Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

1.26.12 | This past weekend’s New York Times’ Education Life includes a group of articles on 21st-century education that look at how educational systems are (or are not) changing to match transformations in technology, information distribution and communications.

Included in the mix is an article by Matt Richtel that sets up a false opposition evidenced in the title itself: “Blogs vs. Term Papers.”

Most readers can probably imagine what follows. What surprises me, though, is that the critique of blogs shows a dated, reductive perception of what blogs are and can accomplish. But since Stanley Fish only now admits he writes a blog, perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised.

While Richtel gives plenty of space in his article for Cathy Davidson and other advocates of a new, digital literacy—those who believe in the importance and power of having students, say, write blogs rather than traditional term papers—the article ends up being more of a chronicle of the anxiety many traditional (old and young) English teachers feel about a perceived decline in students’ ability to write logical, well-researched long-form arguments—or the corresponding anxiety over how school and society are themselves devaluing that type of writing. 

Many of these “traditional” English teachers have very admirable, progressive intentions. They have long seen their main task—insomuch as they are the teachers of expository writing—as giving students the ability to articulate arguments and to see the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments around them. With this ability, students (ideally) become engaged citizens in a vibrant democracy of ideas. 

Blogs and other online writing forms are seen by traditionalists as promoting a style of writing that relies on a much looser form of logic and argumentation—if they are making any point at all. Relying on personal anecdotes or claims that are not cited or even sourced, these forms encourage a very immature conversation and degrade the classic art of rhetoric.

“Writing term papers is a dying art, but those who do write them have a dramatic leg up in terms of critical thinking, argumentation and the sort of expression required not only in college, but in the job market,” Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist for the American School Board Journal and founder of the Leadership and Learning Center, the school-consulting division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, tells Richtel. “It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”

William H. Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review journal and author of a decade-old study on the decline of long-form history research papers, says more bluntly that the solution to improving students’ writing “isn’t blogs, the solution is more reading. We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.” 

The problems with this viewpoint seem to be threefold:

1. If we pay attention to the research of Andrea Lunsford, the idea that students’ ability to argue coherently has declined alongside the emergence of new forms of online writing may be just faculty-room hearsay, or a complete myth. This anxiety may reflect a resistance to change and to altering the way we’ve always done things.

2. As any active reader of blogs can attest, a blog is only as bad or as good as the writer behind it—and in this instance, I’d also argue the teacher behind the class of blog writers. Knowing the technology behind blogs is almost essential to understanding best practices in layout and design, which can enhance reading, writing and sharing blog posts. If a teacher doesn’t get all that, neither will the students.

And while many blogs are simply personal diaries and others are off-the-top-of-the-head polemics, many others are sources of very advanced, well-structured and well-sourced argumentation. There is nothing inherent about the blogging form that makes it the antithesis to a traditional view of literacy or argumentation—even if the popular conception of blogs prevents us from seeing that.

3. A high school English teacher I discussed this with (my partner), said the biggest issue he sees is not between students who write poor arguments and students who write good arguments, but between students who are interested in writing, who see it as a fun and essential skill to have, and students who are completely uninterested, or perhaps scared of doing it wrong. These students view writing as an agonizing, irrelevant activity that they can never do well (as proven by their teachers’ comments on their papers). If a student is interested in writing, it is relatively easy to get that student to adjust their writing to the requirements of different forms.

If online writing motivates students more—and why wouldn’t it? It’s the form of writing that they are most immersed in—then using that form as the way to get students to engage in the world makes the most sense. Once they learn how to express themselves—for any audience, for any purpose—a teacher can create assignments, as Cathy Davidson does, that force students to challenge themselves and even follow the rules and regulations of a particular venue, like, say, Wikipedia. 

I thought Lunsford’s hybrid approach at Stanford is interesting. Here it is, as described by Richtel:

Her writing class for second-year students, a requirement at Stanford, used to revolve around a paper constructed over the entire term. Now, the students start by writing a 15-page paper on a particular subject in the first few weeks. Once that’s done, they use the ideas in it to build blogs, Web sites, and PowerPoint and audio and oral presentations. The students often find their ideas much more crystallized after expressing them with new media, she says, and then, most startling, they plead to revise their essays.

“What I’m asking myself is, ‘Will we need to keep the 15-page paper forever or move right to the new way?’” she says. “Stanford’s writing program won’t be making that change right away, since our students still seem to benefit from learning how to present their research findings in both traditional print and new media.”

The question is whether that will still be the majority position two, five, or 10 years from now. Davidson, in a response posted at her own blog, gives these issues a much more extensive defense, explaining in great detail why she has her students blog and publish their work online—and why she has given up assigning traditional term papers. But first she gets in a few dings:

Since, in fact, so few teachers actually do require the full-length research or term paper any more, as Richtel’s essay makes clear, I am pleased that a vehicle as prominent as the NY Times is dedicating space to the pros and cons of the genre in the splendid Education Life issue that is full of inspiring stories of learning innovation. And here’s a nice thought: the Richtel article might even put a few of the reprehensible research-paper mills out of business. There is a whole industry out there dedicated to supplying students, for a significant fee, with plagiarized or tailor-made term papers. (One of my cousins, who put four kids through college, jokes that the cadre of over helicoptering, term-paper writing mothers of the world will also thank me!)

But if the research paper is a problem, is blogging the answer? That’s what I want to address here. Just as there are good and bad ways to teach research papers, there are good and bad ways to use blogs in the classrooms. They can become just as meaningless and routinized as any other assignment unless they are used carefully and strategically, with an aim to their larger purpose. So, for those who are interested in the larger topic, here is some elaborated thinking that is missing from the New York Times piece (and, no, Matt Richtel, I do not consider it a slippery slope from the term paper to the blog to the 140-character Tweet. That’s a cheap shot).

Head over to HASTAC to read the rest.