Interesting article by Steven Krause about his experience trying to use a blog for collaborative writing. It’s a helpful tale in which he makes several important points for teachers, not the least of which is that success often lies in the way we frame the assignment and the amount of support we offer students. But, he also shared a valuable lesson about blogging and the adoption of new technologies in general. His attempt to use blogs to facilitate discussion in a writing course was a failure in his eyes because, as he finally comes to realize, blogs are really meant for personal publication rather than team writing. But is that a failure of blogs? Rather, he picked the wrong tool and was smart enough to recognize it. I think that’s the real danger of technology: when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and we need to remember, as Kraus eventually does, that one of the benefits of technology is that it offers lots of different kinds of hammers. It’s up to us to define the nail and then find the correct hammer.
Kraus ends with his own construction metaphor: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It made me wonder why we are always so willing to abandon practices that are working in favor of something new, often technology-driven. Are we so afraid to be labeled Luddites? During presentations, I discuss the reading workshops I ran when I was teaching 7th grade Language Arts. They were decidely low-tech: kids, books and journals. We read at least 90 minutes each week and students reflected on that reading in journals. Blogs would be a perfect technology to support this practice: easier for the kids, easier for me, and it gives the added bonus of creating a larger community of readers among the students. However, if blogs proved to be too difficult due to access, I would quickly abandon them for my old practice of handwritten journals. I don’t want the technology to dictate the pedagogy.
Finally, I thought Kraus’s revelation that using the blog did not “make” students want to write any more than other forms of communication was significant. In fact, they needed the same kind of scaffolding in terms of types, length, and number of posts. For those of us intrigued with new technologies, a blog might encourage writing because we like to tool around, but others who aren’t so techy might not care where they write, only how much and when. Again, it’s a caution that technology isn’t going to automatically engage students. It’s up to us to use it in engaging ways.
