Discussion with Sara and Linda

Sara Jameson, Linda Barnes, and I have been emailing about blogs v. journals, blogs v. discussion boards, and blogs in the classroom. I’m going to post excerpts from our emails here and we’re going to start replying here (for some practice using blogs and to extend the conversation to anyone who reads this):

Here’s excerpts from our emails:

Sara asked Linda in an email about her thoughts of journaling v. blogging, and Linda wrote:

I can’t get excited about blogging although I know it’s the very in thing w/ gen x. I should ask Perry’s opinion. But blogging seems more like letter writing or even instant messaging, not journaling, to me.

I had a surprise when living in Utah, when I discovered that journaling was much respected and recommended there, but came to find out it was mostly rec for the “patriarch“ of the family and that journals were shared w/in the family.

The uses of journals is long and tangled and very wonderful, actually. I support all kind of journaling — “even“ scientific notebooks to track experiments or observations in the lab or in the natural world. Travel journals, dream journals, goal-setting/affirmation journals — I encourage all of it!

But the “real and best“ use of journaling, in my personal view, is for psychological growth. By this I mean the introspective and self-expressive process of writing for discovery, enlightenment, clarification, insight and creativity.

The problem with much student writing, in my view, is that students believe they know what they want to say and try to say it (usually badly) without first writing their way to understanding what they want to say. You can’t adequately THINK your way to clarity without also writing (or talking) toward it.

I know you understand this because we both process through conversation. Maybe blogging could be like that — a kind of collaborative writing? — but usually blogging is about making a statement, isn’t it? Stating a point of view, not really discovering a point of view. Do you know what I mean? Do you see a difference?

When writing is public, there is always, always (I must repeat this!) the knowledge of a possible critic in the wings. So hard to put aside and be truly, deeply honest. I don’t mean that writing should be about delving into dark places, really, but it is a kind of groping, an uncertainty, like walking in the dark on a rocky downslope, no handholds, no guides. Slipping is an ever-present possibility. One must go carefully, slowly, and can’t afford to worry about being watched in one’s awkwardness and teetering.

And you mention handwriting, too. There is some research to show that hand writing stimulates different portions of the brain than typing. I do believe that writing by hand can bring up things that typing doesn’t (or can’t?) and writing with the non-dominant hand is really quite a remarkable and surprising process. Have you tried it?

When Sara forwarded Linda’s thoughts to me, I wrote:

I value what Linda has to say, and I think that private journaling still has its place, but I see blogging as similar because I don’t write certainties, when I am writing journaling on my blog, I write about confusions, I work my way through problems through writing. I like how she questions that blogs might be collaborative writing, because it’s always great when a friend or stranger comments on my blog and leaves me a note questioning something I’ve written or asking for clarification or something, and I get to re-think the whole thing and take in a new perspective. My blog is (well, was more so before this quarter) very introspective and self-analytical, and it was a place where others could comment and ask questions of me.

I would never advocate doing all your journaling online; there are things that you need to work out without the possible critic that Linda mentions. However, I think that students could do class journals on the blog because it’s also fighting the “private romantic notion” of the writer that dominates our view of a writer being all alone and private. Blogs are still a relatively safe place to write and journal, and because they are quick posts, there is more of a “this is what I believe and think at this moment” to it, rather than, “this is my concrete views in this final essay due for the class” views. I think there is a lot of potentiality in blogs because of this process and because it is a public act (that can, hopefully, lead to a lot of collaborative writing).

Linda wrote back:

Michael, I appreciate your thoughts on blogging. It is like writing a conversation you can’t have or choose not to have because of time/distance or other restraints. I guess in a way my emails w/ Sara are a kind of blog, but since it’s only 2-way we don’t have benefit of others’ input.

My son is a computer programmer and has a Forum that users of his programs can sign up to use. It’s totally open, so anyone can visit, “eavesdrop“ or participate. They discuss programming ideas, software bugs and their birthdays! Is a blog open like that, or do people have to be invited to join in? I really don’t know much about it at all.

Why is the blog more useful, to your view, than the class discussion board. Or is it? How is it different? Is a Yahoo discussion group like a blog? How can I get one???

I like what you say about refuting the romantic notion of writers being solitary beasts. As Sara and I have often exclaimed, a truly necessary part of writing is being in a community with others who understand the process, goals, blocks and joys of writing. Perhaps blogging is a modern method of making more conscious the fact that thinking is as much a creative process as writing is. The writing/thinking link is so important, and blogs may be filling the spaces we have now in our culture because we are so busy and so geographically separated. Through blogging, one can stay in touch with like-minded folks — even meet more of them than ever before. Thus we have “conversations“ in writing that are really discussions that leave tracks of our process.

Now I think I am leaving some muddy tracks because my thinking isn’t clear at all on this topic — isn’t it wonderful? I’m on the slippery slope and soon I’ll hear back from you.

I like that Linda compared email correspondence to blogs, because I do view them as quite similar. The major difference is that it is logged where anyone can read it, and that people can leave comments other than the original writer. The audience is opened up to everyone who stumbles across it instead of just one particular individual.

Linda’s son’s forum does sound similar to a blog. A blog is defined pretty much as a log kept online in reverse chronology with time-stamps. There can be a single author or mulitple authors. Authors can either be invited to join or be set up so that anyone can join. Usually blogs allow comments. Some blogs allow anyone to comment, others require joinging or logging in, and still others limit comments to those who are invited. It depends on the blog and its purpose. Unless a blog is on a website that is password protected, it’s generally open to anyone and everyone. I’m not sure if Linda’s son’s forum is a blog or not – it would depend on presentation, probably.

For a brief discussion of why I think blogs are more useful than discussion boards, look at this post. Blogs are generally different from discussion boards because a) Blogs are ordered in reverse chronology whereas discussion boards are chronological (generally); b) Blogs show the text (or most of the text) of posts at once, but not the text of comments, whereas discussion boards only list the post titles and the comment titles and no text; c) When you click the comments link for a post, you can usually read the post and all the comments on the same page on a blog, whereas most discussion boards only allow you to read one post at a time; and d) Blogs usually engage in a conversation outside the blog, such as linking to other blogs, and discussing other websites and blogs (when an idea jumps from blog to blog to blog, it is called a meme). From my experience with yahoo discussion groups, I would say it is more of a series of emails rather than a blog.

The easiest way to get a blog is to go to Blogger.com and sign-up. You can get a blog set up and start posting quite easily using Blogger. That’s how most bloggers start because Blogger’s interface is pretty easy to handle.

Does this clear up what blogs are somewhat? Also, Terra Williams and Charles Lowe have a good article at Into the Blogosphere that discusses using blogs in the classroom.