Much like edubloggers have commented about other conferences, one of the most rewarding experiences of this year's 4C's was meeting other edubloggers in composition studies. Some F2F time only helps to build community among bloggers within the field.

In order to build a better community among bloggers in our field, I advocated the creation of a blog listserv. Jeff Ward of this Public Address agreed with me, although, I think, for some different reasons, as noted on his blog:

We debated whether to set up a blog or a listserv, and I argued staunchly for the listserv. The reason is one of signal to noise—mostly, the listserv is for arranging panels for next years conference with participants from geographically separated institutions, not for general blog discussion. It’s the “gated-community” aspect of listservs that helps keep conversations focused. Blogging always has an indeterminate audience, and this makes things wander. Often, that’s a good thing. Other times, it is not.

No doubt that the distributed nature of weblogs can make it more difficult to not only follow conversations, but also can result in a continually shifting of focus. Yet, those of us blogging frequently online should remember that among early adopters, blogs are the life and blood. We read them and write about them incessantly. Yet, if we are to expand the use of blogging as a tool by our fellow teachers, I think we need to remember that a listserv can do more than keep a conversation focused, that it can act as a backchannel mechanism for blog conversations, a space where educators who are not going to follow all the conversations in the blogs can participate.

We should also consider the intimidation factor. I feel like I've been around long enough that I was at the beginning of many conversations about blogging with only a limited past discourse to catch up on. The current discourse today has already grown beyond my ability to keep up, but as an experienced blogger, I'm not threatened by this. On the other hand, the extent, depth, and breadth of the discourse now going on online, including the technical terminology--RSS, weblogs, trackback, comment spam, etc.--is likely to act as a barrier to entry, just as in other established discourse communities. Thus the irony of Jeff's "gated-community" acting as a less gated one than that which is public online. So it's my hope that the list will act as an entry point for new bloggers and a place for less avid blog readers, those less engaged in creating the discourse on blogs in the Web, to ask questions and observe some conversations, so that they, too, can become part of the community.

Meanwhile, there also seems to be a need for a place for conversations about our teaching that cannot be carried out in weblogs, but that's for another post another day. And in another day or so, once I get Mailman configured correctly (still made need tweaking--my first time setting up a listserv), we'll publish the list address so that those many others who want to discuss blogging and make knowledge about blogging can join in without having to do so through the distributed nature of blogs.