In 1988, I began my college teaching career at a school that was participating in a “brand new” concept called ENFI (Electronic Networking for Interaction.) The idea was originated by Trent Batson at Galludet (please excuse me if I spell the name of the school incorrectly). His theory was that students who grew up using sign language as their primary means of communication lacked the verbal experience of hearing students and so their writing skills were also lacking. Some professors at other colleges joined in, deciding that many students, hearing or not, would benefit from this program since they believed that such “Real Time Writing” would form a valuable bridge between speaking and writing.

RTW was run (slowly I might add) on a LAN with a (at the time) state of the art 286 server and 8088 computers as terminals.

If one reads the papers and books that came out of that experiment, and reads about the details of the software, it will be quickly evident that RTW was an early, localized version of AIM. And the results were what we have since discovered…not a bridge between speaking and writing, but a fragmented, emoticon layden (with keystrokes…before the fancy pictures) and uncontrolled group discussion that all too quickly moved off to cars and music and emphasized the slang and colloquial expressions the orignal project developers had hoped to diminish.

So, right now blogging looks like a real neat pedagogical tool. But it always seems that we educators are “a day late and a dollar short” in figuring out how to use these tools and in controling them so that there is a planned, viable educational outcome.