jill/txt: talk at brown
“My talk at Brown today is titled “Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network” and is going to be mostly about using blogs with students. I’m going to stress network literacy and how blogging is not simply keeping an electronic journal, it’s distributed and collaborative; it’s learning to think and write with the network. I’ll also talk a bit about the ethics of insisting students blog in public.
Weblogs are good as learning journals (searchable, writing practice, catching thoughts, intellectual workout, valuing one’s own opinion, discovering interests, even recommended as therapy) but all these things could be done in a paper notebook – though the knowledge that other people are (or can be) reading is important.
What’s more important to teach our students is network literacy: writing in a distributed, collaborative environment. Weblogs are the first native web genre. Serial, unstable (ethics: edit? annotate? delete? change your mind? – compare net journalism, post-editing), networked.”