Why We (Sometimes Don’t) Blog

It’s been nearly two weeks since my last post here, so what’s my excuse, and why, strangely, do I feel I need one?

As a state secondary school teacher, my students and I are still very much tied to the old world of paper exams, whose high season is now. As long as students’ future education opportunities and my level of pay depend on the outcome of such exams, they will continue to push more reflective activities to the margins.

But why do I feel the need to explain this? Perhaps because the public nature of blogging seems to generate a sense of duty and obligation towards one’s potential audience, however small one’s “stats” show it to be.

In Why We Blog by Bonnie Nardi et al. (http://darrouzet-nardi.net/bonnie/pdf/Nardi_why_we_blog.pdf), the sense of an audience is clearly central to the motivation of bloggers within each of the five (“not exhaustive” and “by no means mutually exclusive”) categories that they discovered in their research (otherwise, why not just write a private journal?). As “one of those people for whom writing and thinking are basically synonymous”, I strongly identify with those bloggers quoted in the “Blog As Muse” section of the article. To acknowledge an audience’s ability “to shape the writing” is, more importantly, to acknowledge their ability to shape the thinking, or, as Will Richardson puts it, “push my thinking further” (see earlier post: http://muso1.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/from-journaling-to-blogging/). For this reason alone, I can see myself blogging in one form or another in the future. 

Educational Blocking

This week I’ve had to read and reflect on the following two articles for my MA course:

Blogging to Learn by Anne Bartlett-Bragg (http://knowledgetree.flexiblelearning.net.au

/edition04/pdf/Blogging_to_Learn.pdf)

Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0450.pdf).

Bartlett-Bragg’s presentation of her 5-Stage Blogging Process as something that has “been informed and developed from practice and not theory” seems to provide the sort of encouragement educators need to embrace blogs within (their) pedagogical practices” without waiting over-cautiously for some kind of foolproof “Idiot’s Guide” to come along which will have done all the thinking and risk-taking for them. It seems clear that we must resist the temptation to keep “getting ready” and just “get going”, however “swamped” we may feel by the often confusing mass of “new technology options” which are now becoming available to us. If we are to successfully encourage students to “shift from surface to deeper levels of learning”, we must surely lead by example and model what it means to be “active individuals, wholly present, engaging with others, and open to challenge”. I only hope, whilst “walking across the desert”, that we are able to discriminate between truly nourishing oases and the many time-wasting, strength-sapping mirages.

Despite his obvious enthusiasm for educational blogging, Downes rightly points to a key “dilemma for educators”, namely, the problem of how to encourage “free-flowing”, “unconstrained”, “authentic”, “reflective” and “engaged” intellectual conversation within institutional contexts which necessarily involve prescription, monitoring, censorship and grading. How, for instance, are we to enable the sort of “quality linking” essential to this “new realm of human communication” if access to Web 2.0 sites – such as YouTube – and any sites with the word “blog” in the address is blocked, as in my own Local Education Authority? If blogging is, as Ken Smith claims, “writing down what you think when you read others” and having others “write down what they think when they read you”, such restricted access can only weaken the potential of educational blogging to motivate and engage our students in their own learning process.

Pay Attention

Here’s another challenging video for educators.

But perhaps this is who we should be listening to more than anyone else; the students themselves:

 

Media Snackers?

It would seem fair to say that – in the developed world at least - our media landscape is now a multi-layered one which both enables and encourages multi-tasking, particularly amongst the young. However, I would question how many of our young people really fall into the category of “Media Snackers” as presented here i.e. “empowered individuals…creating as much as they consume”. As far as I’m aware, consumption still far outweighs creative contribution (http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/110480/web-20-sites-failing-to-impress-users-study-says.html).

As David Buckingham points out in Chapter 1 of the 2006 book, Digital Generations (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Digital-Generations-Children-Young-People/dp/0805859802/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210515640&sr=8-10), with particular reference to Don Tapscott’s 1998 book, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Growing-Up-Digital-Generation-Oracle/dp/0071347984/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210516050&sr=1-1), such generalisations should be approached with “a degree of scepticism” and “a commitment to rigorous empirical investigation”:

For all those who believe, like Tapscott, that technology is liberating and empowering children, there are many others who see it as destroying or betraying the essence of childhood (e.g. Cordes and Miller, 2002, http://www.allianceforchildhood.net/projects

/downloads/frontmatter.pdf; Postman, 1983, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Disappearance-Childhood-Neil-Postman/dp/0679751661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210519122&sr=1-1) …As I have argued elsewhere (Buckingham, 2000, http://www.amazon.co.uk/After-Death-Childhood-Growing-Electronic/dp/0745619339/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210519472&sr=1-1, 2005, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Handbook-New-Media-Leah-Lievrouw/dp/1412918731/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210519529&sr=1-1), contemporary developments in technology do present new risks and opportunities for children. But these developments can only be adequately understood in the light of other changes…(social, economic and political).

