A number of threads about the value of blogging in the classroom have been floating here and there lately, many of them here. For context, some of the more relevant posts are:
Yesterday Stephen Downes had this to say about this sporadic, disjointed conversation:
You’ll find the bouncing back and forth between posts from four separate bloggers (Smith, Richardson, Fiedler, Farmer) frustrating, but the question is vital: where is the locus of the blogging phenomenon? In the students? Or in their instructors?
Frustrating is right, for a couple of reasons. First, because the conversation is so disjointed and sporadic. To me, this is one of those times where a Weblog just doesn’t cut it unless the participants are committed to either sharing the same space or tracking back the relevant posts so that links are created. And second, and this is my personal thing, because so much of this really important discussion is almost a non-starter at the K-12 level.
After keeping my own Weblog for three years now, and also teaching with Weblogs at the high school level for about the same amount of time, the differences have become acute. I’ve said this before, but in general, I’ve found that blogs work well, but blogging does not. And my real angst about Weblogs of late is my unwillingness to concede that blogging as a valuable, instructive, necessary writing genre will just not work on the K-12 level. (And it seems to be a struggle at the post high school level as well.) But I’m about to let it go.
“…the question is vital: where is the locus of the blogging phenomenon? In the students? Or in their instructors?”
—Stephen Downes
It may be that I’ve written too much into my blogging definition, but it seems the characteristics of blogging that make it useful are too much in contradiction to what public schools expect of their teachers and students. For blogging to be of value, I think, it has to be born of passion. Look at the best bloggers out there, the ones you read on a regular basis. The reason I stick with them is because of their obvious passion for their topics, their sense of purpose for their spaces. I think of A-list bloggers like Josh Marshall and David Weinberger, but I also think of people like Anne, Pat, James, Seb, Tom and Alan who I almost always scan first when I see new posts in my Bloglines account. And I come across new ones every day. They blog because they want to, because they want to invest in the conversation, not because they are required to do so.
By its very nature, assigned blogging in schools cannot be blogging. It’s contrived. No matter how much we want to spout off about the wonders of audience and readership, students who are asked to blog are blogging for an audience of one, the teacher. (A related question might be whether or not students who have become so attuned to the game of pleasing the teacher can even conceive of what it means to write for an audience…) I try my best to pretend it’s not so, and maybe on the elementary level where kids are less focused on playing the grade game this may not be as true. But my students drop blogging like wet cement when the class is over. And it’s because I can’t let them blog in the first place. I can let them write about their passions, but I can’t let them do it passionately due to the inherent censorship that a high school served Weblog carries with it. I can tell them the process will strengthen their writing and their intellect, but I can’t tell them I won’t assess it or else they won’t do it.
Oliver Wrede’s post mentioned above goes into this in some interesting detail. But his observations on the university level differ little from what I see in my school, even though I would think it would be easier to get college students blogging. (I guess we do a good job of stifling their motivation and creativity before they get there, huh?) He says:
Following the (mis-)conception of many students, that it is not the themselves (or the work group) but mostly the teacher that is responsible for most of the learning progress, it appears to be a ineffective activity for many of them to maintain blogs that non-blogging teachers do not evaluate (and thus will not influence theirs strategy for ensuring the learning progress). And even if students are blogging: few of them really will use a self-reflective style that actually displays learning progress and potential stepping stones.
So if not to blog, then what? Seb says:
So what are the things we do with personal Webpublishing that go beyond what we have done in formal educational settings before? What are the qualitative differences for your personal learning since you have started to spend some time putting your stuff out there? We should start from questions like these or we will see thousands of teachers and instructors applying Weblogs and Wikis and who knows what to “make” others do the same stuff they have made them do before.
Almost everything about my own personal Webpublishing goes beyond what I’ve done in formal educational settings before. It’s the first time I’ve written to my own deadlines. It’s the first time I’ve shared my writing on a consistent basis with an unknown, constantly changing audience. It’s the first writing I’ve done consistently that doesn’t have a grade or a paycheck attached to it. And as for my learning, I can’t think of an exercise in my educational experience that has taught me more than this process of reading, synthesizing, writing and reading has. Which makes it all the more frustrating that it doesn’t seem to translate to my students.
But is there some benefit to having students use a Weblog for “that same stuff” and maybe a bit more? Can contrived blogging be of some use? I would think that the analytical skills that go along with the blogging process are valuable enough to learn even in some controlled environments. It’s not blogging per se, but it is teaching a skill that students can use for a variety of purposes. Anne points to a post by Guy Dickinson that I hadn’t seen before titled “Weblogs – Can they accelerate expertise?” in which he charts Weblog use according to Bloom’s Taxonomy. At the risk of making this post endless, here it is:
|
Student, skill demonstrated: |
Competence: |
Weblog, skill demonstrated: |
|
Recall basic facts Quote parts of student posts Produce lists of facts Create weblog entries |
Knowledge |
Recall basic facts Quote parts of student posts Produce lists of facts |
|
Summarise group discussions Associate related weblog posts from searches |
Comprehension |
Summarise group discussions Associate related weblog posts |
|
Determine new relationships between peer entries Create new categories within weblog Constructively critique a classmate’s work |
Application |
Determine new relationships between peer entries |
|
Analyse own work and comment Identify commonality between different classmate’s work |
Analysis |
Identify commonality between different classmate’s work |
|
Form new opinions by using classmate’s work as basis Research web for related work to own Find and display web based information from a number of sources and present within context |
Synthesis |
Research web for related work Find and display web based information from a number of sources and present within context |
|
Critically assess own work and peer; Create structured arguments based on findings |
Evaluation |
None |
That’s some pretty good stuff, much of it unique to Weblogs. And it gives me all the more reason to pursue the use of student Weblogs with my Media Literacy teachers and others. While the best parts of blogging may be difficult to bring to our students, there are still a lot of “same stuff” that Weblogs may facilitate a bit more effectively than the old ways of doing them. And maybe that’s the starting point after all…
I’ve chimed in at some length here:
http://www.mchron.net/site/edublog_comments.php?id=P2651_0_13_0
The “dark matter” in this universe is all the kids with LiveJournal and other personal blogs.
