What writing means or doesn't mean

When I’m teaching writing, it sometimes seems as though I have two very distinct and different minds about the whole undertaking. It’s a very strange dynamic because, when I sit in my apartment, stewing about how I have yet to receive work from [redacted], I start telling my roommate about how irritated I am with my students.

A quick example: I’m doing conferences this week, and pedagogically / practically, I think group conferences are my best option. I’m a believer in the whole workshop process, and I think it can help so much more than a simple peer review or an individual conference. So, in preparation for this, I told one of my classes that they would be responsible for emailing a copy of their revised to all of their group members by noon. I asked them to CC me on the email, so I could be sure that group members were given a fair chance to look over and make comments on the draft. I promised them that next conference, they would be able to send it in by Tuesday, and my other class would have to have things done by Sunday.

1:00 rolled around, and I had not yet received a revision from 9 people. I sent out an email, doing a little chastising, a little consequence-proposing, and waited another 3 hours to receive most of them.

During this entire time, I’m soft-ranting to myself and my poor roommate, who, let’s be honest, is probably sick of hearing about all this. I’m saying things like “I gave them so many instructions, reminded them so many times, sent reminder emails, what else can I do?” And then I started thinking about how attached to technology we all are, because I started assuming that I had students ignoring my emails. That I expect these emails I send to be received immediately, and responded to accordingly.

Which is probably the wrong sort of attitude to have, but it’s the sort of immediacy that the internet and new technology seems to demand. When students send me emails, I often receive a second one within a few hours if I haven’t gotten a chance to send one back. In fact, I often do see an email come in, but choose to put off answering it for a time if I’m engaged in another project.

I mean, do I owe my students an immediate response if I’m around to give it? What about as we integrate communication technology into the classroom? Do we build some sort of mutual expectation to be available at all times? Did I use technology to encroach on their “own time” that they shouldn’t be expected to respond to me?

This complicates further for me when I start thinking about the way in which I want to talk about writing. Speaking with Ash yesterday, I planned out a rough sketch of a new type of class that I might like to pursue – One that’s totally focused on writing and publishing for an online audience.

Sketch – Students develop a content blog / website for 14-15 weeks, during which they are responsible for not only creating content, but for curating, evaluating, and posting outside content for an audience. Students would choose the direction of their sites, and work to maintain / update on a regular schedule. Perhaps we could also look into promotion strategies, narrowing to an audience, and the economics of running sites.

Ash helpfully pointed out some pitfalls with this, but the one that sticks with me is this notion that students aren’t writing to any real sort of audience – Student blogging usually garners views through the class, or some other manufactured audience.

So is it real writing if it’s not being read by a real audience? That doesn’t quite seem right, because private journaling sure does seem like writing. And this content publishing seems a little like writing too. So I don’t think I’m ready to revise my last definition of writing – still as some sort of relationship between thinking and marking, the evidence of an inner dialogue. But maybe when it comes to technology, we sort of wear down that barrier between thoughtful composing and immediate verbalization. And maybe that’s how writing is changing – speed of content becomes somehow more important than the quality of it. Which becomes sort of problematic at the pedagogical level.