, he’s asking teacher to shift from asking students to “write” reports in new modes (e.g., vlogs, podcasts), and instead
take risks with our ideas, to test them in authentic ways with real audiences, and learn from the process. […] Something that involves risking his ideas or interpretation with the payoff that the viewer (or reader ) will learn something absolutely unique, something that can’t be found at Wikipedia, and may, if done in a provocative enough way, motivate that viewer to respond. Something that genuinely teaches something new.
While this shift in teacher thinking does have to do with safety (getting our students to risk things on the Internet), Richardson notes that
The real shift is with the stance of the teacher. This idea forces us to move away from delivering content as we have for 100+ years and instead move toward assisting students to discover content on their own. What are the ideas, concepts and examples that can be woven together to create meaning in the context of our class goals and outcomes? What personal learning can be made transparent that informs a larger discussion of the curriculum?
And this is really nothing new – educators have been talking about constructivism for decades. But it seems that we have a new possibility with the Internet – a possibility for not just having an audience, but for interaction with an audience.
When I’ve used blogs in the classroom, I’ve used them primarily as an internal communication device, and there was no actual interaction with anyone else on the Internet. We may as well have been using a nicer Blackboard (though I hate Blackboard’s discussion format). So, next time I teach using a blog, I fully intend to get students to interact with other blogs, to actually ask students to not just take risks with each other, but to take risks with a real audience, to be a reader/writer audience with other blogs, to develop information literacy. I’ll also be seeking ways to get students to be open about their thought process in their online writing, to be more explorative.
