XplanaZine

Scholarship. Teachership. It is certainly indicative that the first word, scholarship, is a word that we probably have occasion to use every day of our professional lives. Yet even though we might also be involved in teaching activities every day as well, there is not an equivalent word - a word like “teachership”, say - to help us think and talk about what we are doing.
There is the unfortunate word pedagogy, with which nobody is very happy. We do not call ourselves “pedagogues” very willingly. Of course, there is the even more unfortunate word “andragogy” which seems to have acquired some trendiness of late … although surely somebody could have consulted a classicist to find out that you should probably say “anthropagogy” if you really want to coin such a phrase. The word “andragogy” would just be for the “andres”, the manly men, not for people, “anthropoi”, in general. If you are going to insist on an andragogy for the men, you will need a gynagogy for the women (ouch, the Greek part of my brain hurts) (my spellchecker, on the other hand, wants to correct andragogy to fandango! how delightful).
In any case, pedagogy will not do. And the lack of a word like teachership reflects a larger gap in our thinking and practices. I think that much of the confusion that university faculty members feel about developing online content for their courses derives from this confusion between the outspoken expectations of scholarship on the one hand, and the quiet diligence of teachership on the other. When you publish content on the web, you are doing just that: you are publishing. And for most professional academics, publishing is an activity that belongs to the sphere of scholarship. It is fraught with anxiety, usually rather solipsistic, not prone to take risks, hedging its bets, articulated in response to other works of scholarship in an artificially impersonal and abstract sphere of discourse.
Teaching, on the other hand, is (or should be!) exuberant, involved with others, taking risks, trying new things, and happening with your students, right here, right now. Yet for all that teaching is a very alive and very real part of our lives as academics, we do not really talk about it very much at all. That is too bad. Teaching usually takes place behind the closed door of the classroom, and even online teaching is very often shut off behind the closed doors of Blackboard or of WebCT, not taking place on the open Internet.
And so when we do go to publish our teaching materials online, we are doing something that is really new in the history of the university. It is not just the newness of the technology that is the problem here, but a new cultural practice. I am often struck by the ease with which faculty members have adopted email as a technology - so much so that they will fuss at you about the virtues of different email clients, insisting on the special virtues of whatever email client it is that they prefer. Yet faculty members have by and large not adopted web publishing technology in any form - when its technology is really not that different from email. The problem is not the technology - the problem is the culture.
Yet surely there are enormous benefits to be reaped if we could get teachers - teachers everywhere - to publish their teaching materials on the Internet. And to evolve a culture of publishing on the Internet that matches the needs and priorities of digital teachership, not just the needs and priorities of digital scholarship. The approach that QUIA takes towards the “authorship” of quizzes is a case in point: although I am not ready to argue (yet) for the ad hoc model of authorship that QUIA has implemented in their web-publishing environment, it is one that is driven by the needs of teachers.
Blogging is another interesting challenge to the traditional model of scholarly publishing, and this is why I suspect (sadly) that it will be a long time before it takes hold among university faculty. Exactly because blogging is publishing, but not “scholarly” in the strict sense (in any sense?), it is not something that faculty members are going to embrace. Students will embrace it, I am sure - in the same way that students have embraced email and cell phones and instant messaging and chat rooms. Students want to get and share information, and they want to do that now. That sense of nowness, of immediacy, is something that teachers and students share. The world of scholarship, on the other hand, is not a world of now. It aspires to be a world of always (and so inevitably a world of “not yet”).
You can read in David Sifry’s Alerts a blissful and idyllic vision of a university hooked on blogging:

Give the university a choir of voices. Make it easy for people to talk, easy to post. Imagine the connections that would happen just by doing a Google search, researchers across the world that could find each other. Throw away that old-fashioned quarterly newsletter, or even better - supplement it with the best of the conversations that these blogs start. […] Wow. Office hours are from 2:30 to 4. Blogging hours are from 4 to 4:30.
It makes so much sense. It is irresistibly appealing. And I am so afraid that it is not going to happen. Not while we are all still wringing our hands and trying so hard to be scholarly.
Blogging, however, is a very teacherly thing.