Barton, Matthew D. “The Future of Rational-critical Debate in Online Public Spheres.” Computers and Composition 22 (2005): 177-90. ERIC. Web. 25 May 2010.
In my past blog postings, I have addressed mostly the practical use of wikis. With this posting, I wanted to address the wider importance of the use of Web 2.0 technologies, including wikis, and of encouraging collaborative learning for the benefit of society at large. Matthew Barton’s article points us in this direction and helps us consider some tools that might help us migrate current activist pedagogies to an online class.
Barton’s central argument revolves around the belief that interactive Web tools, specifically blogs, discussion boards, and wikis, can increase and improve rational-critical debate. (He doesn’t specifically define this last term, but from the article, readers can gather he means the analysis and critique of current social, political, and economic issues.) He claims that these democratic tools hold the promise of developing a more socially aware and active public, so long as the public, and not corporate interests, can maintain control of these tools.
He puts this discussion in the context of Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, a place for rational-critical debate that theoretically allowed all citizens to participate and addressed previously unchallenged assumptions and issues. Habermas saw such spaces rise in Europe in the seventeenth century. This incarnation failed, though, because corporate/profit interests that limited viewpoints and people’s ability to engage in debate took over the newspapers that grew out of these public spaces for discussion.
Barton claims that Web 2.0 technologies, particularly blogs, discussion boards, and wikis, can reinvigorate this public sphere in part because they provide not only greater access to information but also to the production of that information. To these ends, Barton envisions that these three tools will help students grow in their abilities and willingness to engage in rational-critical debate.
The typically personal nature of blogs makes them an ideal space for self-discovery, a space where students might find out what they think and why, preparing them for rational-critical debate. Discussion boards, the next step in the progression, offer greater equality and greater interaction among users, “expos[ing] students to the sphere of critical debate and foster[ing] rhetorical awareness” (189). Finally, wikis’ open and democratic nature and their focus on the text as process “provide that space where students strive for consensus and learn to share a common, community voice” (189).
We may argue about how much and what kind of “consensus” we want our students to reach, but we can certainly recognize his claims’ connections to the type of social awareness and critique that has bloomed in composition pedagogy recently (e.g., critical pedagogy). Because it clearly articulates the benefits of these tools for activist pedagogies, this article is a relevant piece for any instructors who espouse these pedagogies but are struggling to incorporate them into online classes. Though general application details are not present, Barton does ground these tools in theory, which might encourage more faculty to see them as possibilities for achieving their pedagogical goals and ease their move into online environments.
1 comment:
I found myself nodding in agreement about the appeal of this article to "instructors who espouse [activist] pedagogies but are struggling to incorporate them into online classes." Work like this really enables teacher-scholars to bridge that gap between the ideal and the real. SO much of what I read seems critically important, and yet when I think about how I would implement them in the classroom, the obstacles to successful implementation can seem daunting. Thanks for pointing out this helpful article and its potential to inform real change in the classroom.
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