Blogs > Cliopatria > Graff on Online Communities

Aug 24, 2005

Graff on Online Communities


by Cliopatria


Academic Commons is a new bloggy webpage for discussing the use of online technology in liberal arts education. Currently in the Commons is this interview with Gerald Graff, which includes an interesting observation that I have excerpted below the fold.

In the quote below, Graff argues that involving students in online discussions has pedagogical advantages that classroom discussions do not. I'm intrigued by that argument because it still seems pretty rare. I have a feeling that even university professors who use websites, listservs, or course software like Blackboard still think of these tools either as bells and whistles--embellishments of classroom instruction rather than true extensions of the classroom--or as accommodations to some ill-defined" cyber-consciousness" that twenty-first century college students allegedly possess. Compare those views to Graff's:

I have long thought that there is something infantilizing about the standard classroom situation, where the very face-to-face intimacy that is so valued actually encourages sloppy and imprecise habits of communication. That is, the intimate classroom is very different from--and therefore poor training for--the most powerful kinds of real-world communication, where we are constantly trying to reach and influence audiences we do not know and will probably never meet. We should be using online technologies to go beyond the cozy pseudo-intimacy of the classroom, to put students in situations that force them to communicate at a distance and therefore learn the more demanding rhetorical habits of constructing and reaching an anonymous audience. We have begun to do this to some extent, but our habit of idealizing presence and"being there," the face-to-face encounter between teachers and students, blinds us to the educational advantages of the very impersonality and distancing of online communication. Indeed, online communication makes it possible for schools and colleges to create real intellectual communities rather than the fragmented and disconnected simulation of such communities that"the classroom" produces.

I like this idea that encouraging students to communicate"at a distance" through online discussions like those on blogs helps them develop"more demanding rhetorical habits."

I also wonder whether Graff's closing point relates to his larger arguments about curricular fragmentation in higher education, which Timothy Burke has discussed here before. That is, perhaps the intellectual communities created in online discussions might help students see that conversations begun in class are not supposed to end there, that one course connects with other courses instead of being its own self-contained unit.


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Caleb McDaniel - 8/24/2005

Thanks for the interesting links! I also appreciate your sounding a cautionary note. Online discussion won't be itself make students better writers or communicators; teachers still have to play an active role in using this technology to its best advantage.

Melissa Ann Spore - 8/24/2005

Scholars in Distance Education and Writing and Rhetoric have noted how online discussions help develop "more demanding rhetorical habits.” Computer conferencing—which emphasizes text—seems to have spurred the discussion in the 1990s. See Andrew Feenberg, My Adventures in Distance Learning http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/TELE3.HTM - Distance Learning: Promise or Threat (1999), Anderson Garrison, and Archer, Assessing Teacher Presence in a Computer Conferencing Context (2001) http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/v5n2/v5n2_anderson.asp , and Kairos :A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/.

I’ve seen online discussions conducted at a much higher level than classroom ones. The usual explanation is that reading and writing slows us down a bit; students understand that they will be read and post comments that are more pertinent and well-constructed than would emerge in the classroom. However, there’s no assurance of this. The banality of repeated comments (especially when a minimum number of posts is required for grades) can be numbing. The teacher has to work to elicit good discussion.

It’s my impression (I don’t have any citations) that the most successful of such conversations are in graduate and professional education, where students start with some knowledge and commitment.

Still I’m a great believer in using the online interchange. As someone who works in writing and technlogy, I encourage such discussion as a means for students to write regularly while participating in legitimate academic communication.