Yesterday Stephen Downes had this to say about this sporadic, disjointed conversation:

You’ll find the bouncing back and forth between posts from four separate bloggers (Smith, Richardson, Fiedler, Farmer) frustrating, but the question is vital: where is the locus of the blogging phenomenon? In the students? Or in their instructors?

Frustrating is right, for a couple of reasons. First, because the conversation is so disjointed and sporadic. To me, this is one of those times where a Weblog just doesn’t cut it unless the participants are committed to either sharing the same space or tracking back the relevant posts so that links are created. And second, and this is my personal thing, because so much of this really important discussion is almost a non-starter at the K-12 level.

After keeping my own Weblog for three years now, and also teaching with Weblogs at the high school level for about the same amount of time, the differences have become acute. I’ve said this before, but in general, I’ve found that blogs work well, but blogging does not. And my real angst about Weblogs of late is my unwillingness to concede that blogging as a valuable, instructive, necessary writing genre will just not work on the K-12 level. (And it seems to be a struggle at the post high school level as well.) But I’m about to let it go.

“…the question is vital: where is the locus of the blogging phenomenon? In the students? Or in their instructors?”
–Stephen Downes

It may be that I’ve written too much into my blogging definition, but it seems the characteristics of blogging that make it useful are too much in contradiction to what public schools expect of their teachers and students. For blogging to be of value, I think, it has to be born of passion. Look at the best bloggers out there, the ones you read on a regular basis. The reason I stick with them is because of their obvious passion for their topics, their sense of purpose for their spaces. I think of A-list bloggers like Josh Marshall and David Weinberger, but I also think of people like Anne, Pat, James, Seb, Tom and Alan who I almost always scan first when I see new posts in my Bloglines account. And I come across new ones every day. They blog because they want to, because they want to invest in the conversation, not because they are required to do so.

By its very nature, assigned blogging in schools cannot be blogging. It’s contrived. No matter how much we want to spout off about the wonders of audience and readership, students who are asked to blog are blogging for an audience of one, the teacher. (A related question might be whether or not students who have become so attuned to the game of pleasing the teacher can even conceive of what it means to write for an audience…) I try my best to pretend it’s not so, and maybe on the elementary level where kids are less focused on playing the grade game this may not be as true. But my students drop blogging like wet cement when the class is over. And it’s because I can’t let them blog in the first place. I can let them write about their passions, but I can’t let them do it passionately due to the inherent censorship that a high school served Weblog carries with it. I can tell them the process will strengthen their writing and their intellect, but I can’t tell them I won’t assess it or else they won’t do it.

Oliver Wrede’s post mentioned above goes into this in some interesting detail. But his observations on the university level differ little from what I see in my school, even though I would think it would be easier to get college students blogging. (I guess we do a good job of stifling their motivation and creativity before they get there, huh?) He says:

Following the (mis-)conception of many students, that it is not the themselves (or the work group) but mostly the teacher that is responsible for most of the learning progress, it appears to be a ineffective activity for many of them to maintain blogs that non-blogging teachers do not evaluate (and thus will not influence theirs strategy for ensuring the learning progress). And even if students are blogging: few of them really will use a self-reflective style that actually displays learning progress and potential stepping stones.

So if not to blog, then what? Seb says:

So what are the things we do with personal Webpublishing that go beyond what we have done in formal educational settings before? What are the qualitative differences for your personal learning since you have started to spend some time putting your stuff out there? We should start from questions like these or we will see thousands of teachers and instructors applying Weblogs and Wikis and who knows what to “make” others do the same stuff they have made them do before.

Almost everything about my own personal Webpublishing goes beyond what I’ve done in formal educational settings before. It’s the first time I’ve written to my own deadlines. It’s the first time I’ve shared my writing on a consistent basis with an unknown, constantly changing audience. It’s the first writing I’ve done consistently that doesn’t have a grade or a paycheck attached to it. And as for my learning, I can’t think of an exercise in my educational experience that has taught me more than this process of reading, synthesizing, writing and reading has. Which makes it all the more frustrating that it doesn’t seem to translate to my students.

But is there some benefit to having students use a Weblog for “that same stuff” and maybe a bit more? Can contrived blogging be of some use? I would think that the analytical skills that go along with the blogging process are valuable enough to learn even in some controlled environments. It’s not blogging per se, but it is teaching a skill that students can use for a variety of purposes. Anne points to a post by Guy Dickinson that I hadn’t seen before titled “Weblogs – Can they accelerate expertise?” in which he charts Weblog use according to Bloom’s Taxonomy. At the risk of making this post endless, here it is:

That’s some pretty good stuff, much of it unique to Weblogs. And it gives me all the more reason to pursue the use of student Weblogs with my Media Literacy teachers and others. While the best parts of blogging may be difficult to bring to our students, there are still a lot of “same stuff” that Weblogs may facilitate a bit more effectively than the old ways of doing them. And maybe that’s the starting point after all…