In looking through Barber and Grigar's New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing about and in Electronic Environments (2001), I discovered that Nick Carbone, "Diving into the Text: Rediscovering the Myths of Our Books," deserves significant note for his advocation of public web journals in composition. Carbone never mentions blogging and is speaking about journals along the lines of academic journal publications reconceived for the web and the classroom. But Carbone was writing this before blogging became mainstream and does caution that "it is also important that these journals do not become mere imitators of print journals. . . . a Web journal should also take advantage of the unique way the web can create, shape, share, and store writing" (240).

Maybe I'm transferring an argument by substituting the definition of web journals as Carbone conceives for web journals as I want to now envision them when I read his text. Yet, consider some of the pedagogical premises that Carbone bases his vision on. Don't they also help to justify the place of blogs within composition? For example,

• "It is important for students to participate as knowledge makers so that they do not only ape what they see."
• "Yet we are disheartened often because the writing students do does not really matter the way the writing we do matters to us
• "What I suggest is that by creating a space for students to write on the Web, we can radically rethink how we introduce students to academic ways of writing, to what we mean by the idea of a community of learners, and how we understand and teach what it means to be a writer and author(ity) in a given community" (238-239).

Also of importance is Carbone's advocacy of publishing these journals under a copyleft license, way in advance of Creative Commons license adoption by many bloggers. Carbone notes teachers have a precedence for this type of sharing in their practice of making syllabi and assignments available to other teachers and that "writers could play in and around the words and ideas of others as children play in and around a sandbox: reshaping, shifting, sweeping, piling up, adding to, bringing in other considerations" (245). But also significant to me as an open content advocate was the suggestion that teachers, too, should publish under copyleft, sharing their texts with their students, inviting students to rework the words of teachers (248).

I can only suspect that had Carbone written this piece after blogging was popular, he might have forgone the brief parts about peer review and the editorial process for students and may have adopted what largely makes some good arguments for weblogging. A substitution for one type of electronic "journal" writing for another. Regardless, much of the ideas in this text are important for composition researchers interested in developing a rationale for blogging in the classroom.