TITLE: Fly on the Wall
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 02, 2009 10:42 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
A student wrote to tell me that I had been
Reddited again,
this time for my entry reflecting on
this semester's final exam.
I had fun reading the comments. Occasionally, I found
myself thinking about how a poster had misread my entry.
Even a couple of other posters commented as much. But
I stopped myself and remembered what I had learned from
writers' workshops at PLoP: they had read my
words, which must stand on their own. Reading over a
thread that discusses something I've written feels a
little bit like a writers' workshop. As an author, I
never know how others might interpret what I have written
until I hear or read their interpretation in their own
words. Interposing clarifying words is a tempting but
dangerous trap.
Blog comments, whether on the author's site or on a
community site such as Reddit, do tend to drift far
afield from the original article. That is different
from a PLoP workshop, in which the focus should remain
on the work being discussed. In the case of my exam
entry, the drift was quite interesting, as people
discussed accumulator variables (yes, I was commenting
on how students tend to overuse them; they are a wonderful
technique when used appropriately) and recursion (yes,
it is hard for imperative thinkers to learn, but there
are techniques to help...). Well worth the read. But
I could also see that sometimes a subthread comes to
resemble an exchange in the children's game Telephone.
Unless every commenter has read the original article
-- in this case, mine -- the discussion tends to drift
monotonically away from the content of the original as
it loses touch with each successive post. Frankly,
that's all right, too. I just hope that I am not held
accountable for what someone at the end of the chain
says I wrote...
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