my talk today with Lisa at the New Research Summit

I thought I’d go ahead and put my part of Lisa and my talk here for people to read. A pdf version is availble from a link on the sidebar.

Keynote Talk:
“Online Citizenship:  Amazon.com Citizen Reviews and Student/Classroom Blogs”
Lisa Ede & Michael Faris
New Research Summit
12 May 2006

Before I discuss my experience with blogs in Lisa’s class last fall and for my research, I’d like to ground my experience with blogs in education within the context of my history with technology. I like to view myself as on the cusp between two generations. As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I was among the first to grow up with computers in my elementary and high school classrooms. I was amazed when I recently learned that colleagues only a few years older than me didn’t have computers in high school. Also, because of my age, I negotiated my way into the Internet in high school, much later than those only a few years younger than me (and in a time of such rapidly changing technologies, a few years makes a big difference). While I quickly acculturated to the Internet, it is definitely not something that “has always been there,“ as it was for some of my eighth graders whom I taught last year.

My experience with using computer and Internet technology in the classroom began with emailing classmates and using discussion boards in high school English classes, and submitting publications layouts and papers to my teacher through the network my senior year of high school. Beginning in high school, research could also be done online, and—I’ll be honest—this helped to incorporate play into work. I recall my college prep course my senior year: sixteen students in the computer lab, each of us researching or writing about our topics, simultaneously emailing each other jokes or stories, posting to discussion boards, and holding face to face conversations.

I’d like to fast-forward to my senior year of college when, in order to share my self-sponsored writing with my friends and acquaintances, I published my first zine. Zines are independently published magazines and have been popular among countercultural and subcultural groups since the 1960s or 70s. Arguably, the genre is quite old, dating back to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, if not before. I titled my zine Sisyphean Task, echoing Albert Camus’s account of Sisyphus as someone who is happy in his punishment because the struggle toward the goal, and not the goal itself, is enough for fulfillment. My zine served several purposes, but I think foremost among the might have been to aid in my search for and exertion of my own voice.

What, you may be wondering, do zines have to do with the New Research Summit and with the title of our talk, “Online Citizenship: Amazon.com Citizen Reviews and Student/Classroom Blogs“? Well, it was in early 2004, less than a year after printing my first zine, that I began blogging on Blogger.com, and I see the genesis of my blog, also titled Sisyphean Task, as arising out of my self-expression in zines. Kevin Brooks, Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe write in their online article “Remediation, Genre, and Motivation,“ that “The web is remediating all media that has come before it (print, music, film, television, radio, paintings, email, etc.); therefore… we wanted to emphasize… that weblogging is not a radically new way of writing, but a repurposing of familiar… print genres.“ For me, blogging started as a way to remediate the genre of the personal journal, and I would later begin to remediate other genres: editorials, letters, and political commentaries, among others.

By the time I found myself in Lisa Ede’s Language, Culture, and Technology course last fall, I was an active blogger for nearly two years, read at least twenty blogs consistently, and administered or contributed to at least five blogs. For this mixed undergraduate and graduate course, Lisa has set up a class blog using the blogware Moveable Type through OSUWrite, a program at Oregon State meant to pilot blogs and then eventually set up the potential for every student, faculty, staff, and organization on campus to have a blog. This was a new endeavor not only for Lisa, who didn’t have much experience blogging, but also for the majority of the students, only a few of whom had blogged some before. Lisa titled her class blog The Presence of Others, deriving the title from Hannah Arendt’s statement in her book The Human Condition: “For excellence, the presence of others is always required.“

I was excited for the opportunity to see how blogs, something that had such personal and social meaning for me, would work in a classroom setting. It’s interesting that before Lisa and I had met face to face, I had stumbled upon her blog through Paul Bausch’s ORBlogs website. Lisa and Bausch had both posted about online citizen reviewers and their respective blogs, and I and other bloggers were able to read this and discuss those ideas on both their and our blogs. Within a day of posting on my personal blog some of my initial reactions to Lisa’s questions regarding online citizen reviewers, I was receiving feedback from students in Australia. As we are all most likely aware, blogs have the ability to provide a forum for the quick spreading of news and political commentary, such as with the Hurricane Katrina aftermath and the recent Colbert speech. However, I think that the spread of Lisa’s online discussion regarding online citizen reviewers is a testament to the how quickly academic knowledge and discussion can spread as well.

Lisa’s first assignment for us on the class blog was to introduce ourselves on the blog, both in terms of who we were and our history as technology users. I think I outed myself right away as a blog nerd with the extensiveness and enthusiasm of my post, but I was quite surprised as to the resistance and fears of my classmates. Wrote one student, “I am not sure about the whole blog thing. It just seems too neoteric and chic for me. Plus I don’t know how confident I am with complete strangers reading my thoughts, concerns, anxieties, excitements.“ Other students expressed fear, distrust, and stress revolving around the use of technology in general. On the other end of the spectrum were a few students who were regular bloggers or very comfortable with technology. This blog was going to obviously be an experiment with a technology new and unfamiliar, if not downright scary, to most of us that would involve communicating between students in a way that I don’t think any of us had communicated with classmates before. Right away, however, students were commenting on each others’ posts, offering support, sharing experiences, and asking questions through the blog’s comment feature. This was exciting for me when I saw how quickly everyone began commenting on the blog. Near the end of the term one of my classmates posted about the success of this blog, noting there were 228 individual posts with 383 comments. This seems like a lot of not only text generation for a quarter, but also a lot of dialogue.

