There are many activities that come with age and maturity prerequisites. Given the age of my Current Events students, getting a driver’s license immediately springs to mind!

The new driver must be at least 16 (in my state), take a mandated course about the dangers and responsibilities of driving, pass a general knowledge test, practice, then receive a license with limited privileges.

For the blogging analogy, I would keep the instruction and maybe some initial guided practice. Since your students are older - almost legal adults, I think you could probably “grant” them full blogging rights after that.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if blogging became as desirable as drinking (a lame but vivid analogy, suggested by my recent PowerPoint experiences!) and students did it with or without our “permission” because they wanted to!

Your question: “So what do you do when a student chooses a topic area with an audience whose social norms you might find objectionable? ”

It’s an interesting one, and thanks for bringing it up. I expect you know things like this will be as rare as any other problematic event in student blogging - in my experience students show good judgment about their blogging and commenting 99% of the time - so you’re probably tossing that question in because we also all know that that 1% of poor student judgment threatens the whole enterprise. That’s why it’s worth finding these questions, to me - not because they will be common occurrences, but because even single occurrences can be damaging.

So if a student chooses “a topic area with an audience whose social norms [I] might find objectionable,” what should I do?

FIrst, I’m having a hard time thinking of an objectionable social norm. I guess a classroom blog for neo-Nazis, bigots, and other hate-groups fits the bill. (Is that what you had in mind?)

So if that happens - if Bobby decides to “blog for Hitler,” for example, and attract an audience of world-wide neo-Nazi bloggers - what an interesting situation. Seems like more of a “teachable year” than a “teachable moment.”

I’ve got a less extreme case (sorry for the meandering): teenagers can get awfully revealing about their private issues - eating disorders, suicidal tendencies, etc. Things we adult self-publishers typically have the good sense to keep to ourselves (I’ve never, for example, posted about my taste for pet-food*).

So suppose a student writes about wanting commit suicide. You’d think simply deleting the post from the blog, when you (the teacher) find it, solves the problem. But that’s not true, is it? My earlier comment about WayBack Machine not caching most sites failed to account for this fact: any RSS aggregator will have that post permanently, even if it was deleted from the original blog.

So where does that leave us?

What do you (anybody) think of an idea I’ve kicked around now and then: a “probationary” period of blogging in which all posts are submitted “private” - viewable only to “friends”, basically - until the individual blogger has shown he/she has the good sense to keep dirty laundry and damning information private?

I don’t like it - it’s based on mistrust. The opposite approach, like a hockey game, would be to allow all to play, but put any offenders in the “penalty box” if they show poor judgment.

No more time for the moment - have to prep for school tomorrow - but do want to add that in the extreme cases (the neo-Nazi, e.g.), that “teachable year” would involve asking the parents to be involved, and the school admin.

Which points to the conversations about the “social nature” of blogging both you and Diane mention. Mature students should understand the affiliation of their own blogs with their school, their family, their teachers, their classmates. Or they should understand it once it has been discussed and digested in the classroom.

Thanks for the input. Helped. Have to run now.

*obviously a joke

The problem in evaluating how much, and where, prudence should be applied is that it’s a question of values, and there could be wide variation in terms of the audience the student wants to address. I can imagine some cases in which I’d be at a complete loss to help a student with the issues that might arise if they were trying to reach an audience that I didn’t understand at all. The coaching metaphor is useful since there might be a need for exploratory discussions about a student’s intentions. Blogging, as I’ve said before, is a social practice. If the subject matter is left wide open, the teacher’s role would shift from technical expert to something more like mentor, I suppose.

I really like the idea of putting the kids onto the idea of connecting with other bloggers and to identify a focus for a blog. Doing that is key to making blogging work. So what do you do when a student chooses a topic area with an audience whose social norms you might find objectionable? As you say, the issues would differ with the students’ ages, as well as their interests.