Digital Burkean salon, contact zone, community of inquiry, supportive space, illusion, panopticon…what is "community" and can blogs effectively create it in an OWC?

“Community” can make me shudder and long to escape.  It can feel overly-cosy, small-towny, and stifling.  A pastoral panopticon.  Along with Jeremy Brent, I can see it as an illusion, a mirage of a paternal aristocracy keeping the villagers and loyal citizens in their place… ah, we Brits are cynical! 

But community is also the spirit of the Blitz—of beleaguered Londoners pulling together in the face of overwhelming odds. It can be a powerful illusion—perhaps reified desire!—that gets us through a time of adversity – the genuine, if temporary community of boot camp.  It’s a shared need or shared interest.  Our combined voices can be polyvocal, supportive, protective and challenging. The shared communal space can offer an “I’m Spartacus” blog solidarity in the face of the panopticon.  As Kevin DePew and Heather Lettner-Rust argue, distance learning interfaces operate as panopticon, and I’d argue that the self-policed space extends beyond the on-screen class time and to the blog.

While I’d not say the community of this class is one born of dire necessity in the face of a shared enemy, we are a self-selected community with shared interests.  That said, we did not have to form a community; we could have gone through the motions, blogged as instructed, been cordial in class, and moved on.  However, we chose to engage. 

As part of an already existing community of ODU students, we were ready to use the non-mandated affordances at our disposal: the back channel and the class chat. However, while that is community, it’s a community of support and sociability, commiseration and conversation, rather than content matter and discussion based. Resources and ideas are indeed shared, but the focus is informal.  What makes the community gel is the shared tasks and goals – some skin in the game perhaps.  For me, true community involves collaboration and communal tasks, not just conversation or even shared goals. 

I’m a darned pinko, but I deeply hold that, pedagogically and politically, that we all contribute to the collective community. To me, what makes the community of this class work is not so much the blogs, but the shared tasks in Google docs. The creation of communal documents built through conversation as opposed to documents that are conversational replies to a document (blogs) were community in action.  In part, the synchronous and live creation was a factor. 

The blogs were more static and a place for longer more considered replies, but they were, at least to this member, out of sight and out of mind.  I think, should I have my students blog, I will strongly suggest setting up a RSS feed for the class so that we are alerted/reminded of new posts and replies.  Since we used a variety of platforms, the mix of follow choices, pingbacks, replies, e-mail alerts,  remembering to go and check the original list contributed to my own failure to post to others.

I’m not an on-line commenter in general. I rarely comment on blogs, discussion boards, and so on outside of classes.  Articles feel as if they are finished—the author is done and gone (there are many exceptions, but I’m generalizing here!)—and the comments sections feel artificial and beset with bickering and trolls.  This wider experience of the web, combined with how women are often treated online, means a wariness about commenting that perhaps transfers to other blog situations.  I do engage with people I know on FaceBook—the space feels conversational and open ended—and offers me the illusion of community.

Pedagogically, I agree that we should “Self-Consciously Define Class as Discursive Space Working Toward ‘Community’ (Amy 12), and bear in mind that what we are asking for in posts is that “They are writing assignments, albeit informal ones, conducted in a class for a grade” ( Amy122 ).  Students are not just posting, they are thinking and working.  Blogs are often used as part of the “writing to reflect” idea and I’d argue that they’re inherently a  social constructivist tool when used as such.  Porter notes that in FYC classes “the primary course content does not pre-exist the course; it is, rather, the students’ own writing, which emerges through the course” (18-19) and I’d suggest that this is especially true in OWC and that blogs (and discussion boards) are a key way that that content is generated.   Blogging is what I’d call performance writing—it’s public in a way that other (student) writings are not—and it’s also interactive.  Porter suggests that what colleges offer over self-study is “the social exchange, the enactment, the interaction that happened between content, instructor, and students, and that results, ideally, in learning” (17).

