Stencils

I found the following passage in Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage:

The young today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information ... Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and not necessarily benign) force.

The student finds no means of involvement for himself and cannot discover how the educational scheme relates to his mythic world of electronically processed data and experience [...]

The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive "outside" world created by new informational media. Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery - to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.

McLuhan published these words in 1967. It's been almost forty years and, frankly, we are still for the most part in the business of imposing stencils.

Blogging as "An Experience"

I believe that when students are part of a class blogosphere - a community of writers and learners - they experience a learning process that occurs continuously. It does not stop when the lesson ends. It does not stop when the assignment is completed. It goes on. Since blogging does not naturally lend itself to tests or deadlines, a blogosphere does not have abrupt stops such as tests or unit projects which, once completed, indicate to students that one part of learning is over and the next one is about to begin. In other words, a class blogosphere is likely to furnish learners with what John Dewey refers to as "an experience." Dewey claims that we have "an experience" when "the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment." In Art as Experience, Dewey argues that an experience, in order to be an experience, has to be "so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation." In other words, a true experience is more than just a singular event, it is a flow. A true experience is a continuous process of interaction and transaction between human beings and the world around them. A true experience involves being at one with the surrounding environment:

human beings are originally and continually tied to their environment, organically related to it, changing it even as it changes them. Human beings are fundamentally attached to what surrounds them.

A class blogosphere, or blogging in general, offers the type of environment that its participants can be "organically related to." While it may consist of specific texts which have their own beginings and ends, or specific assignments with assigned deadlines, a class blogosphere is an entity that continuously evolves. No text within this environment is ever truly "complete." It can always be expanded upon, commented on, linked to, or alluded to in another post or another blog. As a result, the community itself is sutained by a continuous flow of its constituent parts:

In an experience, flow is from something to something. As one part leads into another and as one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in itself. The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases. (Dewey, Art as Experience)

While individual bloggers in a class blogosphere all compose individual texts, their work contributes to the "enduring whole" of the community where texts are written, commented on, re-written, and linked to in the ongoing process of interaction. Dewey, then, goes on to say that this causes

... continuous merging, there are no holes, mechanical injunctions, and dead centers when we have an experience. There are pauses, places of rest, but they punctuate and define the quality of movement." (Dewey, Art as Experience)

When the course or the year ends and students graduate, the movement may stop but chances are that, having experienced the flow of learning, students will continue to perceive learning not as a series of neatly compartmentalized units but a continuous movement, an enduring current.

Dialogic Texts - Part 1

I'm re-reading Todorov's Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogical Principle. Below are some of the passages from Bakhtin's writings that I find especially significant.

No utterance in general can be attributed to the speaker exclusively; it is the product of the interaction of the interlocutors, and, broadly speaking, the product of the whole complex social situation in which it has occurred.

The entire verbal part of human existence ... cannot be charged to the account of the unique subject, taken in isolation; it does not belong to the individual but to his social group (his social environment).

... the speaking subject ... turns out to be wholly the product of social interrelations.

These passages help me understand some of the processes that are now taking place in my Grade 8 classroom. Bakhtin's dialogic principle is beginning to manifest itself in our classroom blogosphere. The students have begun to look at their own writing as part of a larger whole. Some not only expect feedback from their peers, but also solicit it verbally in class thus encouraging further interaction online.

Consequently, I have been noticing that their blog entries, or their utterances, to use Bakhtin's term, are a product of interactions that ensue every time a new text is posted. What emerges is not just a polyvocal community, but also a community where most written pieces are polyvocal due to the dialogic nature of the environment in which they are composed.