One of the most exciting outcomes of this blog was that we were able to engage in discussion with authorities whom we would not have otherwise been able to talk to in such a public sphere. This led to discussions on the blog with Paul Bausch, co-founder of Blogger.com and administrator of ORBlogs; Charlie Lowe and Terra Williams, who both run classroom blogs and wrote “Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom,“ published in the online collection of essays Into the Blogosphere; and James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Literacy and Learning. What is particularly interesting about Gee, I think, is that his involvement was student-sponsored: By this, I mean Lisa had contacted Bausch, Lowe, and Williams, but a student in the class contacted Gee about the possibility engaging in conversation with us.

In his post to our blog, Gee wrote, “I have looked at your Blog and am just really amazed at how interesting, creative, and just plain smart the whole discussion is. I am usually no fan of such “chats“, because it often seems that the discussion is less good than the document being discussed, but your comments, positive and negative, really add value to the material in my book.“ I think Gee’s comment adequately summarizes the type of work students engaged in on the class blog. Students were willing to discuss openly and honestly about what we read in class texts, as well as share some personal experience that helped to create a community of learners and thinkers.

As exciting as dialoging with Bausch, Lowe, Williams, and Gee was, I think the online dialogue with my classmates was the most exciting feature of this blog. Right away I found myself sharing personal experience, both experience that related to class discussion and experience that helped to build relationships with classmates. I might dismiss my experience of sharing personal stories on the blog as having to do with my comfort with blogging and the personal, but I found that many of my classmates shared personal experiences, and we found ourselves discussing a variety of topics, including sports, music, and war. I think there is a fear — which Gee gets at in his comment — that online discussion will degenerate into personal blogging irrelevant to the coursework. I think this fear is often founded in a dystopian position, which Lisa mentioned, that new technologies will result in the degeneration of academic discourse.

I have a different perspective than this dystopian position because I think it is based on the assumption that personal experiences will dilute academic discourse. I see certain values in the sharing of personal experiences. I think one of the biggest challenges of teaching is creating a strong learning community, a community of students who share experiences and develop the same goals as learners. The wonderful thing about our class blog is that we were able to share personal experience and build cohesion as a class. The dialogue on the blog related to personal experience built rapport, helped us connect as people, and helped in the development of a strong learning community. Additionally, we were able to ground the class content in our own personal experience, making the learning authentic and applicable to our own lives and work.

As the quarter progressed, most student posts to the blog became self-sponsored, in that Lisa did not assign them. While Lisa occasionally assigned a post to the blog in response to a specific reading, many students opted to post their responses to course reading online, so that their journals became public and part of a dialogue, rather than a private reflection on the reading. For me, this was an amazing opportunity to see the course readings in a new way, to see reflections, interpretations, and insights that normally do not get shared in class because of time, fear of sharing, or other constraints. Our engagement on the blog was able to do something that to me was phenomenal: we were able to create knowledge while continuing our course discussions outside of class. One of my classmates wrote on the blog, “For me, a blog is a positive way of taking class out of the classroom without making it a chore, especialy [sic] since we are not required to post in this class, that almost makes us want to post more sometimes.“

Before moving into a discussion of my research blog, I’d like to quickly quote two of my classmates’ end of the term reflections on using the blog. One classmate of mine wrote, “Every week it seems like some new way of learning and writing takes place on the blog, from questioning public vs. private space, to political issues, to challenging both the authors we’re reading and our classmates. I’m thinking more publicly, but at the same time sharing more private thoughts than I though[t] I would.“

And another wrote, “I can’t think of a better way to communicate with my classmates in a non-classroom setting. Discussion boards are rigid, e-mails are boring and slow… blogs are versatile, quick, linkable thoughts that flow from one to the next, well, like they do in my head.“

While I was actively engaged in blogging and in the course blog, it was not until I read Andrea Lunsford’s The Everyday Writer that it occurred to me that the weblog could be used as a log for research. Lunsford writes, “You might prefer to begin a Web log (blog) for your research project. You can use it to record your thoughts on the reading you are doing, and especially, add links from there to Web sites, documents, and articles you have found online“ (143).

Lisa suggested that I pilot the use of individual student blogs for OSUWrite. Using the open-source blog software WordPress, I set up a blog on my OSU webspace, titling it A Collage of Citations (which is where the images that you see here today are posted). (Both Lisa’s class blog’s and my blog’s URLs are in the packet.) I began to research the use of knowledge blogs, k-logs for short, which are used to keep track of research. I found that students and faculty in various disciplines, including rhetoric, visual psychology, feminism, and bicycle engineering, were using k-logs to store and discuss research.

