Could a Blog be a Writing Workshop?

 Derrall works with elementary students and has been thinking about recent publications about blogs in the mainstream media (Go, Clarence!).  I have been, too, as we’re wrapping up a quarter and I have some student work that we’d like to publish and a new portal through which to do it.  (I’m not sharing a link yet because I’m awaiting administrative approval on one minor issue on which I’ll post later.)

    He wrote a post today discussing the dilemma between letting kids publish and making sure they’re "ready" before they do.  He writes that he’s:

Locked in this quandary of being the freedom seeking, enlightened
classroom facilitator, and the hunched over, anal, cackling dictator
smashing down rulers on the hands of students . . .

I know how he feels.  I want my students to be judged on the quality of their ideas, but I know that some readers, like this one, will judge them on their semi-colon usage.  That’s a risk of publishing with students that Jim has mentioned before (several months ago, in fact):

One of my fears about students publishing on-line is that the public
will judge struggling writers and outstanding writers the same. I
afraid that community members will be critical of writing errors or
writing skills when a struggling writer publishes a piece of writing
that is their best at that time. I hope we can all put away our red
pencils long enough to value the struggle to become a writer. It takes
brave teachers to open their classroom doors and share what their
students are doing.

  Anyway, Derrall  mentions an idea that is a real gem:

Perhaps what is needed is for students to have essentially two parts
to their weblogs. One part would be for sharing their writing with
invited students to read and comment, and the second part would be for
the publishing of work for a larger audience (parents, teachers, world)
to read.

  His words are tickling the part of my brain that says I’ve heard someone else thinking along those lines lately — are there tools that we can use to do this already?  To set up multiple levels of view-ability?  I’ve been playing with Drupal and am thinking that we can do that with a student’s blog there by only allowing registered users to view.   Of course, I’m using Drupal right now to take a look at posts before they go public, but I’m thinking, like Derrall, that maybe students should have multiple levels of publishing  available to them that don’t necessarily involve teacher approval as the only step.  They already do in LiveJournal, where they can make posts available to friends only.  Why not in the good and academic software?
    It seems essential to me that if we want to create strong writers, then our students need tools that allow them to collaborate through drafts in a simple format.  How cool would it be if a student could share a blog post with four or five trusted readers(students, cyber-mentors, parents, or what have you), get feedback, make changes, and then publish the post to the Internet, all using one system and without necessarily involving the teacher?  I think it’s the one system piece that would be tricky — but would make such writing and revision and workshopping more about the writing and less about the technology.  You can certainly do this sort of thing with e-mail right now — but you’ve got to leave time for formatting, transferring from one tool to the other, etc.  A one-stop shopping situation would improve the process.
    Is anybody doing this? 
    Thanks, Derrall, for getting me thinking again.  My blogging parts were getting stiff.