When I get a chance to spend a few minutes looking at newish weblogs written by students, I see that some of them, of course, start off at a very basic level, and I wonder if some of the writers have noticed the room to move that a good weblog assignment has given them or the techniques that they will need to explore their topic skillfully. Seeing these hints about where some of the writers are in their development, I am reminded of a very nice lecture Christine Farris of Indiana University (Bloomington) gave here in South Bend a few years ago. One point she made was that we shouldn't hide the moves -- we should name the goals of an assignment very clearly and tell as much as we can about the steps one should take to achieve those goals and the elements of the finished produce we will be using for evaluation.
She said that many teachers she had worked with were able, when asked or even pressed, to say much more about the goals and elements of their assignments than they had offered students in assignment sheets or oral descriptions. We sometimes take too much for granted about what students know and end up unintentionally hiding the moves from the students who most need to learn them.
Working with weblogs will bring this problem back for most of us, since we will probably not be quite sure what we think weblogs can accomplish in a semester and what steps are necessary along the way. When it comes to writing on the web, what are the moves?