This technologically determinist stance means that there are many issues and phenomena that Tapscott and other such technology boosters are bound to ignore. He neglects the fundamental continuities and interdependencies between new media and old media (such as TV)…the banality of much new media use…the downside of the internet…

The technologically empowered cyberkids of the popular imagination may indeed exist. But even if they do, they are in a minority, and they are untypical of young people in general…like other forms of marketing rhetoric, the discourse of the digital generation is precisiely an attempt to construct the object of which it purports to speak. It represents not a description of what children or young people actually are, but a set of imperatives about what they should be or what they need to become.

And, by implication I suppose, a set of imperatives about what teachers should be or what they (we) need to become.

Here are some interesting articles on the so-called “Multitasking Generation” or “Generation M”:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/

article/2007/02/25/AR2007022501600.html

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-07/uoc–maa072506.php

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/

article/0,9171,1174696,00.html

“Snacking” is clearly not enough.

From journaling to blogging

The adolescent search for self led me to journaling in my late teens and early twenties, for which I gained inspiration and guidance from the likes of Ira Progoff (http://www.amazon.co.uk/At-Journal-Workshop-Unconscious-Workbooks/dp/0874776384/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210499919&sr=1-1), Tristine Rainer (http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Diary-Self-guidance-Expanded-Creativity/dp/0874771501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210499952&sr=1-1) and Joanna Field/Marion Milner (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Ones-Own-Joanna-Field/dp/0860688216/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210499636&sr=8-2).

Journaling featured again in my teacher training (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflection-Turning-Experience-into-Learning/dp/0850388643/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210500643&sr=1-1), during which the importance of being a “Reflective Practitioner” was stressed (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflective-Practitioner-Professionals-Think-Action/dp/1857423194/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b?ie=UTF8&qid=1210500643&sr=1-1). Even now, my instinct is to turn to the form of the reflective journal in order to get my bearings and a sense of perspective in times of major transition in my life.

So what’s the difference between journaling and blogging? Will Richardson has some interesting thoughts on this subject (http://weblogg-ed.com/2005/blogging-vs-journalingagain/#comments). He seems to get to the heart of the matter in this extract from an earlier post (http://weblogg-ed.com/2004/05/07/):

Weblogs don’t change the “Here’s what I did today” type stuff. I can journal on paper or in a dozen other ways. Journaling in a blog opens us up to a wider audience, no doubt. And that in itself may change the way we write when we journal. But bottom line, it’s not decidedly different from what I can already do.

And I don’t need a Weblog to deliver or collect assignments or share links; it certainly facilitates that kind of work, but it’s not a requirement.

But I’ve never in my life written the way I write in this Weblog. And frankly, I don’t know that I’ve learned as much from any other type of activity as I have from this type. And I learn when I’m doing just what I’m doing now (sweat on brow). I’m not journaling. I’m not just linking. I’m attempting to synthesize a lot of disparate ideas from a variety of sources into a few coherent sentences that I can publish for an audience and wait (hope?) for its response to push my thinking further. That’s the essence of blogging to me, and I can’t do it without a Weblog. That’s the distinction. That’s what tells me this is different. And that’s what makes me think so hard about the effects that blogging, not just using a blog, might have in a classroom.

If we’ve been blogging without Weblogs in schools all along, then just put me out of my misery now. But I don’t think we have.

Social Networking Wars

Some enjoyable food for thought:

Information Overload

Although I’ve spent several hours today following one fascinating link after another, I haven’t really digested everything sufficiently for the long post I’d hoped to write. I should probably abandon the idea of long posts altogether and just make more regular short ones.

In the meantime, it’s nice to remember that I’m not the only one concerned about IO:

http://www.managingio.com/2008/02/24/

internet-resources-on-information-overload-and-productivity/

http://www.digitalnative.org/wiki/Main_Page

The Great Seduction

Another unintentional encounter with the work of Andrew Keen.

On Googling “Neil Postman+Web 2.0″ (intrigued by what the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death might have had to say on the current state of our “internet culture” if he had lived to see it), the first link I was given took me here: http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction

/2006/06/where_have_you_.html.

“The Great Seduction” which Keen seems to be warning us against is not Web 2.0 tools themselves – he is not a Luddite – rather the widespread idea that the “the wisdom of the crowd”, disseminated via such tools, is as equally valid as the wisdom of rigorous scholarship and genuine expertise. “Media literacy is the key in this new age” he states in a keynote speech linked to the above page (http://www.oeb-docs.com/oeb-videos/speeches-07/oeb07_andrew-keen.mp3); in the face of ”the democratization of knowledge”, discrimination skills are going to be more important than ever.