Traditionally, students use notebooks, journals, or note cards to keep their research. My blog, as well as those that I looked into, usually incorporated bits and pieces of all three of these styles of research. I sometimes just posted quotations and citations in a post, like a notecard, and sometimes I journaled in reaction to a source or for brainstorming, like a journal or notebook What made using my blog more advantageous than keeping either a journal or note cards was the ability to create categories. By attaching a category (or multiple categories) to each blog post, I was able to later sort my posts by categories, and read each blog post I had written under a certain category, such as the category “voice.“ (You’ll note the use of categories on the sidebar here.)

In addition to a place to keep my research, my blog became a very handy place to prewrite. I noticed, however, a shift in the way I wrote my brainstorming, which I wrote about on my blog:

When I normally do research and then do brainstorming/freewriting/prewriting for a paper, I have a sole audience in mind: me. However, my last entry was a brainstorming/prewriting activity that was geared not just toward an audience of me, but to a larger audience. I felt like I was no longer writing to just formulate my own ideas, but to explain my ideas to an audience (real or imagined). So, my prewriting journaling activities have changed in that my audience has changed, and that I’m cognizant of it as I write. So, then, my freewriting’s purpose changed from exploration to exploration/explanation….

Indeed, I had found that my audience had changed. I was able to get feedback on my ideas, as well as suggestions for other sources. These came not only from Lisa, who read my blog, but from classmates, friends, referents from google searches, professors from other universities, and other writers. The ability to receive comments, and hold discussions through those comments, helped me formulate ideas and think more in-depth on my topic, as well as learn of new sources to check out.

This shift to research as a social activity was very exciting for me, as I saw the potential to learn from others and engage in online conversation. In a way, the privacy of research was lost; it was no longer as safe to make “mistakes“ because there was the chance someone else would read it. However, I’ve always valued process and understood the value of learning from mistakes, so the risk of journaling in public was a relatively low one for me.

When writing my paper at the end of the term, I found that the use of the blog was very helpful. I didn’t have to worry about losing something, not being able to find a source, or losing all my research if I lost a notebook or computer file. If I had an electronic source, I had linked to it. If I couldn’t remember the author of an article or something he or she said, I could use the “search“ feature of my blog. I found my thoughts and research were much more organized and more easily accessible than I was used to. The blog had become a way for me to organize myself more efficiently.

At the end of fall term, I began to reflect upon my process of using my blog, and I noticed that more often than not, I hadn’t ventured too far into writing about what I thought about my sources. Once the term was over, I blogged:

…shouldn’t I be reflecting my thoughts, my personality, onto this weblog? Shouldn’t posts not only contain information from others, but also my reflections upon that? I did do this on some posts, but rarely. I could have been more brave and put out my immediate thoughts related to what I was blogging about. So, from now on, I’m going to try to make this a bit more personal of a research log, to try to value my personal and immediate reactions to my research.

I have since tried using my blog as a place to formulate my own ideas, to brainstorm more, make conjectures, and explore ideas more fully than I had before. I’ve started using it for other coursework and have started some brainstorming for thesis ideas on it.

One of the potentialities of blogging research, I believe, is in the possibility of a more collaborative research and dialogue surrounding research. I agree with Tiffany Herard and Robert Boice “that it is the failure to make research social as a practice at each stage that inhibits the possibility of the completion of more books, articles and study guides on radical thought“ (Herard 96). Noting that isolation is counter-productive, “Boice, author of Professors as Academic Writers, encourages academics to work collaboratively to get ‘unblocked’ and to move beyond the competitive impulses that undermine the possibilities of universities becoming centres for empowerment“ (Herard 95). While a community of bloggers who keep their research online and comment on each others’ blogs isn’t collaborative writing in the traditional sense, I see it as a tool that could be used to recreate a collaborative model.

As I think about the potential of student use of blogs in the classroom, I consider what was advantageous about my blog: The format of the blog helped me organize my notes and brainstorming, and the public forum allowed for responses from others, as well as discussion. I wonder what a classroom of twenty or more students, each with an individual student blog, blogging their ideas and research and commenting to each others’ blogs, would look like, and I’m thrilled about the possibilities.

I’d like to thank everyone for the opportunity for Lisa and me to speak here today, and I’d like to close with a few questions that I’m continuing to grapple with. Earlier Lisa asked what form of new citizenship and new publics these new online forums are creating. When online publishing can be nearly instantaneous and academic discourse can be conducted at a faster pace, how does this affect the way we do research and the way we dialogue? Does blogging, as bloggers and researchers Toril Mortensen and Jill Walker argue, influence “the way you think about thinking,“ as well as the process and method of research? I am also beginning to wonder how students interact and represent themselves online, and how this differs from, or perhaps even changes, how they represent themselves and interact in the classroom. The opportunities for new areas of research and new ways of discourse are rife with the continual development of new online media technologies.