I've published this presentation over at my own site: http://inventio.us/deixis/. Thanks for taking a look... cgb

Abstract:
In his recent Kairos article "When Blogging Goes Bad," Steven Krause suggests that the fit between weblogs and the writing classroom isn't perhaps as seamless as we might wish it to be. His article recounts a "failed experiment" where weblogs failed to provide a "dynamic and interactive writing experience."

My presentation takes Krause's article less as a "cautionary tale" and more as a challenge to understand where the friction between weblogs and the writing classroom is located. Drawing on Kathi Yancey's discussion of deixis in her 2004 CCCC Chair's Address, Carolyn Miller's work on ethos in Human-Computer Interaction, and Duncan Watts' work in network theory, I suggest a couple of conclusions. I argue that the "community" we work towards in our classrooms is largely a clustering, or centripetal, type of networking, while much of the "dynamic and interactive" nature of weblogs comes from connective, or centrifugal, activity (or more accurately, a healthy mix of the two). Furthermore, the energy of blogging is highly context-specific (deictic), in a way that can be difficult to accommodate (or value) in a classroom setting.

Ultimately, I do not argue that weblogs and classrooms should never mix, but rather that their mixing should be informed by a more careful articulation both of what weblogs can accomplish and of our pedagogical expectations for this particular technology.