What does it mean to blog?

(To my fellow classmates – feel free to read and respond to this post, but the one I did for this week’s assignment is the following post titled “Whiteboards and the CSI Effect”)

Though perhaps not an existential question, I want to discuss briefly what it means to blog. In the course of blogging in this educational technology class, there has been some discussion about what we should write in our blogs and how to write them. For example, some students, out of academic habit no doubt, feel the need to include citations in their blog posts in proper APA format. Even my professor has some doubts, writing in her final blogging instructions:

“So, I am not sure about you but I have mixed feeling about my blogging experiment.  It has been more work than I imagined, but I also feel like everyone is getting a lot out of it.  I definitely need to rethink the logistics if I decide to do this again.”

I understand and share her feelings. I think everyone has gotten something out of it, but I do think that the experiment needs to be redesigned for future classes. How? Let me ask (and answer) a very simple question:

Q:           When does a blog become a Blackboard post?

A:            When you tell your students what to write.

Blogs by their very nature are an individual expression of thought and opinion. Students in my course created several blogs with imaginative titles, including:

http://exploringtheworldofeducation.blogspot.com/

http://technoblogistics.blogspot.com/

http://historiansaregossips.wordpress.com/

Just by their titles, I expected to explore the world of education, learn about new technology in the classroom, and hear the dirty little secrets of historians. But I think the requirements of the blogging experiment constrained that creativity. Instead of being free to write on any topic (perhaps with some loose or minimal guidelines), we instead had to respond to prompts in our blogging, such as:

Sweeder (2007) states, “Video projects may also help teachers more fully differentiate their instruction and assessment. Videos are by their very nature multimodal; thus, such projects help to meet the needs of visual and auditory learners.”  Do you agree?  Can videos be a medium for differentiating instruction and providing universal access to the curriculum? Are there any learners that might be left out?

What does that have to do with the world of education, technology, historical gossip, or law?  Not much. This is not asking for a blog post, this is asking for a Blackboard post – and we all know how much we love those!

What was the learning objective with this project? Was it to familiarize students with blogging? Was it to have them read and think about these articles? Was it both? If both goals were to be met by this assignment, I would argue that those objectives are perhaps incompatible.

Here is my suggestion: trust your students. If the goal is to get students comfortable with blogging, then the way to do so is to provide them with loose guidelines and let them decide what their posts will be about. This way they will be much more engaged with and interested in blogging. If you go that route, I would have students blog more than twice during the course (which will be easier in a semester-long class). Save any reflections on articles for the Blackboard page, or ditch the Blackboard posting altogether.