The long haul. Will Richardson follows up on Chris Lott's post about the long period of time it takes to build a meaningful blogging practice and become part of a strong online community. Chris proposes a set of tools that acknowledge that reality and plan for a longer period of engagement:

I have in mind something like the idea of the portfolio, which spans semesters and houses explicity artifacts, within which would be integrated discussion, blogging, and wikis tied to that student’s identity throughout their academic career. Top-down LMS like Blackboard are exactly the wrong answer because the social tools (I’m being generous with the plural here) are pathetic, locked down, and not created to go beyond the instance of a single semester or course.

Behind this discussion is the problem I mentioned briefly yesterday -- the model of individualism and consumerism that distracts us from meaningful experiences of community and from the skills of community-building. If you build or buy the tools Chris has in mind, and throw away the ones that are so thoroughly "locked down," as he says, you still have to change the pedagogy.

You have to have institutional goals for each student that run something like this: at the end of four years each student will have participated at length in some virtual and local community-building projects, contributed through writing and live events, maintained a log and archive of these activities, and reflected on them in a regular public forum. Students may graduate when they fulfill the general and particular academic requirements of their program and these active citizenship requirements. Faculty would need to have built into their job descriptions some credit for supporting these activities beyond the limits of the individual course.

Then you would start to see graduates with the democratic skills we value. [0 & P]