The semester has changed at my school which means new blogs going up, old blogs coming down. Yesterday, a creative writing teacher bounded into my office bringing urgent messages from his former students. “You took the blog down,” he said. “You can’t do that.” His students, it seems, had just expected to keep writing and sharing in the class blog even though the course had ended, and they were distressed when it disappeared. “You have to put it back up,” he said.
Similarly, Clarence writes about the angst of “Moving Day” as his kids migrate over to learnerblogs and their fears are resonating all over the place:
“Can’t we take our old posts with us?”
“It seems awfully quiet without our other stuff”
“I’m proud of my comments. Do I have to leave them behind?”
“No one will know what who we are and what we’ve done!”
And he connects this with questions that Konrad’s students also struggled with:
As soon as they were able to create their new individual blogs, the first question was:
“What about the old posts?”
The new space, I realized, was not really a blog or a community. It was an empty space and almost all of them were overcome by a need to populate their new blogs. They have been working very hard since but many also insisted on transferring their old entries to the new blogs. Their blogging identity, it seems to me, is so inextricably linked to their writing that abandoning their old work seemed somehow wrong. Many were very disappointed that the comments they received cannot be automatically moved with the posts.
As I struggle with the potential disruption of making a similar move here, it’s striking to me how much different this level of concern is compared to all the paper content we’ve created in the past. If you don’t yet understand the power of all of this, consider taking it away. I don’t think I’ve actually appreciated the depth of my connection to this body of work and thinking and conversation. It’s become such a part of me, “so inextricably linked” that I can’t imagine a complete existence without it. And it’s all about the investment that we make in this, the idea that what we’re writing has a legitimate audience. How different it must be for these students who want to stay connected to the people and the ideas that have nurtured their learning. I say this all the time when I do presentations, but how nice will it be when we finally get rid of the physical (and metaphorical) recycling bins in our hallways where 99% of our students’ content ends up at the end of the year. Given an opportunity to build community around content that we create and care about, it’s simply not as easy to throw it away.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.