Ken Bain suggests that the difference between a "good" and a "great" teacher resides in the instructor's ability to generate a classroom environment which prods the students to question "larger issues" and "broader concerns", whereby the classroom creates spaces of mutual exchange and "builds a sense of community."¹ During my time at Purdue, I have molded my teaching philosophy around two platforms for learning: the classroom and the classroom outside of the classroom. In the classroom I encourage the students to engage in a communal discourse regarding political and educational as well as belief-system-oriented assumptions. Through this discourse, the students should question their assumptions and actively participate in gaining self-awareness as well as a communal identity through a diversely populated and talking classroom. Texts chosen for discussion are geared toward supporting this discussion and student-centered active learning. For example, the literary texts chosen for discussion are often anti-canonical, and students are asked to compare these texts with the canonical texts read during their secondary educational careers. In this sense the stuents are not only participating in "uncovering dialectical relationships between texts and subtexts,"² but questioning their own initial interpretations of texts.

The challenge then for myself is to ensure that these questions and discussions are not relegated to the fifty-minute classroom and then forgotten. The integration of the Drupal blog/webpage has allowed the students to carry the discussion back to their dormitories, other campus computer labs, and even home. Oliver Wrede claims that weblogs shape authorship and will require that author "to be »connected« to processes, discourses and communities."³ Wrede's play on the word "connected" denotes not only a connection between the students in the classroom, but connotes a digitial connection to the community outside of our classroom community. Other institutional instructiors, including the a professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and high school instructor in Flemington, New Jersey, have become voyeurs of the Spring 2005 class's blog and have directed their students to observe the discourse our class is building on the blog. Returning to my primary goal, if students are able to transport their classroom discussion into a broader community of readers, they will prepare themselves for their induction into an increasingly global workforce in which they will need to communicate personally as well as digitally; through my structuring of the classroom environment, I hope to guide students in developing the tools that will advance them and enable them to make a difference.

¹Bain, Kenneth. "What Makes Great Teachers Great." The Chronicle of Higher Education 9 (April 2004): B7-9.

²Cutter, Martha J. "If It's Monday This Must Be Melville: A 'Canon, Anticanon' Approach to Redefining the American Literature Survey." The Canon in the Classroom: The Pedagogical Implications of Canon Revision in American Literature. Ed. John Alberti. New York: Garland, 1994. 119-41.

³Wrede, Oliver. "Weblogs and Discourse." Blogtalk Conference Paper. Vienna, Austria. May 23-24, 2003. April 27, 2005. http://weblogs.design.fh-aachen.de/owrede/publikationen/weblogs_and_discourse