I recently read a couple articles about blogging in the professional literature. The first is Stephen Downes’, “Educational Blogging” in the September/October 2004 issue of Educause. If you are not familiar with Stephen Downes take a look at his website and check out his bio page.
The article seems geared for a someone who is generally interested in blogging for educational purposes. Downes relates, anecdotally, experiences of fifth graders at a school in Quebec City, Canada, and talks of Will Richardson’s experiences. The one solid piece of information he includes that I found useful was in citing the five majuor uses for blogs in education which he attributes to Henry Farrell whose blog is called Crooked Timber The five major uses are:
- teachers use blogs to replace the standard class web page
- instructors bein to link to internet items that relate to their course
- blogs are used to organize in-class discussions
- some instructors are using blogs to organize class seminars and to provide summaries of readings
- students may be asked to write their own blogs as part of their course grade.
Also of value is including Will Richardson’s thoughts on why blogging is valuable in teaching writing. “Blogging, however, offers students a chance to a) reflect on what they are writing and thinking as they write and think it, b) carry on writing about a topic over a susteained period of time, maybe a lifetime, and c) engage readers and audience in a sustained conversation that then leads to further writing and thinking.” [citation: Will Richardson, “Metablognition,” Weblogg-Ed, April 27, 2004, http://www.weblogg-ed..com/2004/04/27]
The December 2004 issue of the Communications of the ACM features several articles under The Blogoshpere. The most useful to me was “Why We Blog,” (p. 41-46) by Bonnie A. Nardi, et. al. In this article, the authors report on the results of an ethnographic investigation of blogging in a sample of ordinary bloggers. They investigated blogging as a form of personal communication and expression, with a specific interest in uncovering the range of motivations driving individuals to create and maintain blogs. The way they did this was by conducting in-depth interviews with bloggers, who they said were located primarily in and around Stanford University between April and July 2003. All told, they said they interviewed 23 people.
They reported finding five major motivations behind blogging: documenting one’s life; providing commentary and opinions; expressing deeply felt emotions; articulating ideas through writing; and forming and maintaining community forums. ... These motivations are by no means mutually exclusive and might come into play simultaneously. In addition, they reported on the same sort of thing that I’ve discovered, that students found that blogging created a sense of community that would be less likely to emerge in a conventional classroom setting. And, that a course where students didn’t participate but only prof and TAs did not lead to much participation. As with other electronic media, they wrote, blogs in themselves are not sufficient for building a community.