While I began this post with a kneejerk response about the downside of community, I would appear to argue against myself when I say that we should, as both E. M. Forster and Gerald Graff urges us, connect!  However, this connection with colleagues and students does the opposite and helps us collaborate and “move away from, ‘hermetically sealed classrooms’ that incline us toward a ‘Courseocentrism,’ ‘a kind of tunnel vision in which our little part of the world becomes the whole’” (Halasek et al 163).

What I would argue for as a form of community is not the cosy, stifling, conformity, but a robust community of inquiry as described by D. Randy Garrison and Norman D. Vaughan—one that is deliberately invoked and nurtured.  A community must be curated since, as Kevin DePew and Beth Hewett note, “communities are not an outcome that instructors can simply create by using a specific digital technology or adopting a specific pedagogical practice. Instead, creating community is a rhetorical act deliberately attempted” and as I noted in a class WebEx session “community will find a way with no affordances if it wants to exist, but the abundance of affordances won't invoke community.” We can lead students into the contact zone / salon / concernful / supportive space, but we cannot create engagement without considering the situation the students are in.  The kairotic moment is to no avail if they are disengaged.  The moment may be teachable to us, but they may not be reachable. 

“… two ideas that are essential two higher education—community and inquiry.  Community, on the one hand, recognizes that social nature of education and the role that interaction, collaboration, and discourse play in in constructing knowledge”  (Garrison and Vaughan 9).

So how can we foster this?  Joyce Magnotto Neff and Carl Whithaus discuss how simply transferring even a successful f2f process script activity over to OL can fail to build community if the students see no reason for the activity or discern the necessary OL adaptations / instructions as micro-managed.  “The steps for building an intellectual community or a community of practice and inquiry need to be more concrete…for students to conceptualize the value of an activity , its purpose needs to be made explicit in terms that they can comprehend in their roles as students and learners” (85).  In fact, the specific sample script Neff and Whithaus offer—a f2f class sharing articles via routing slips and added comments—while becoming article if literally transferred, can adapt well to blogging.  Without the literal “you must respond to each other”  that would undoubtedly fail to build true community, an assignment to read several and write a fresh blog post synthesizing the ideas or rebutting (respectfully) them may build robust communities. The blogs can thus become a rolling conversation extending beyond the class or beyond a discussion thread tied to an individual entry.  It becomes a Burkean digital salon where members may come and go, but the conversation continues, no matter how late the hour. 

The communal and collaborative work of  Kristina, Margie, Laurie, Daniel, Carol, Shantal, Ryan, Kelly, Jenny, Suzanne, Sarah, and Kevin in this class in the backchannels of Facebook chat and class page, in the belly-of-the-beast panopticon chat of WebEx, google docs, and Adobe Connect, as well as the blogs and class discussion is a genuine community of inquiry that incorporates humor/sociality, concern/support, intellectual challenge/debate./ disagreement, and it operates synchronously and asynchronously. We may converse orally in class, but we commune through text.

Works Cited

Amy, Lori E. “Rhetorical Violence and the Problematics of Power: A Notion of Community for the Digital Age Classroom” in Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing. Jonathan Alexander & Marcia Dickson, Eds. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2006. 111-132.

Brent, Jeremy. “The Desire for Community: Illusion, Confusion and Paradox.” Community Development Journal 39.3 (2004): 213-223.

DePew, Kevin Eric and Beth Hewett. Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction. Unpublished manuscript.

DePew, Kevin Eric, and Heather Lettner-Rust. "Mediating power: Distance learning interfaces, classroom epistemology, and the gaze." Computers and Composition 26.3 (2009): 174-189.

Garrison, D. Randy, and Norman D. Vaughan. Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Halasek, Kay, Ben McCorkle, Cynthia L. Selfe, Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Susan Delagrange, Jennifer Michaels, and Kaitlin Clinnin. “A MOOC with a View: How MOOCs Encourage Us to Reexamine Pedagogical Doxa.” in Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses. Steven D. Krause & Charles Lowe, Eds. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2014. 156-166.

Neff, Joyce Magnotto and Carl Whithaus. Writing across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007.

Porter, James E. “Framing Questions about MOOCs and Writing Courses” in Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses. Steven D. Krause & Charles Lowe, Eds. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2014. 14-28.