Blogging for Education

Blogging is one of the modern versions of the town square. Perhaps Luther would not have used a door to post his ninety-five theses that ignited The Reformation had he been able to blog. With the world embracing blogs it only stands to reason that educators would find ways to use them in class. Stephen Downs in his article Educational Blogging that appeared in the jounal Massachusetts Computer Using Educators http://www.masscue.org/publications/archive/educational_blogging.pdf made a great point when he said, “Blogs are, in their purest form, the core of what has come to be called personal publish¬ing.” In that statement there are numerous concepts that support using blogs for the classroom.

How often is do we hear, “when are we going to use this?” Here is a writing outlet used by millions everyday and is very related to other forms of Web 2.0 technology. Adrian Bruce, on his critically acclaimed educational website www.adrianbruce.com supports this motivational idea by saying that students are more likely to enjoy writing on the computer verses traditional paper and pencil assignments. He goes on to talk about how blogging really expands the students’ horizons. Instead of simply writing something that a teacher will read and will eventually be tossed, students are now writing for a worldwide audience. He implies that this greater audience is a motivating factor causing students to write at a higher level.

The University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) computer writing and research lab find this real life context writing to be a major factor in student motivation to produce quality writing and to find interest in each others work. Having a sense of an audience beyond just completing the paper, they department argues, helps students to see purpose in their writing. The assignment has a value that rests in traditional art of rhetoric. On their website http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/233 , in an article entitled Steps Toward a Successful Classroom Blog by Jenny Edbauer a developer for their computer writing and research lab, one of the professors at UT points out the freedom of the blog format. Students can write about their interest and find communities to interact with to improve their writing.

In the Internet TESL Journal, an online journal for teacher of English as a second language http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Johnson-Blogs/ Andrew Johnson lays out a complete rationale for teachers to use blogs. He discusses that idea that most people do not use traditional pen and paper in their writing procedures anymore. The writer starts and finishes on a word processor. If we are to be teaching things for transfer and expecting our students to be applying what they are doing in the future it only stands to reason that we as teachers need to model what is presently being used in the marketplace. Blogs have the potential to be used in the total writing process. The are set up for natural feedback to the writer and both concepts and form can be critiqued, revised and improved. It is a nature setting for peer evaluation.

Now the question is weather the educational community is ready to embraced blogging and the rest of the Web 2.0 concepts. In an research article that appeared in Edutopia entitled Synching Up with the iKid, http://www.edutopia.org/ikid-digital-learner states that more then 27% of teachers feel they have little or no training as to the implementation of computers in the classroom. That is nearly a third of our teachers. Combine this fact with the limits of available technology in many schools in the educational community still have some work to do to fully implement these concepts in the lives of every student.