The Newness of New Media

I created this blog in late July, 2008 to teach an introductory course for the University Writing Program at UC Davis. To examine the terms and goals of the course more specifically, please see the blog archive on the right-hand side of the page. When the writing course ended in September, so did my efforts to keep the blog up-to-date; I had to move on to other projects and a different course and let the experimental tenor of introductory writing with blogs settle a bit before I could write my own reflection. The overall evaluation by the students and me seemed to have been that the course was a success. They managed to stay focused and, for the most part interested, in writing for six weeks during the late summer. However, since the course ended, I have realized that in many ways, I do not know how to determine what constitutes a “successful” writing course with new media. Is it a success, in other words, if they write consistently, if their peers and I also consistently evaluated them, and if most students registered a detectable improvement in their writing?

When the course began, I had to inform and, in some cases, assure students of several aspects of the course. They would be experiencing a different form of pedagogy in my class than in other lower-division writing courses on my campus. In general, I have always found that teaching students about writing is extremely challenging. At a predominantly science-focused research university, much of the quarter is devoted to statements about why and when they may need writing in the “real” world, or how they might be better scientists if they write well, or (on a good day), how they may begin to see the world differently with their new approach to writing. This is no easy task in nine weeks, particularly when (at times) I do not believe in the very categories—such as the “real world”—on which such incantations depend. I have grown to accept that for many students, UWP 001 is merely a “requirement” and they may never return to the papers they wrote, the readings they encountered, or the discussions we had.
However, rather than blame students for not caring enough about writing, another graduate student and I began thinking about ways to teach writing through media that the students might already use, or at least media with which they may be familiar. Indeed, on the first day of class, I learned that many of the students do blog and many of them utilize this medium for their “daily” or “random” thoughts. We wondered, then, what would happen if we took this medium more seriously, which is to say, if we ask students to write formally in blog posts to which their peers and I would comment. As I mentioned, I had to assure students. By the end of the first week, it was clear that they are much more comfortable with their writing if they think the audience ends at the instructor. They do not want to be accountable to an outside audience and frankly, neither did I in some moments. Up to this point, my teaching has been a fairly private practice. My best and worst moments as an instructor are usually between the students and me. When the blogs pushed both our writing and teaching practices into a more public and evaluative space, I began to feel differently about the course: it was not simply a “better” or “worse” feeling, but it was different.

In part I think this difference has to do with time, and with what new media has the potential to do to the temporality of a class (or of any activity, really). I can look over our posts from August and September and remember the contexts in which they were written, the discussions and readings that ignited them, and sense of accomplishment and frustration I felt in reading them, then. They exist now as an archive of something that happened three months ago and yet they are still public, and new readers may encounter them as if they are happening now, as if the conversations were alive this week. Is that not what an Internet surveyor experiences when she or he happens upon something? I know I have “newly” encountered items online that other people knew about months ago, but because I found them by browsing in a simulated real time, that information felt new and fresh to me. What does it mean, then, for me to leave these posts here and now? Again, they are somewhat out of context and out of time, and yet in your present, they are here for the encounter and response.