Collin Brooke’s recent post on network pedagogy raises some interesting questions about teaching students how to participate in networked environments. He raises Adrian Miles and Jeremy Yuille’s Creative Composing Manifesto, in particular the notion that we need to think about reshaping education in response to networked technologies. This recalls for me Greg Ulmer’s contention in Internet Invention that the technological developments we are encountering might represent an end to schools to the extent that they are print-based institutions.

Collin’s post goes on to discuss the sociality (is that a word?) of the network: that is, what rhetorical practices establish the network of communciation? and how do we teach our students these practices without falling into the pedantic lessons of citational formats?

In part, I think the challenge of teaching networked rhetorics is in having students confront the shifts in consciousness implicit in this move toward a distributed model of cognition. Collin’s reference to Jeff Rice’s post on plagiarism intuitively makes this connection: the “problem” of plagiarism being intimately tied to print-based concepts of intellectual property and authorship.

Summoning ye olde rhetorical triangle for a moment. the blogosphere clearly alters for our sense of audience (though how is still an important subject of study); it also affects our sense of subject and form, as Collin’s post explores; and presumably, it transforms the notion of the writing subject/author as well. I believe this is the most difficult aspect for students to accept, as it addresses their own sense of identity and authority.