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:
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.
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Thank you for the various types of Weblog…I now know what/how to write in the future.
I was thinking a few weeks ago about scoring weblog uses in two broad categories: useful, i.e., creating efficiencies in the school; and “desirable” to idealistic constructivists like ourselves. So answering the questions at the end of the chapter in a blog might be useful but not desirable. Students spontaneously waxing metacognitive in their personal blogs is desirable but probably not useful.
Hey Tom, why not useful? I think that’s what I’m trying to get at, that blogging would help kids to understand how they learn. We (public schools) don’t do reflection very well. And answering the questions in the blog IS useful, but it could be desireable too if we ask kids to read further, synthesize, link, reflect etc.
A very useful off-the-cuff taxonomy.
I’d disagree that “This is what I did today” is necessarily not blogging. How many of us have reached for a kitchen knife when we know we’ve got a little plastic box with screwdrivers of different sizes in a box somewhere in the basement? In a pinch, I’ll use a rock if the rock is handy and the hammer isn’t. Thus, a blog can still contain some traditional journaling (and some postings of assignments and traditional “lists of links”) and some and still be valuable as a blog. The problem is if the educator doesn’t do (or hardly does) any of the advanced things that blogs really are good at doing.
Interesting summary of blogging, this really has helped me focus and reflect on the potential in the classroom. I am exploring the possibilities of rss and blogs and I see such potential. I like the way you address Metacognition and reflection, absolutely so critical to getting students to dive deeper into the content and really have an understanding of a topic. I am involved with a grant project focused on reading in the content areas with the support of digital tools. With our work with handhelds our professional development has been focused on various strategies, one being meaningful text dialogue. I would like to marry blogging and this meaningful text dialogue with the handheld tool. My hunch is that we will get richer discussion and go deeper into content.
A helpful, graded list apt to what I’ve discovered about blogging. The variety of blogging styles, though (including some given exclusively to visual work), suggests yours might be a necessarily provisional list — one open, as the mathematicians happily say, to emergent expansion. My sincere thanks for your work. Keep it up!
As to my remark about kids blogging about their learning not being useful–I mean, kids writing stuff in their personal blog isn’t useful in the mechanisms of running a school, insofar as the adults in their lives probably don’t even know that it exists.