From the “Throwing it Out There to See What Sticks Deptartment” here are some very raw thoughts about the various types of Weblog posts for teachers and students and where they fit on my very indistinct blogging scale:
Posting assignments. (Not blogging)
Journaling, i.e. “This is what I did today.” (Not blogging)
Posting links (Not blogging)
Links with descriptive annotation, i.e. “This site is about…” (Not really blogging either, but getting close depending on the depth of the description.)
Links with analysis that gets into the meaning of the content being linked. (A simple form of blogging.)
Reflective, meta-cognitive writing on practice without links. (Complex writing, but simple blogging, I think. Commenting would probably fall in here somewhere.)
Links with analysis and synthesis that articulates a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked and written with potential audience response in mind. (Real blogging)
Extended analysis and synthesis over a longer period of time that builds on previous posts, links and comments. (Complex blogging)
I’m sure there’s more, and I’m sure others have been here already in some form. Peter’s post has really gotten me thinking about the two things that I think make Weblogs such an interesting teaching tool: an easy platform for constructivist learning and instruction, and the potential of a greatly expanded interested audience against which to test ideas and learning.
And that’s what my brain keeps coming back to over and over and over again, how much MORE blogging potentially offers our students over the traditional idea-draft-revise-done model that we give our kids. I’ve always hated that idea that writing ENDS. It doesn’t. This post, the last post, the first post are all done FOR NOW, and when you blog, the ideas and the feelings usually end up rearing their heads down the road in some new, hopefully more evolved form. They don’t get put into some dust-collecting folder (or should I say folder icon) never to be heard from again. They stay alive, Google-able, and out there for people to read and respond to a week, a month, or a year from now. (It always amazes me when I get a comment on something I wrote long ago. But it usually reminds me of something important, which then becomes a new post…)
But our kids need this, almost as much (if not more) than they need to write those phony essays about abortion, gun control and lowering the drinking age (which, by the way, I have read hundreds (if not thousands) of each.) They need to be analytical and engaged in topics that mean something to them. I’ve seen it happen. So has Peter, and Anne and many others. That’s what makes this all so cool.
Peter Ford, who has been blogging in schools longer than most of us, reposts an essay from his “early” days on the effects of Weblogs in schools that is certainly must reading for any educator users. He highlights the effects of serendipitous collaboration, the evolution of online community, and the effects of audience, among many other topics. I’ll just pull out a few lines that I find particularly interesting, but it doesn’t give the entire work justice.
Critics often slate the simplicity of weblogs, and dismiss them as ‘merely vanity’. Yet it is precisely these two factors that are the keys to their potential. Children are vain, just like adults. They desire and require an audience for their thoughts and achievements. Every teaching college in the world extols the virtues of providing students with an audience.
The simple, intuitive nature of weblogs is precisely what is required to allow students to express themselves on their own terms. Children’s involvement with websites has to add up to more than a posting of a few pieces of their work on a third person’s static web-site for a virtually non-existent world to see. There is little ownership in that.
An awareness of audience is one of the underlying principles across the whole curriculum, yet so often students have to make do with an imaginary audience, or one limited to the teacher and any random individuals who might peruse a classroom display. With weblogs the audience is real and is, in most cases, large. The average Year Six weblog was read between four and ten thousand times in the first year. The class weblog accumulated almost treble that number of reads over the same period. Even if the amount of reads by the student himself is subtracted from this total, the size of the audience remains impressive, and motivating.
Equipping students with this sense of responsibility to research and report accurately has always been a priority in schools. It is, however, fast becoming a life skill and not just a purely academic one. Children are becoming much more than just handlers of other people’s information. They are active researchers and providers of information that could affect the knowledge base of others
Similarly, I would add, in using Weblogs they become editors and decision makers about information as well. The power of the technology is the way in which it allows students (and adults) to be active participants in the process, not just passive readers or writers without reach.
Other weblogs such as our Tudor Exploration weblog are set up as news-sites and students can post their own stories and interesting links to material they have found during their own research. This has proved genuinely helpful to me as the teacher. Not only does it provide my student with a sense of ownership of a topic, but points me to some excellent source material that I can use in subsequent sessions.
This process of students teaching students is commonplace in the weblogging environment. When a child discovers a new blogging skill, inserting a background or creating an online survey, then there are always peers who want to share and apply those skills themselves. I have seen this process in action dozens of times
The simple nature of weblogging means that it can immediately make an impact. Teachers start to think about how they can use weblog to complement their own subject expertise and start to explore ways of using the internet for themselves. Skills that are often hidden behind a closed classroom door become visible online for others to benefit from. It helps foster a climate of collaboration.
There is much more here, and from the “blogvangelism” standpoint, Peter’s essay is
a wonderful resource.
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