Comments on: Caring About the Content

By: Ewan McIntosh

Ewan McIntosh — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 14:18:12 +0000

I’m just astonished that any teacher would ever feel obliged to delete blog content. Paper content fills up limited space in our classrooms and difficult decisions are taken to give it to kids or bin it, or keep some back to show future years. Digital content doesn’t take up any space by comparison. It’s silly to get rid of them. And if students are writing posts and teachers don’t have time to read them then why not use domain mapping to distance the blogs from the establishment? Students can pay for these domains if they wish to keep their work AND continue blogging. For those who wish to continue blogging there’s also the option to put a final post on their school blog with a link to their personal blogger account, for example, and then close all the comments and disallow further posts to be made.

There are so many options for the teacher that blog deletion seems an outrageous waste of the efforts of our kids.

By: Darren

Darren — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 16:27:36 +0000

Hi Will,

I think Alan and Doug nailed it. This semester my kids have really taken ownership of the blog; it is much more their space than it is mine. Even though their blogs are maintained, disabling the chatboxes has, in some sense, “damaged” their online environment.

Like Doug, I think the solution is for each kid, starting in kindergarden or nursery, to have their own web log that they maintain all the way through grade 12. It should also be possible to port it over to another server at the end of high school should the student wish to “take it with them.” Similar to the way Blogger works.

What is really evolving out of all this is that we’re educating a generation of kids that really care about what they are learning because the global community cares about what they have to say. It’s never really been about the technology; it’s about the community and connection that the technology makes possible in ways that have never been possible before. Kids just want to be cared about — web logs show them that the whole world cares. (OK, I’m overstating it, but you know what I mean.)

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 19:27:26 +0000

Spinning off Alan’s comment, perhaps yet another alternate title could be Caring About the Community. Like other teachers, my students have asked the same question about long-term access to their site. This situation is inherited from the way schools are structured in grade-level (elementary) or content-based (secondary level) cohorts that move to different teachers and disband each term. My vision for student web publishing is that, with appropriate technology support at the school district level, students could “own” a school-based web presence that persists from year to year and might serve as a developmental and showcase portfolio (easy to to with categories) of their work. It would also help to preserve the sense of community that they develop in their classrooms.

In addition to the writing that my students do online now, they review and comment on what their peers are doing. This is powerful, especially when you consider that they have face-to-face opportunities to say these things; yet they take the time to write their comments. Like the little presents that my children give me, these are gifts, and shouldn’t be lightly discarded.

By: Mark Ahlness

Mark Ahlness — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:01:58 +0000

Will, I'm a third grade teacher in Seattle - started my kids blogging with great success last November. Most of them are into it just so incredibly. Within two weeks of starting up, a couple of kids came to me in private - and asked with an earnestness that made me sit down, "What's going to happen to our blogs when we're not in your class next year?" They were worried - I saw it in their eyes, that this thing they were just learning how to use as 8 and 9 year olds, had value to them way beyond anything I've ever seen in over a dozen years teaching this age kids. I looked them straight in the eyes and told them I honestly didn't know what would happen to their blogs: http://roomtwelve.com One more piece to send on to those who still question the value of this medium. - Mark http://ahlness.com

By: Nate Lowell

Nate Lowell — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 16:32:04 +0000

And we continue to create Learner Management Systems where ALL the content goes away at the end of the semester — there’s a very powerful lesson here that we keep not learning.

By: Alan Levine

Alan Levine — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 10:56:28 +0000

Maybe the post title of this should have been “Caring about OUR Content” as there is also an important sense of ownership of the students’ posted writings. And then it is confounded/compounded when someone else (Teacher, School, Eager Beaver Server Admin) arbitrarily removes it.