I always like it when I find new instances of Drupal being used in education, particularly when it is writing teachers doing so: Oregon State University's Center for Writing and Learning Online Portal.

Placeholder for publishing a version of my dissertation manuscript.

Via datacloud comes a set of tips over at 43 Folders for working past writer's block.

Alexander, Jonathan. (2002). Digital spins: The pedagogy and politics of student-centered e-zines. Computers and Composition, 19, 387-410.

Anson, Chris & Beach, Richard. (1995). Journals in the classroom: writing to learn. Norwood: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Ballenger, Bruce. (2004). The curious researcher: A guide to writing research papers. (4th ed.). New York: Pearson Longman.

In "Digital spins: The pedagogy and politics of student-centered e-zines," Jason Alexander's introduction talks about how "staged" audience is in first year composition. Alexander points out that even just sharing papers among students on the Internet is not enough, and goes on to problematize posting to the web, suggesting that students realize that their only real audience is fellow students and the teacher. However, we would say that by using weblogs in our classrooms, we've turned ownership over to students and given them a real audience. In life outside of the classroom, much like on the Internet, writers will not always know who their audiences are when they write. A report, memo, letter, or fax might cross the desks of numerous people that the writer has never met during the course of a workday. Risk is part of writing, and our students experience that risk within a very supportive community of writers. When we first began teaching with blogs, Charlie recalls being apprehensive himself about putting course syllabi, feedback on drafts, and other teacherly responses up on the web for everyone to see, even though he had been posting to an academic blog for almost six months. But we both feel now, that the shared meaning we and our students have gained from blogging our courses makes it all worthwhile. Imagine. Classes within and among institutions could interact through the use of weblogs as more institutions integrate student blogging into the curriculum, such as the University of South Florida's First-Year-Writing Program's Writing Blogs site.

As writing teachers, we typically feel it our duty to protect our students, to create safe writing spaces where students can enjoy greater risk-taking. Traditional print journal writing, used as a private writing space, typically embodies this notion. It is no wonder that teachers fear having students post personal reflections, drafts, reading responses, and other writing assignments and exercises to the public Internet, preferring instead the locked doors of a Blackboard or WebCT site. For example, Charles Moran's "experience with Web publishing has made [him] consider a rather frightening possibility: that computer technologies, as we are presently using them, move all of us in our first-year writing courses toward the production and publication of 'documents' that will live in the public sphere, and away from more or less private writing that will help us compose our lives" (Moran 40).

Moving journal writing to the Web using weblogs where Internet surfers can read and link to student writing potentially opens our students' texts to the unknown outside of the classroom, but our experience with student blogging has shown that "less private writing" may equally help writers to compose their lives, albeit in a social, more public way. And even though this speculation about the positive aspects of public writing may disrupt established thoughts on what should be public and private, it is not out of line with collaborative process views. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford (1990) note that the solitary writer image permeates "the theory and practice of teaching writing" (6). Composition has traditionally privileged dialectic and Platonic perspectives on invention in writing (LeFevre, 1987, 49-50). The scholarship often depicts the writer, working alone, drawing on deeply divined personal truths or engaging in inner dialogue as the means of creating knowledge. While composition theory and practice now recognizes the importance of collaboration and social interaction more than it did twenty or even ten years ago, we still suspect that our field's expressivist heritage may lead many writing teachers to put the private unnecessarily in front of the public, partially because writing teachers are themselves more comfortable with the private. As a consequence, many writing assignments include opportunities for deep, personal reflective writing that is not possible within the public eye. But what is the tradeoff for that kind of writing opportunity for students? Isn't it possible that the paradoxical situation of creating a risk-free space in which to enable risk-taking has led compositionists to forget a primary purpose of privacy, which is to provide a comfortable writing space, comfort which can also come from community?