Krause and Brooke

I assume that Krause's "Blogging Gone Bad" was the Brooke response that we were supposed to read (I wasn't entirely sure from the syllabus). Anyway, I was struck by Krause's remarks. He places some of the blame for his class's failed blog experiment himself, but he also points out some key issues that I found myself agreeing with, such as:

"While blogging, students quickly learn that posted content can be read by those other than the teacher and their classmates. Blogging opens up assignments beyond the teacher-student relationship, allowing the world to grade students and provide encouragement or feedback on their writings."

I wonder if Krause's utopian vision here is common. As I wrote in a comment to Faith about her blogging anxiety, there's very little to feel anxious about, since so few people will read your blog. In fact, many bloggers receive hits from friends and family. I ran a blog for two years and was disappointed that my blog didn't receive more hits. This notion that the class Web log will connect students to people around the globe is something of a pipe dream.

Later, Krause writes,

"Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I thought the blogs turned out poorly. Some students posted repeatedly, while other students barely posted at all. The amount of text per posting varied considerably. While there were times in which some students wrote longer messages, more often than not, the posts were short, merely links to other documents, or text that was "cut and pasted" from another source. There was very little writing that could be described as reflective, dynamic, collaborative, or interactive."

At times this term, I've felt that the 8040 blog could fit the description above, and I'm definitely part of the problem! I've blogged. I consistently blogged for two years. I am no technophobe, yet I find myself posting less often to the blog than I have for other forums, such as E-mail listserv or Blackboard. Part of me wonders if the blog is really more special than Blackboard discussion, which offers similar basic tools: posting and commenting. If the blog isn't really reaching out to the masses, is it really better than other simpler forms of technology?

Krause would disagree with some of my comments. He sees blogs as more polished, more formal than E-mail; thus, they can inhibit discussion, since posters might feel intimidated to post to the "author." I'm not sure I agree. Members of the class feel comfortable enough to talk to one another. I think Krause is referring here to true dynamic discourse (i.e. people from "out there" jumping in on the discussion), and as I've written above, I'm not sure how many people outside the class really find their way to the blog, become interested in what's written, and respond.

The Brooke page was okay, but did anyone else have problems putting everything together? The page begins with an overview of deixis, which sounded interesting, but by the time I finished all the readings, I didn't really sure how digital writing should embrace/acknowledge deixis. Also, as Brooke admits, his page is quite stable and doesn't seem like a very good example of a "web log as a deicitic system" (which is the name of the blog). I did like the part where Brooke writes, "In a matter of three degrees (each connection between two people is a degree), the graduate students at Syracuse, for instance, are connected to the faculty and graduate students at Purdue University, the University of Texas, Penn State University, and so on." This reminded me of a mental game that I play, and that I'm sure others play, where you try to link any given two figures (Liberace and George W. Bush, for example) in as few steps as possible. :-)