Notes from Vygotsky: Conserving constructivist practices through new technologies in the ELA classroom

Despite its tech-heavy title and intent, Paul Allison’s article “Be a Blogger:  Social Networking in the Classroom” is, in some respects, less about the effect of new technologies in the classroom than about the continued importance, in the English Language Arts, of ensuring student comprehension of the writing process as well as of ensuring student participation in constructivist classroom models such as that of the writing community.

This is not to say that technology does not modify the writing process or the dynamics of a writing community—far from it. However, Allison’s injunction to his reader as modeled in his classroom implicitly conserves “current” (as in theoretically fairly recent, if not “wired”) constructivist classroom models such as that of the writing community. Will Richardson, in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroom, makes a grave error in ignoring such 20^th-century models, which promote many (though not all) of the values he ascribes solely to “connective writing,” or blogging. The goal of this post will be to explore to what extent new technologies helpfully enhance the aforementioned ELA instructional practices, and to determine in which ways the use of new technologies might compromise them. I find both Allison’s and Richardson’s accounts very practical and convincing.  However, my main criticism of “Be a Blogger” and the first three chapters of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms is that both sources neglect (so far, anyway) to model a successful integration of technology with older practices.  What Allison and Richardson should promote is a slightly more tempered 21^st-century re-evaluation of the writing process.

It is possible to reimagine what Allison describes in his classroom in what would have been its paper-and-pencil past.  To begin, Allison asks his students to “find something to be passionate about” (Allison 80).  He is talking, of course, about the stage of the writing process called brainstorming (although most of this stage falls under Allison’s label of “participating,” a label that particularly emphasizes the collaborate nature of brainstorming undertaken with the help of the Read/Write Web).  “In my day” (way back in the 90s), we used paper printouts of concept webs to brainstorm; we learned how to freewrite, and how to bounce ideas off of our classmates.  Though student bloggers may not rely so much on concept webs anymore (this method is either not worth mentioning in Allison’s and Richardson’s tech-specific accounts, or else no longer relevant), the collaborative aspect of brainstorming is still present in both authors’ classrooms.  The stage of “participating” precedes “producing” in Allison’s chart because blog comments (whether given or received) may spark the creativity or new realizations that students seek when brainstorming (Allison 84). Freewriting, too, is still very much an integral part of Allison’s blogging process. Most interesting to me is the fact that brainstorming retains its research component, albeit in virtual form. This does make sense:  in order to write, after all, students must seek sources to which they will feel compelled to respond.  In this respect, blogging promotes the strategy of close reading that any study of a printed text is designed to cultivate; I agree with Richardson here (Richardson 31). Initial research on the web forces students to become “information literate” or to develop what Lankshear and Knobel further explain as a skill related to the filtration of information, to discernment of what is factual and relevant and what is not.  And, because the nature of the Web is democratic, students may find themselves citing experts and non-experts alike.  Therefore, like commenting, this type of research normalizes the collaborative aspect of brainstorming, which (I have found, from personal experience) continually needs re-emphasizing.

However, I worry that too many students will fail to understand the process of brainstorming in its most complete form if their experience of it is constrained to the web, where the connections between topics and ideas are other- rather than self-generated.  Brainstorming should be collaborative, but it should be individual as well.  Students might lose much from forgetting the power of “monologue,” or internal meditation on the relationships between concepts.  In Allison’s and Richardson’s blog-centered curricula, students are able to move through hundreds of ideas in minutes; anyone who has ever played  the Wikipedia game knows this for certain.  But nothing in the blog curriculum prevents the student, once they choose an initial idea, from primarily relying on connections made and hyperlinked by others to push them past this first stretch.  While research of this type nearly mirrors traditional research, it lessens the responsibility of the student to sit and listen, for at least a few minutes, to his or her internal voice.  As students of my generation brainstormed without computers in elementary and middle school, we became lost for a few minutes in our own minds as we rifled through catalogues of potentially-relevant personal experience.  This is a unique and valuable experience, and it should not be neglected in the development of a blogging curriculum.

