“Could it be that students who don’t read, even though they can, are people who, on one important level, don’t and can’t write?
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–Ken Smith

Tom’s comment on an earlier post that blogging is a reading activity as much if not more than it is a writing activity has spawned a pretty interesting thread that Ken continues on his site. It’s another great post that has a lot of levels to it, the kind you need to read over a few times with focus to get all the nuance to it. (Time to turn off Air America.) The kind you need to respond to after you’ve let it settle for a while. Actually, the kind of blog post that begets the kind of blog posts that make blogging a worthwhile act.

Blogging starts with reading. It’s easy (at least for me) to forget that sometimes. I know that I’ve articulated the blogging process in that way many times before, but it still does seem very writing centered to me. But as Ken accurately points out, “blogging, at base, is writing down what you think when you read others.” And maybe that explains the disconnect I’ve been feeling between the act and the tool of late. The tool requires writing. (There is no blog without writing.) The act requires reading. (There is no blogging without reading.) Without reading, you’re just writing, not blogging, and that’s a pretty heady distinction (at least in this head.) And that really does change the expectations we have of our students, I think. They can use a Weblog to write, but in a different way they can also use it to blog, and in doing so they can develop an important skill that is not as easily taught with pen and paper or even the Internet and a word processor.

Writing stops, blogging continues. Writing is inside, blogging is outside. Writing is monologue, blogging is conversation. Writing is thesis, blogging is synthesis…none of which minimizes the importance of writing. But it’s becoming more clear just what the importance of blogging might be.

Some of the good stuff from Ken’s post:

If you are a reader and if you are reading, you start to be able to find something you want to say beyond shallow commonplaces, and you start to know how to say it, and maybe even who to say it to.

And:

And maybe that means that links are vital for new bloggers for a completely non-constructive reason. Instead of assigning students to go write, we should assign them to go read and then link to what interests them and write about why it does and what it means, not in order to make a connection or build social capital but because it is through quality linking (not the flaccid A-list stuff I spoofed above) that one first comes in contact with the essential acts of blogging: close reading and interpretation. Blogging, at base, is writing down what you think when you read others. If you keep at it, others will eventually write down what they think when they read you, and you’ll enter a new realm of blogging, a new realm of human connection.

Read the whole post…

A couple of updates on blog projects here. First, the Monkey Bridge Weblog which featured responses to student questions by the author of the book has been pretty successful. I’ve been enouraging the teachers to get their students to talk about some of the information the author related in the answers, like this one:

Monkey Bridge was written when my own mother was sick. I had always wanted to write a book about Vietnam, where I was born, especially when I realized how many books about Vietnam have been written, but none by a Vietnamese American. However, my first version of the book, written in the late 1980s, was not to my liking because I found that it was too much about the politics of the war. It was too eager to make a point (my point) about the war, and not enough about human interactions, the intricacies, nuances, ambiguities that characterize much of human interaction on a daily level. I then set that draft aside and basically let go of it. In 1992, my mother fell ill, making me think a lot about my relationship with her – hence I wrote Monkey Bridge – which is primarily for me about mothers/daughters. This one just happen to be set within the context of an immigrant story and the context of the aftermath of the war in Vietnam. But it is for me a story about a mother’s relationship with her daughter.

That is some good stuff, and I would hope students could explore their own relationships with their mothers in the context of current issues. We’ll see.

And, the Chinese class has been using Weblogs to post advertisements they have made along with voiceovers. Unfortunately, they didn’t think too much about background noise while they were recording, but the process was really easy and the teacher is thrilled. Here are a few of the better ones. Very cool to see these ideas branching out.
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