A second to Tom’s comment, with the addition that its darkness is rich because it’s not exposed to the glare of school neon. Mark Bernstein said it with an “a hah” moment at edBlogger SF: “Oh, you all are still thinking of a centralized solution!” It just won’t work – not for school IT staff and equipment, not for legal reasons, and not for all the school deadening risks noted. But now teacher blogging -that might be different. I haven’t seen a local community of blogging teachers yet. We’re working on it at BAWP, but it’s slow going. And obviously, a group of teachers blogging might inspire some genuine student bloggers.
Hey Pat! Long time…how’s China? Yeah, Live Journal IS evil..it gives blogging a bad name. A teacher blogging group is an interesting idea, but I’ve had very little interest from my staff.
I may be in a minority, but I rather like the chaotic, unorganized thread of this discussion across multiple blog spaces. This is how real conversation happens, like a crowded party, or a noisy meeting– confined to a rigid structured neatly organized environment— well, the “conversation” grows dull and muted.
I would also say there are some oranges compared to papayas here- I would not expect students using weblogs in a class to be doing it for the same reason, with the same OCD energy, and for the ego trip of having lots of readers like your “list” (of which I am humbled to be included).
Blogging for students is a different game altogether, and creating a compelling reason and structure within for blogging activities is the challenge and the payoff. We should not be trying to get students to write to be “popular” but to write to say something, and to write for an audience, albeit two readers and the Google robots.
Moreso, weblogs, wikis, whatever are just hammers and saws, learning objects are screws and 2x4s, and by nature alone do not make me a good carpenter. We ought to be focused on the craft, not the tools, and craftmanship is a learned skill by doing, by experience, by making mistakes, by learning as an apprentice, etc.
There will be lots of places where blogging flourishes and more where they may wither, but it is awfully early to be condeming what is pretty much experimental usage.
I am still firmly convinced that there is power in personal publishing, the payoff of seeing instant results, the ability to get feedback directly, and to create real social spaces, not the artificial ones of rigid monolithic software systems.
I like Alan’s comments because they suggest that there is still a place for pedagogy, for the arts of teaching, in the classroom reaches of the blogosphere. That makes blogs part of the real and utopian space I tried to express in my post above, rather than what I see, for the moment at least and for students in classes, as an unrealistic hope of a quick, fruitful move into wide, wild freedom of the blogosphere, cut free from school’s goals and practices.
In other words, students are, properly, still students, and teachers still have jobs to do. Our understanding of our jobs should be at least as powerful as someone like Paulo Freire urges, with all the criticism of traditional education that kind of critique implies. But even when we’re blogging we have work to do. Our work goals should be written down somewhere, and there should be ways to assess the results. And there should be room to be surprised by the creativity of the young people we work with.
We should be able to imagine a common ground between a teacher’s skill, duty, and creativity, and the experiences, learning work, and creativity of students. Friere would locate a rich custom of dialogue in that common ground, and so very naturally weblogs and wikis are going to end up residing in that common ground too, being used for powerful and surprising and even, when we can manage it, risky things.
We can’t be risky and brave every day — it’s too exhausting. But every day we can practice dialogue and work to make something substantial together and learn the social and collaborative skills that real utopian spaces possible. Weblog and wikis make some of that work easier.
An aside to the main discussion, on which I will probably comment in full later.
Alan writes: I rather like the chaotic, unorganized thread of this discussion across multiple blog spaces. This is how real conversation happens, like a crowded party, or a noisy meeting…
The problem isn’t the discussion, it’s the usability. Blogs create conversations, but unless you are very attuned to the community, it’s very hard to follow what’s being said. What is needed – what I have been working on – is a way to get the conversation out of the chaos.
This conversation is the first real failure for Edu_RSS Topics, which is supposed to pull such conversations out of the blogsphere and make them readable for those who aren’t in the know. First, several commentators were not harvested – collecting and culling a definitive set of writers requires as much attention as writing itself. And the search mechanisms were not sufficiently fine to filter this conversation from the background noise of jabber about blogs in general.
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/xml/topics.cgi?categories=Web%20Logs
On the main topic, very quickly, with more to follow some time: (at least) two things kill blogs:
– forcing people to write
– telling them they can’t write
One forcing people to write: not everybody is a writer. People express creativity in many ways. Forcing other people to blogs makes as much sense as forcing me to kick field goals. I’m no good at it, don’t see the point, and express myself in other ways.
On telling them they can’t write: until something like freedom of speech and freedom of the press exists and is respected in schools, students will not be able to explore the boundaries they need to explore in order to find out what they want to write. So long as students are being expelled for wearing a Pepsi shirt on Coke Day (or for equivalent ‘offenses’) blogging will fail.
Blogging is about freedom. This is the deep, important challenge for schools. And this challenge presents itself not just in blogging, but in e-learning, and learning, in general.