More on Protecting Classroom Bloggers from Teachers

Friday, 9 March 2007 Clay Burell Print This Post

A portrait of a monkey
Originally uploaded by s-a-m.

[Note on photo by s-a-m: I was looking for a "traditional teacher" photo in Flickr "school" tags, and came across this instead. Something about the idea of "trained monkeys" and "prison bars" seemed relevant to this conversation.]

I’m learning and percolating ideas so much better due to the comments coming in about how to save classroom bloggers from “teacher-vampires” who, with surely the best intent, threaten to “suck blogging dry,” that again I’m going to promote another comment to a full post here.

(The relegation of comments to a secondary position by the very structure of blogs and rss readers is one thing I find very imperfect about current blogging conventions so far. Great comments are overlooked because they don’t appear on the same page as the post itself. And then, RSS readers only show the blogger’s post, and not the comments, to the subscriber. So the conversation between blogger and reader-cum-interlocutor/writer is simply not heard because of the design of the blogging and RSS programs. Not good. So I’ll continue posting comments to turn up the volume on these conversations for everybody else–until new conventions are made to remedy this defect, or someone teaches me current remedies of which I’m unaware. Because the social “crowd wisdom” afforded by blogging is one of the wonders of this new writing reality. Blog developers, take note: give us an option to enable posting of comments on the main blog page itself, and not just the permalinks for individual posts!)

My apologies for not linking to the posts that got this whole “Teachers as Blog-Vampires” conversation started. You can scroll down to the March 8 post, “Teacher Think-Aloud on Student Blogging (a Fresh Start),” and read upwards from there; or you can click here, here, here, here, and here. That way you’ll get to read the comments.)

Here is Barbara’s input. I’ve italicized what jumped out at me. I don’t think I need to editorialize about it, since Barbara says it so well.

Barbara said…

Thanks for moving the comments to a post. I agree this is an important discussion. As I was reading through the post one thing that was hovering at the corner of my mind was a concern that the hw vs blog dichotomy might play into the departmentalization that has so characterized education…there is what we do at school and then what we really do….
I agree with the idea that we need to experience blogging ourselves to really get how to use them… and that “how to” will change as our understanding of our own learning deepens. To quote Will again ” our learning needs to be transparent” to our students (or in my case to my staff).
So what I am thinking is we need to consider what kind of learning best takes place in the medium of a blog. If they have to do with exploration of ideas …well that is a good starting point for all subjects and can follow both personal interests some directed exploration..it also often requires the direction or mentoring of a teacher….Blogs for me are about constructing meaning.
Okay, I am rambling on my own think aloud and since this supposed to be a comment I better stop.But I really value this on going conversation…it is definitely causing me to think.

March 9, 2007 3:02 PM

Final comment (for now): Linzel‘s riff on my suggestion that blogs could/should? be “online portfolios of a learner’s educational journey through school years”–that blogs are ideal repositories for the students’ “life-long learning” we preach about, and could span grade levels and demolish our artificial “September-to-June” compartmentalization of student learning by academic year–is making me think of how blogging in schools could be independent of classroom teachers and school departmentalization altogether.

I can only articulate it this much so far: students get credit for their blog at the end of every quarter? semester? school year? as a stand-alone grade. Schools provide faculty advisers for student bloggers to guide students toward interdisciplinary reflections and meta-cognitions about their educational journey. This would save student blogs from the vampires, and promote the higher-order thinking, construction of meaning, connections to personal relevance, and interdisciplinary coherence that we all talk about wanting to foster in students. And every new school year, students would continue to build that same blog. It would really be a “growth-chart” for a students entire school life, from learning to write in first grade to, one hopes, learning to Think by grade 12. All on one blog.

And students could download the blog at graduation and keep it forever. After all, it’s their blog–unless teachers take it from them.