BLOGGING IS TAKING OFF LIKE WILDFIRE:

...through our cluster. It has been great to see the enthusiasm and connectedness these tools are creating in our classrooms - and beyond them.

The question is "Why?" "How Are These Blogs Deepening Our Learning Experiences to Truly Make A Difference?

While learning is often a social interaction, could it be that sometimes the social can overtake the learning? Many blogs like facebook and bebo are just that. How are our classroom blogs different?

In his article "The Blog of Proximal Development" Konrad Glogowski talks of just this.

• "It’s not enough to know how to grow a blog, to pick a topic and keep contributing to one’s blog. Our students must also be aware of the class communities in which they learn. They have to have opportunities to think and respond to other writers. They need opportunities to engage in and sustain conversations about their own work and the work of their peers. Blogging is not about choosing a topic and writing responses for the rest of the term. It is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement with ideas."

While I realise this is more geared towards students older than those we work with, I think many of us are considering these same ideas. For this reason I will continue to quote Konrad...

• "I find that for so many of my students blogging often becomes a race to publish, to write entries and receive comments. (Most of them measure the success of their blog by the number of comments they receive, and the content of the comment is often not as important as the mere fact that it is there). They rarely look critically at their own writing, preferring instead to judge their own work by the traffic that it attracts to their blog."
  
• "In order to engage in truly reflective thought about their work, students must also have opportunities to analyze who they are as bloggers and writers. They must have opportunities to look critically at their own work and see how they fit into the class blogosphere."

I do think we need to really explore ways that we can facilitate our students into a deeper awareness of the impact in both submitting and commenting in a blog. I am very aware of the benefits that I have gained personally from making my own thoughts explicit and in receiving responses to exposing these. Both actions without a doubt have helped to take my thinking into new fields.

I wonder if our students are feeling the same..... ?