I found this great post on successful student and teacher blogging in D'Arcy Norman's delicious feed. Point number one, "blogging is mostly about reading", is what has me jazzed today. So often when talking about blogs in education, I find myself trapped into talking about them simply as an easy way to attach comments to a class-assigned essay. Really, blogs have so much more potential, and I try to keep that in the forefront of my mind, but sometimes it is hard. This past Monday I had the privilege of guest speaking in Bart Pursel's IST 110 classes. I tried to frame the practices of blogging as a decentralized facebook. It looked something like this:
rss reader = facebook news feed
blogroll = friends list
blog page = profile page
This is all a roundabout way of me getting to my point. The most important part of blogging is reading blogs. If you don't read blogs, then how can you be expected to successfully maintain your own blog? If you are using blog software to publish information, but you are not reading, reflecting, and linking to other blogs, are you really blogging? Isn't it a bit like using facebook with no friends or news feed? It occurs to me that class blogging has to focus as much on the reading of blogs as it does the writing of blogs.
In these slides I laid out why I think the practices of blogging are such a great fit to higher education. Blogging is not just a new way of having a threaded discussion or dropbox. We have to focus on fitting student blogs into a larger community if students are going to blog outside of the formal classroom setting and move to a mode of lifelong learning.
I have the great pleasure of working with Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul this summer on the topic of blogs as e-portfolio. We have been talking about the importance of interlinking among student bloggers and how that can play into eportfolio. There might a big difference between creating an eportfolio using blog software and using a blog as the foundation of an eportfolio.
Hi Brad,
Your optimism and broad thinking around teaching and learning topics is always refreshing. Actually, your post has had the effect of encouraging me to comment on your blog for the first time. Thanks for stirring up some thinking.
I have always thought of blogging as a form of journaling, and in the framework of teaching and learning, a way to break out of "writer's block" by permitting writing in an open, (hopefully) non-judgmental forum. So in that sense I guess I've always viewed it primarily as an internal process, a way of overcoming the demons that keep us from effectively composing our thoughts. You bring up another very important nuance to what blogging is - it is also a community process, with as much give involved as take.
Natalie
Natalie Frances Harp wrote:
I did too, but reading Naked Conversations by Scoble and Israel changed my mind as to what blogs could be. It's a pretty good read, lots of case studies. I "blogged it" here:
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http://www.personal.psu.edu/jal7/blogs/Main/2008/06/naked_conversations_book_revie.html
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