What if all teachers and students described their classroom experiences like this (Warlick, 2007)?
[My students] see themselves as part of a global communityāa community that shares. . . . This international audience gives my students a purpose and they are motivated to do their best writing.
Kathy Cassidy, Teacher, Moose Jaw, Canada
I worried about making my studentsā developing language skills available to a wider audienceābut I neednāt have. They are developing their own voice and with it a greater degree of responsibility and confidence.
Paul Harrington, Teacher, Blackwood, United Kingdom
We have an authentic global audience for the events that happen in our school. . . . [W]e have a real purpose for writing to inform, to educate, to connect.
āTeacher from New Zealand
These comments from educators using Class Blogmeister, a classroom blogging tool developed by David Warlick, show the positive impact that blogs can have on student engagement and performance. What are blogs and why should educators use them? What does a fully developed blogging project look like and require? Where can educators find blogging resources? These are some of the questions that educational leaders are asking in order to support twenty-first-century teachers and students.
WHAT ARE BLOGS?
In simple terms, blogs are web-based logs or journals (web log shortened to blog). The basic concept behind blogging is not new. Social interaction in teaching and learning is a keystone of educational theory. When teachers and students blog, they are able to actively engage audiences outside the usual classroom time boundaries.
Individuals and groups are drawn to blogs for the following reasons:
- They are simple to set up, edit, and publish; no computer language is needed.
- Topics can be as formal or personal as deemed appropriate by the writer.
- Recent entries (posts) are easily located as blogs are published in reverse chronological order.
- There are easy ways to subscribe (see Chapter Four).
- Comments from an audience are a standard part of the process, thus creating two-way conversations.
So what are the implications for blogging as pedagogy and what is their potential impact on student engagement?
EDUCATIONAL RATIONALE FOR BLOGGING
SupportBlogging.com, a site set up to help promote an understanding of the benefits of educational blogging, suggests that āone of the great educational benefits of the read/write web, and blogging particularly, is the opportunity for the student to become a āteacherā by presenting material to an audience. When we teach, we learnā (Hargadon, 2009).
In the past, when a student wrote in class for a single teacher who provided grade-based criticism, student audience was minimal. When student writing was shared or published outside the classroom, feedback also was limited to local, rather than global, area connections.
With the rapid growth of the read-write web, it is as easy to create and exchange content as it is to consume it. Likewise, it is increasingly easy to build an interactive network. With a single click of the mouse, classes can engage in conversations with people from around the world and get authentic feedback. Different than simply keeping a notebook or diary of writing for a single audience, blogs can be public, commented on, and safely moderated before comments are published. This means that educators can provide authentic opportunities for their students to simultaneously analyze, evaluate, and create content that is immediately published for a global audience. Blogging provides new opportunities to receive feedback and see things in a different way. When put to use in education, blogging can have a profound effect on learners.
BLOGGING BEST PRACTICES: THE ALICE PROJECT
āWould you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?ā [asked Alice]
āThat depends a good deal on where you want to get to,ā said the Cat.
āI donāt much care whereāā said Alice.
āThen it doesnāt matter which way you go,ā said the Cat.
āāso long as I get somewhere,ā Alice added as an explanation.
Lewis Carroll, Aliceās Adventures in Wonderland (1865/2008)
In fall 2009, educator Christian Longās Alice Project (2009) challenged sixty tenth-grade high school students to answer the following questions:
- How can we make Aliceās Adventures in Wonderland come alive for us?
- More important, how can we create something together that would give an audience outside our classroom its own version of Aliceās unexpected journey through Wonderland?
- Can we become the worldās most passionate authorities on Carrollās story in the process?
- And how would we create and nurture an equally passionate audience in just two short months?
On a traditional level, the challenges were simple:
- Read a richly annotated version of Lewis Carrollās classic childrenās story, Aliceās Adventures in Wonderland.
- Write rigorously about what caught oneās eye along the way, balancing playful curiosity with line-by-line analysis.
- Make it interesting for others.
The last challenge, as much as anything else, became the heart of this project.
Students were excited to share their ideas with and get insight from people around the world. The blog was the right ātoolā to provide a balance between traditional writing and global conversation. Beyond these questions, the students were required to collaborate on project guidelines, craft and nurture an audience over time, and engage professional judges from around the world to evaluate their individual efforts and teamwork.
TECHNICAL STEPS
The story of Alice is simple enough for a ten-year-old child to appreciate. However, the seemingly limitless intellectual word games and social innuendos in Carrollās work invite a rethink about how students could analyze Wonderland. It demands a more public, question-filled, and debate-centered, writing-as-exploration process. The question was not if blogging could work but how it should be done to ensure the richest experience possible for students.
It seemed logical to create a series of team-managed blogs to frame student analysis. Additionally, the blog entries were to create ongoing conversations while simultaneously engaging a global audience from day one.
To truly mirror the upside-down experience of young Alice, the students were challenged to be very public about their emerging insights and wrong turns alike. This was not about perfection. It was about fostering conversation. And it was about extending the four walls of the classroom in ways impossible traditionally.
FRAMING THE PROCESS
The first step was creating a teacher-managed home blog to serve as collective archive and one-stop map for visitors. Then a unique Alice Project blog was established for each team to design, compose, edit, and publish. Although there were many free platforms (e.g., Blogger.com or Edublogs.com) that could have been used, the Alice Project used WordPress.com, a free and easy-to-manage blogging system. Nothing was made permanently public until each teamās editor had read over posts and ...
