Whenever we teach, whether in the traditional classroom or online, that act of teaching can easily be understood as an act of textual production. Whether we are speaking or writing, the content that proceeds from our teaching has a textual existence. It is a rich textual fabric synthesized from countless sources of information and experience and then encoded into our own language, whether painstakingly or spontaneously, to be encountered by our students as language, as text.
Our students, then, encounter our teaching texts in what is essentially an act of reading. Their initial experience with that text is an act of decoding, an act of interpretation. However, learning only occurs when students then re-encode it into their own language. Learning, therefore, is also an act of writing.
Most of the literature on interaction tends to focus on learner-learner or learner-instructor interaction, but it could be argued that the most important interaction in the learning process is the process described above, where learners interact with content at the level of meaning and meaning making, where interaction constitutes full participation in the production of a lesson’s meaning, where the student re-writes the instructor’s text into her own learning, onto her own consciousness.
This interaction can be further enriched if we endeavor to achieve what Mikhail Bakhtin called “dialogism,” where there is conversation between the text and reader, where meaning is negotiated, translated, and appropriated. It can be present when an instructor provides some content and then asks questions or makes demands of the reader/learner to fill in the gaps or finish the lesson. It can also be present in the incorporation of multiple perspectives in that content delivery, in the form of guest speakers or intertextual connections between the instructor’s words and other existing texts, such as seminal articles, theories, or even the textbook.
Blogs offer an excellent opportunity for us to achieve this kind of dialogic interaction, this learning as textual production. More specifically, the blogging software CommentPress, allows this concept of teaching and learning as a process of textual production to happen on the screen, and not just in the abstraction of mental space. CommentPress allows readers to comment on the instructor’s (or any other) text paragraph by paragraph. Unlike conventional blogs, where comments are added at the bottom of the text in an incoherent and unordered list, CommentPress allows readers to comment in the margins of the text at the paragraph level. It also allows readers to reply to other readers’ comments, creating what is essentially a thread-style discussion.