Blogging and Writing (Con't)

Seems the blogs as writing tools thread is spreading. Charlie Lowe offers up this perspective on what happens when students use Weblogs to publish:

I was in a workshop today at Purdue where we talked briefly about the idea of students writing publicly in blogs. One of the concerns expressed was that students could be at risk by writing on the web. However, the first goal of public writing is to put the writing at risk, not the writer. Students can post under pseudonyms or anonymously while the writing remains vulnerable to public readers, to criticism on the web. Or maybe a better way to put this is at that the writer is still at risk, as the one who has done the writing, but the person behind the writing can still achieve the degree of safety that we might want to give our students, the room for them to make mistakes, rather than having those mistakes show up in a search engine query of their names.

I love that “putting the writing at risk” part, because that’s what we need to do with our student work. We need to make it risky, within reason, especially on the K-12 level. But at the same time, we need to make it safe. That’s the fine line that we’re trying to walk down here, and while I’m not sure using a pseudonyms the best answer, it’s one way to get kids published to a wider audience.