I am having a tough time getting this paper going so thought maybe a little free from blogging would help get to the heart of what I want to say: We need to refocus the conversation about weblogs from how teachers will use them to why and what students need to know and do in order to navigate and contribute to the blogosphere.
For instance, the article in Learning and Leading (March 2004) that describes how one teacher used blogging technology to revive her use of student journals. That’s great…it’s a perfect use for blogs and one I’ve used myself with my undergraduate pre-service teachers. It solves a problem for the teacher because it eliminates all those notebooks and makes commenting easy. And it may solve a problem for students because the technology is transparent thus focusing their attention more on the actual writing. Students are potentially more facile with keyboard than pencil these days so the ability to type might also help increase students’ writing. Steven Krause, who incorporated blogs into his graduate course, admits that his assignment did not require blogs and could just as easily been accomplished using paper. It is the technical advantages of blogging that he highlights including getting rids of the notebooks, the possibility of linking to relevant materials rather than just citing, and the ability for students to read and comment on each others’ writing, “a task that would be difficult to manage with paper notebooks” ” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2005)
But, technical issues aside, blogging software does not create compelling prompts, something the L&L article says is necessary for successful journaling. And blogging software does not get at the question of how to assess student journals. In fact, one of the reasons the teacher in the article no longer used paper and pencil journals was because she stopped having real dialogs with the students and started imposing quantitative assessments such as number of entries and length. For now, she and the students are excited about using blogs so perhaps that increases the number of posting and their length but what about over time? Krause purposely left his first blogging assignment open ended: “I didn’t want to be more prescriptive because I felt that blogs were an evolving technology, and I didn’t want to restrict their use; because I wanted my students to feel free to experiment with their writing; and because they were graduate students who I didn’t think needed to much guidance.” At the end, students complained that the assignment was just too vague.
When I use blogs with my undergraduates, I encourage them to see them as a reflective tool and post as often as possible, but I also make very specific assignments as to the number of required posts and their content. Students are asked to make specific blog posts (such as a technology autobiography) and also given the opportunity for free choice. (I don’t give any length requirements as I figure by the time they get to be juniors in college they should have some sense of how long it has to be to make their point. So far I haven’t had to encourage anyone to write more.) As with any assignment, responses vary from students who do exactly what I ask, no more, no less, to students who immediately grasp the technology and run with it, posting extra entries and setting up second weblogs to use with other courses or for their own reflection. Krause says that he found the same thing in his class, and I suspect the same would be true if I used paper and pencil journals.
The other thing I don’t think weblogs will do is transform education. An article in District Administration by Elizabeth Millard (January 2006) suggests, however, that this is the case: ?¢‚Ǩ?ìIn addition to simply learning how to use the technology, teachers and librarians will likely have to change the way in which they teach or distribute information. Traditional models of teaching, in which instructors are the leaders of the classroom and all knowledge disseminates from them, don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t apply when is comes to using tech like blogs and wikis?¢‚Ǩ? (p. 3). As I read that statement, I could hear Larry Cuban laughing in the background. Here again is the promise that technology is going to transform education, turning it into a constructivist enterprise. It hasn’t happened yet…why would blogs have the power that the personal computer did not?
In addition, blogs seem to have a fairly narrowly focused use with the emphasis on blogs as journals. That’s how the teacher in the L&L article used them, and Krause concludes that using blogs as journals has been his most effective use of blogs. But he also points out that using journals in writing classes is a “common pedagogical technique” so blogs are really just a facilitator.
And what about the assumption that a traditional teacher cannot make use of a blog effectively? It might be the perfect place to allow students to comment on teacher lectures or textbook chapters. I don’t think being a traditional teacher precludes allowing students to discuss their learning, right? Besides, I’m even wondering what that means: traditional teacher?
But something else bothers me about this article. Millard make the statement that because of blogs, everyone is equal. The teacher isn’t the expert anymore, and Millard quotes a technology consultant who says, “?¢‚Ǩ?ìIn the blogosphere, in particular, we?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re all equal, with what we have to say given equal weight?¢‚Ǩ? (pp. 52-53). So, are we suspending our critical judgement? In Issues of Science and Technology (Winter 2006), Kevin Finneran, the editor of the journal, asks this very question: “Who are these people? Why should I listen to them?” (p. 23).