There are other issues with web-based brainstorming.  Constant consideration of audience (from brainstorming through publication) can be intimidating and even detrimental to output, especially for students who view themselves as “weak” writers.  Not everything that is written necessarily needs to be (or should be) published; to insist on such is to perhaps place unfair burdens of anxiety on students who need private spaces in which to experiment. This is an area where temperance may be key, and the practices of “traditional” writing communities adopted for students who express apprehension.  Additionally, the research component of blogging described by both Richardson and Allison neglects the print world entirely. While I understand that the numerous advantages of web-based sources (their currency, their accessibility) means that students are already more likely to use such sources than to use their print counterparts, web journals are, for many projects, not a perfect replacement for books. 

Both Allison’s and Richardson’s accounts of blogging in the classroom make clear that the process fundamentally alters the writing and revising process as well as traditional conceptions of the prewriting stage. In concert with these two authors, I predict that blogging will most probably increase student predisposition to revision.  As Richardson remarks, “some would argue that a true blog post is never really finished, that as long as it’s out there for others to interact with, the potential for deeper insights exists” (Richardson 30). While in the pre-Web era a student might have received instructor comments on his paper and done nothing further with the piece but tuck it away, students who receive comments on their drafts or published posts are compelled to further explain their thought processes and original intentions to their readers.  These explanations may then be edited into the post to produce a final product.  This is theoretically what occurs in traditional forms of peer revision. However, since many students disregard peer revision (again, from personal experience), this practice may actually be enhanced by the blogging curriculum, in which students feel accountable to a larger audience.  From Richardson’s account, it seems as though most blogging achieves what only some writing communities do:  that is, an investment of all student writers in a communal and ongoing conversation.  

On that note, most remarkable to me are the changes effected in the publishing aspect of the writing process.  In this respect, too, blogging in both Allison’s and Richardson’s conceptions of it seems superior to traditional writing because the stakes of publication are somewhat higher:  instead of an essay collected with other students’ essays, printed, and distributed in a booklet to the ELA class, as they would be in a writing community, blog posts can be published in real time to a worldwide audience.  While the core audience of a student’s blog may remain the same (parents, teachers, and classmates) in either case, the possibility of intercontinental connection offered by a blogging platform gives it a distinct advantage (especially with planning of the type Richardson uses in his classroom, taking advantage of personal connections to leading authors and thinkers who can maintain a virtual conversation with his students).  And, of course, the never-quite-permanent, ready-for-editing existence of a “published” post ensures that students continue to privilege the revision stage of the writing process, which is often overlooked in its traditional conception. 

Nevertheless, educators should read both Allison’s and Richardson’s treatises with temperance in mind.  Blogging seems to be a fantastic way to encourage students to read critically, write with enthusiasm and clarity, and research and cite that research effectively (Richardson 28).  However, not every assignment students encounter in school will require the same format as a blog post:  to enter college, and then the professional world (assumptions of SES rampant here, I know), students at the beginning of the 21^st century must still write and read in the old world.  This means that they will know have to cite research in MLA format as well as link to it; it also means that they, at least for the time being, will have to dig into “expert” research published only in discourse-specific journals, as well as write in discourse-specific ways.  The blog, after all, is only one genre of many, and students will have to write in many genres before their days in school are over.

Finally, I think it’s important to problematize Richardson’s proposed dichotomy of writing and blogging (maybe I should have done this at the beginning, but I think it makes for a good closing too). The writer claims that “writing stops; blogging continues.  Writing is inside; blogging is outside.  Writing is monologue; blogging is conversation.  Writing is thesis; blogging is synthesis” (Richardson 30-31).  I believe that Richardson is working with an outmoded idea of “writing”—one that excludes constructivist classroom innovations such as that of the writing community.  Richardson, when he privileges blogging, is privileging it in relation to an antiquated model of writing that excludes constructivism.  Therefore, while “connective writing” may indeed have a number of advantages over traditional writing—even traditional writing produced with the assistance of a writing community—it does not have nearly as many as Richardson suggests, because writing practices have evolved over time as pedagogies connected with them have advanced.  Writing can be outside; it can be conversation.  It can continue.  Perhaps what could be most exciting about using blogging in the classroom is what Richardson omits: blogging has the potential not only to attract students to it and invest them in it, but to change their perceptions of writing as a discipline as well.  Perhaps we will have truly succeeded in using blogging in the classroom when the elements of Richardson’s dichotomy no longer exist as a dichotomy at all.