If a [Digital] Tree Falls in a Forest Full of Falling Trees, Does Anyone Hear It?

In our Teaching College Composition class, we have just discussed J. Elizabeth Clark's "The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy," a response to Kathleen Blake Yancey's work and call to arms for composition teachers to take up "the digital imperative" by involving our students in engaging digital literacies. Obviously, I'm a supporter of the use of technology to teach and theorize writing (hence, this blog). Many of the literacy skills called for by Yancey, Blake, and others are, indeed, imperatives. But there was one section of Clark's piece that troubled me and that I think smacks a little of what Lanksheare and Knobel have called "boon theory." For Lanksheare and Knobel, this is one half of a binary that includes both "bane" and "boon." For boon thinkers, technology is a panacea, the thing that will finally cure social ills, provide universal access to powerful literacy tools, give agency to those currently without it, and so on. Certainly, the piece as a whole does not display this, as part of its exigency is Clark's understanding that the digital world requires new sorts of critical literacy for our students. Yet, her description some of her particular classroom activities gave me pause.

Her composition courses, or at least those she discusses here, involve online activities including ePortfolios and blogs, which her students are required to perform. In addition to giving students hands on experience with the types of composing many of them will be expected to do in life outside academe, Blake claims that "when they tell their multimodal stories and share them on the internet, their education has an immediate impact on their lives and their interests, allowing them to put their new skills--like research and multimodal composition--into play immediately for audiences that may include their family, their friends, and even wider publics" (32).

Indeed, one of the most promising aspects of including digital components to Composition classrooms is the possibility of building a sense of audience for our students. By writing in forums that are indeed public, it is hoped, our students will have actual audiences beyond us as teachers. Because of this, says Blake, "our students feel pressured to create effective arguments and to respond to critiques of this arguments" (34). It was exactly this possibility that led me to include a blogging component to my composition classes at Oklahoma State in 2010-2011. I believed that asking my students to publish in forums where their writing was indeed public would both cause them to think about forming arguments for actual audience, and that it would also give them a personal investment in the writing that would lead to greater engagement. However, I found that this was not necessarily the case.

In order to give my students a sense of having a real audience, I did a couple of things. The first is that I created a mother-ship blog that gave them potential blogging topics (which related to our course readings), and provided links to blogs by other student groups. Students were required to respond to at least one other blog, but encouraged to read and respond to several. My desire was that we would be able to establish a kind of online community between my two sections in which a healthy and interesting dialogue would take place. The second thing I did was to recruit friends outside the university to respond to some of the first questions I posed. The idea here was to give students the sense that people outside our class, and even our university, would be able to read and respond to these public blogs.

Ultimately, however, I saw little awareness of audience in my students' blog posts. They were often very short, riddled with typos suggesting that students were not proofing their posts, and often read like direct responses to the teacher. In other words, what I saw was that students treated their blogs as if they were simply electronic versions of in-class journals. To be sure, some of the problems were due to the way I assigned the blogs.

For one thing, blogs were written in groups. I intended to do double duty with the blogs in giving students experience both in online writing and in collaborative writing, an important skill in the modern workplace. This meant that whatever wash't finished in the classroom time devoted to blogging had to be finished by the students over the weekend. Most groups ended up simply taking turns finishing the blog over the weekend rather than trying to make time to meet with one another.

Another problem was that the class time devoted to writing blogs was often insufficient. The idea was that students would come prepared with ideas in mind (I eventually created a space on the classes' Online Classrooms, a format similar to Blackboard to encourage discussion prior to class), then they would actually do the compositions in class. Often, however, most of the time spent in class was devoted to settling on a topic, leaving much of the composition itself to occur over the weekend outside of class. Considering the wide range of quality across the posts, I suspect that other group members rarely revised or proofed the post, leaving it entirely to the group member whose "turn" it was.

These problems, either of which could be easily overcome, suggest that students did not necessarily feel more involvement in their blog writing knowing that there was a real audience. Ultimately, I suspect that they understood that their audience was neither large, nor actually public. Students understand, perhaps better than we do, that the sheer volume of communication now being performed online means that just because something can be seen by a public audience does't mean it will be. Students seem to feel that their online, school-based writing is going to be buried by the mass of information now online. Their writing is a tree falling in a forest full of falling trees; their voices are drowned out in the cacophony.

This is not to say that these forms of writing don't still have value, or even that they can't help our students develop a sense of audience. This is only to say that they won't automatically do so. We will still have to work to create real rhetorical situations for our students by creating writing opportunities that will encourage students to build their own audiences. In other words we want students to be performing writing tasks that they will care about and be proud of, enough so that they will advertise their writing to "their family, their friends, and even wider publics" (Blake 32).

Part of this will require us to make these forms of writing more central to our classes. At OSU (as with the university where I now teach) there were programmatic requirements that a certain percentage of the final grade be based on program-wide rather standardized essays. This means that the electronic writing portions of my classes are relatively small, and the students responded accordingly. After all, our students are budgeting their time, therefore they will privilege the assignments that our grading scales privilege. Other types of writing will be seen as extras, or even busy work. After all, in our classes, the grade will always be more important than any audience. So, if we wish for audiences to matter to our students, these audiences must also be important to us.