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?

Regardless, despite the fact that publicly posting to the web may limit some instances of deeply personal expression, we want to encourage writing teachers to be aware of their possible biases for private writing spaces when thinking about weblogs. In her 1987 report on a computer-mediated graduate course, Linda Harasim highlights some of the new options in education that computers have opened, suggesting that computers can, in some cases, be more effective than the traditional classroom (118). Below, we show that using weblogs in our classrooms has been more effective for at least some of our students because it has increased participation: our quieter students who typically don't participate in face-to-face discussions are participating in weblog discussions. Making a similiar claim, S.R. Hiltz's early research in online learning concludes, "...we believe that one important requirement for realizing the promise of new educational technologies is to use them to create new learning and teaching environments that are more effective and exciting for at least some kinds of materials rather than merely trying to replicate the traditional classroom electronically" (1986, 104).

Differing in important ways from other genres traditionally used in the writing classroom and on the Internet, weblogs are, as Mark Federman explains,

an instance of "publicy" - the McLuhan reversal of "privacy" - that occurs under the intense acceleration of instantaneous communications. Our notion of privacy was created as an artifact of literacy - silent reading lead to private interpretation of ideas that lead to private thoughts that lead to privacy. Blogging is an "outering" of the private mind in a public way (that in turn leads to the multi-way participation that is again characteristic of multi-way instanteous communictions.) Unlike normal conversation that is essentially private but interactive, and unlike broadcast that is inherently not interactive but public, blogging is interactive, public and, of course, networked - that is to say, interconnected. (2004)

Compare this to Jill Walker's observation on jill/txt, that "the traditional solitude of writers is so different from the companionship of blogs." Or pioneer edublogger Will Richardson's conclusions about his K-12 literature class where blogging "stimulate[d] debate and motivate[d] students to do close reading of the text" (40). Each of these is an instance of publicy that fits very nicely with Bruffee's social constructionist views of writing. For instance, Bruffee (1984) explains that "if thought is internalized public and social talk, then writing of all kinds is internalized social talk made public and social again. If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized" (1984, 641). Blogging, then, with its networked, informal conversational style, is less thought, and more externalized public and social talk.

From a Bruffeen perspective, then, weblogs can facilitate a collaborative, social process of meaning making, leading us to believe that weblogs as an instance of publicy enable a comfort zone, a social environment where anxiety about the teacher and of school writing is reduced, while also drawing on other benefits of writing publicly:

