The Seven-Year-Old Bloggers

From the BBC comes this story about a school in England doing some large-scale stuff with Weblogs at an early age.

Children as young as seven in one British school are using weblogs as part of their normal routine, and are doing better than non-webloggers as a result, their teacher says.

If you read the article, you’ll see that the improvement is being shown in the IT area, as in copying and pasting. Now that’s great, but somehow I guess I was hoping there was some evidence of improvement in writing or critical thinking skills or something that they can’t get by doing it somewhere else. While the article sings the praises of blogging, it never really delivers anything more than general observations about what Weblogs seem to be able to provide in some situations. Nice, but…well, nice.

I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately, this need for some real classroom research. I’ve been thinking about broaching the idea with one of my English teachers, seeing if maybe I can finagle some duty release or something if she agrees to teach one class with blogs and another section of the same class without. We could take a look at levels of participation, frequency of edits, words written, lots of other data like that and try to come to some conclusions about what really happens when you introduce Weblogs into the mix. Of course, there are a ton of variables to consider, and I’m sure it would take almost as long to set up the study as it would to carry it out. Still…it would be nice to get some hard data.