Anne responds to my “Will Emily be blogging?” question from yesterday with “Will Emily be writing?” And Aaron says “It’s not the blogging or the writing, it’s the feeling.” And James summarizes all of this with “blogging isn’t the point… it’s the writing stupid” (with a nod to Greg.)

Oy.

I’m stubborn. To me it is the blogging. The verb. Not the noun. And I’m not being snarky. Really.

Of course it’s the writing, and no one celebrates that more or better than Anne. She’s downright inspiring when it comes to ecouraging and nurturing young writers, and I have a feeling she was just as encouraging and nurturing before she stumbled across Weblogs. Writing comes first, and unless we work to develop writers we’ll never develop bloggers. No doubt about it.

And it is the feeling. We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t feel the joy of expression through writing, the flutter that audience provokes. And I can’t tell you how many students I’ve had who have no passion or feeling for writing because they’ve been beaten down time and time again by teachers demanding correctness before creativity and form before feeling. (And with what I’m reading about those poor third graders out there stressing over the high stakes tests they’re taking, I doubt this is going to get better.)

And no, we don’t need blogs to teach writing.

But we need blogs to teach blogging. I think that’s where this whole discussion has been heading for me, and I find myself more and more needing to distinguish between the noun and the verb. (And forgive me if this is all sounding redundant, but it’s the way my feeble brain processes stuff…moving molecules.) Now I know people have been “blogging” (reading and synthesizing and writing) before blogs. (The NPR piece referenced in an earlier post says Plato blogged…) But Weblogs and the power of personal publishing change the act of blogging into an even more important genre than when we were doing it with paper. And it’s the audience that makes it different.

I guess what I’m saying is that blogging is still just a form of writing, but it’s an exciting new form (to me at least) that changes the equation and may be a way to engage kids in writing more effectively than what we’ve done in the past. So for me, I hope Emily is blogging when she’s in high school, because it’s obviously a form of writing that inspires her. Maybe she’ll be giving blog readings and participating in blog slams or posting contests. Or, maybe not. But there is something in this genre to teach and nurture nonetheless.

Gregory Nunberg read this essay on NPR yesterday and I found myself listening hard to his observations on blogging as genre. Some snippets:

That interconnectedness is what leads enthusiasts to talk about the blogosphere, as if this were all a single vast conversation — at some point in these discussions, somebody’s likely to trot out the phrase “collective mind.” But if there’s a new public sphere assembling itself out there, you couldn’t tell from the way bloggers address their readers — not as anonymous citizens, the way print columnists do, but as co-conspirators who are in on the joke. Taken as a whole, in fact, the blogging world sounds a lot less like a public meeting than the lunchtime chatter in a high-school cafeteria, complete with snarky comments about the kids at the tables across the room.

And:

The fact is that this is a genuinely new language of public discourse — and a paradoxical one. On the one hand, blogs are clearly a more democratic form of expression than anything the world of print has produced. But in some ways they’re also more exclusionary, and not just because they only reach about a tenth of the people who use the Web. The high, formal style of the newspaper op-ed page may be nobody’s native language, but at least it’s a neutral voice that doesn’t privilege the speech of any particular group or class. Whereas blogspeak is basically an adaptation of the table talk of the urban middle class — it isn’t a language that everybody in the cafeteria is equally adept at speaking. Not that there’s anything wrong with chewing over the events of the day with the other folks at the lunch table, but you hope that everybody in the room is at least reading the same newspapers at breakfast.

Hmmm… An adaptation of the table talk of the urban middle class??? And isn’t one of the great appeals of blogging the fact that we DON’T all read the same newspapers (or Webistes) at breakfast? My “filters” send me in all sorts of directions that I would never travel to if I didn’t read blogs. I think he’s missing the point (or is that too snarky?)

Hey, why can’t we have our students contribute what they learn/know to Wikipedia and put it up for scrutiny?

Wikipedia has also served a valuable teaching tool at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. We have used it in undergraduate and graduate journalism classes to teach the skill of writing dispassionately for an international audience. By collaborating online with others, students not only interact with each other when writing, but get advice and corrections from complete strangers around the world within minutes of making contributions to the Wikipedia.

This is a great primer for the wiki uninitiated and one that I’m going to think about sharing with my faculty.
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