• When our students write about a bad day or a difficult personal experience of some kind, quite often someone else in the community will post a comment of consolation. One of Terra's students from the Fall of 2003 posted a message about how having strep throat forced him to quit smoking--cold turkey. Several students posted encouraging words, including one who wrote, "I have only had ONE cigarette in the past 2 days, so I guess you can say that you are kind of an inspiration. Once reading your blog, I realized that I would never want to feel the way you did, and I am now going to try and quit." Another student in Charlie's class injured her ankle and was somewhat immobilized for a few weeks, unable to attend class and largely confined to her room. When students in the class saw her declarations of loneliness in her blogs, they more frequently responded to her posts, making a special effort to continue to include her in the blogging community that existed outside of face-to-face class meetings.
• In reference to peer dialogue journals, Anson and Beach explain through the sharing of their journal writing, that students "create their own social support network" (66). Comfort, then, as with the examples above, may be said to come from what Karen LeFevre has defined as resonance where "an individual act--a 'vibration'--is intensified by sympathetic vibrations" (65). One student noted in a mid-term evaluation, "I like the way that we have our own little corner of the world that we can do what ever (PG-13 guys) we want in it. If something were bothering us we could state it and then have our fellow classmates comment with solutions, help, or maybe just a kind word that will cheer us up." Blogging thus creates a sympathetic space through social interaction, friendliness, and positive, useful feedback--a place where writers don't have to become comfortable with their writing before sharing.
• Frequent blogging reduces anxiety about publishing to the web, about writing publicly. We've found that students' apprehension about blogging usually disappears within a few weeks as they become "comfortable"; for example, students often expressed views such as: "I think that as I got more comfortable with [the course weblog] my participation has increased."
• In our classes, blogging is a constant from the beginning of class to the end. There should be some long-term effects of public writing even after the first few weeks that aren't seen in classes where public writing is a once-a-semester or occasional project. For example, students have told us at the midterm that they were very skeptical of blogging in the beginning of the class, but the initial discomfort they felt about sharing their work disappeared once they discovered it was actually fun to read everyone else's writing and be able to post comments when they were compelled to do so. Three weeks into the Fall 2003 semester, when asked to evaluate their experiences with blogging, a student wrote, "I like blogging because I believe it to be a positive experience for shy people. At times I don't speak up in class because I get frightened. It's much easier for me to express my opinion on paper and it's easier for me to take criticism on paper. I think blogging will bring up new ideas that might not have been spoken in an in class environment. Many people aren't as intimidated to speak their mind online."
• Some students said they would read through what others had written in order to get ideas about what was acceptable and what had already been covered so that they wouldn't repeat the same ideas in their writing. Here we see that the writing students are doing has a direct impact on what others write: ". . . I [read the messages already posted on a given topic or assignment] so I can get a feel on how others interpreted the assignment."
• Blogging represents the interaction of a community in the sense that all posts are subject to concerns about audience. In a classroom that uses weblogs extensively for posting content, as well as discussion and feedback from peers, the ongoing conversation becomes the voice of that community, which can make itself heard over the voice of any one, including the teacher. With the teacher no longer the overly predominant active reader and responder of student texts, students, as a community, take more ownership of their writing. Writing teachers should remember that much of the purpose of private writing is to create a teacherless writing space where students take ownership. Peter Elbow (1998), himself, arrived at freewriting as a means of escape from the anxieties created by a history of writing instruction. Private writing created a comfortable place where he could find himself as a writer; public writing through weblogging can do the same. One student writes: "When I first looked over the syllabus for the class before the first day of school and I saw the word 'blog' all over the place, I was like what??? I had never ever heard of the word blog... So I got a little nervous, but I realized that I probably wasn't the only one who didn't know what a blog was, so I decided not to freak out and keep a positive outlook on the class. Now, 3 weeks into the class, I love blogging! It's really cool! I really like how you can read what other people wrote, and other people can comment on what you wrote so you get some feedback from your class mates. It's also a really good way of communication and you get to know people in a sort of different way, other than meeting them face to face." Another student wrote, "What I have enjoyed most about blogging is that even though we have certain topics to expand upon, I can post my own thoughts and feelings in a relaxed environment. As I have already stated in a previous blog, being in relaxed environment when you write is probably one of the best things for your writing. You can always write how you feel about the desired topic that you have to blog about."
• Like print journals, blogging encourages the sort of informal writing where students can share invention work, drafts, half-formed ideas--always with sharing as the common focus. But because sharing is the common focus, students still have a rhetorical situation to consider since they are writing for a real audience; as a consequence, they seem to take more pride in all of their work, even exploratory writing. One student notes, "Blogging is a interesting thing that has been really fun for me to learn how to do and I know that with each new blog I will get better and better at expressing my message in a neat, clear and concise way so that all who read it will get a feel of me and my ideas." And as Theodore Humphrey suggests about online writing in general, students may also work harder: "their work is constantly being shared with and receiving responses from their peers as well as their professor. The rhetorical concept of audience emerges almost without awareness into the consciousness and practice of the students." On working harder, one student confessed, "I could show improvement in the 'insightful' department. I've noticed that my blogs aren't as insightful and original as the other blogs."
• Some would point to other student web texts--zines and student websites--and suggest that they, too, can accomplish the same goals without the need to share drafts and other exploratory writing, that students can wait until a finished product is ready to share publicly. Yet, we feel that such texts diminish the process of drafting and do not create discourse about the drafting process in the same way that making the entire process public does. In only publishing the final draft--such as in the case of many zine projects and student websites that we have seen--isn't this practice overly valuing the final product and, in doing so, also undercutting writing process pedagogy?