Connective Writing and Anti-social Reading

2005-11-28

Reading is antisocial, but writing is first and foremost about creating a community of writers ?

I agree with L. Arvan who says "Reading is anti-social." and who thinks about how kids could nevertheless develop a reading habit. K. Glogowski, on the other hand (who also wrote convincingly about blogging in education), said

"[C]lassroom blogging is first and foremost about creating a community of writers."

So, reading blogs would be anti-social, while writing blogs is extremely social? I think the emphasis on community is a matter of taste and of personal cognitive preferences and it is currently being a bit exaggerated. Literacy is more anti-social than orality and synchronous interaction. But blogging combines the reflective advantage of the former with a considerably reduced amount of "anti-social"ness that comes closer to the latter.

I rather like the term Connective Writing by W. Richardson. His emphasis on moving "away from container texts to connector texts", reminds me of the containers of canned content in teaching, from an article by D. Brent I commented earlier (in my #74), where the content thing was contrasted to the revisability and incrementality of the teaching process. IMO, the main affordance of the new type of connective writing is exactly this incrementation of added value by the connected writers that is not possible when sticking to the traditional model of the monolithic, self-contained "work" as focussed by legacy intellectual property regulations.

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