Michael's cautionary note rightly leads us to reflect on our purposes for having students share their writing with each other and sometimes – if we ask them to publish on a public Web site – with all the world. On the one hand, we do want to protect our students' privacy and provide them with a comfort zone for practicing communication in the context of their classes. On the other hand, we want our students to be aware of and to write for audiences beyond the classroom.
Charlie's preference for various levels of privacy echoes my own, and we should certainly decide with our students and colleagues under what circumstances publishing within and beyond the class is appropriate. Christine and Tharon suggest similar variations of thoughtfully considered writing situations in which, as Christine says, password protection "does provide a barrier to the sharing of information" but "there are ways to open the doors when sharing is desirable."
Publishing to the class seems to me appropriate except under special circumstances such as journals and freewrites meant to stimulate the writer's thinking and to provide a stimulus to further writing, revising, and editing. If we are teaching our students to communicate in writing, then they must communicate, not just write for their teachers. As Tharon reminds us after he has effectively outlined some of the reasons our students (and us) need privacy for the safety of the learning environment, "the pedagogical benefits of writing for real audiences and participating in service learning projects" must also be considered. Tharon does recognize the need for student writing to be a "consequential act of communication," not unlike Randy Bass's recommendations for "authentic tasks and complex inquiry" as well as "public accountability" among the "six kinds of quality learning…information technologies can serve to enhance." In addition to ensuring that our students have safe places to practice their writing and speaking, therefore, we should help our students access the Web and other forums for communicating to the public with writing that makes a difference.
Some students may object to forced publication of their class writing; and we may even be reluctant to act like the teachers in our past who answered the question "Why?" with a stated or implied "Because I'm the teacher and I say so." Nevertheless, we understand that "because I say so" can mean "because my experience and training have shown me that this approach is valuable for learning and that you should practice it now and do it now so you'll have a frame of reference from which to vary if you choose as you continue your education." After all, teachers ask students to do things they do not "want" to do in order to introduce them to new ways of thinking, knowing, and acting. As an undergraduate, I did want to take general biology or any other lab science. I certainly did not want to do the labs. But I knew even then as I know now that to learn some fundamentals of science is valuable for a citizen as well as for a student. And as a WAC-CAC-ECAC educator, I know that students do need practice in writing for real audiences, speaking with small groups and before large groups, solving mathematical problems, and peering through microscopes at life forms invisible to the eye. So we should indeed incorporate throughout the curriculum both writing and speaking to the public beyond our classes. The Internet offers one way to reach a broader audience than the classroom or the academy.
Bass, Randy. (1998). "Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History." http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/guide/engines3.html
– Donna Reiss
dreiss@wordsworth2.net