Public(s)
Welcome to Technoblogistics, a forum for considerations and concerns about the roles and responsibilities of technology in teaching and learning. Call me John, soon-to-be licensed in secondary English-language arts and conferred a Masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction.
In the digital and information age, I believe we are all teachers and learners. Web 2.0 has pervaded our lives, such that it has become a taken-for-granted fabric of our existences. It is our fishbowl. We use it and consume it to connect, communicate, and collaborate. We use it and consume it to discover, disseminate, and discuss. And its value and possibility for education are only burgeoning. However, such powerful technologies demand that we, both instructors and pupils, examine and reflect on our relationship to the technology.
I would like to start here for my inaugural post by sharing my own "blog log." Consider this a meta-blog. Yes, a blog, as the word itself suggests, encourages wordplay.
I submit: I have a leg-up when it comes to blogging, or, rather, thinking about blogging. In years past, I have authored my own blog, The Space between Three Violins, where I posted poetry, essays, and other musings. I did gain some followers, especially by sharing my posts on Facebook and Twitter (whose status updates, I have learned, are forms of what is called "microblogging"). This blog allowed me to publish material that I would otherwise have never attempted to publish. It also provided me, at a time when I was writing creatively much more regularly, a user-friendly structure that ensured I both kept up with writing, and sharing it, on a frequent basis. The blog, it stands, is a wonderful vehicle for self-expression.
Blogs are a medium of and for the public. We can all speak. We can all listen.
I also co-authored a blog with a few friends called The Cincinnati Labyrinth Project. In this blog, we parodied certain corners of academia by fabricating a fake field, called labyrinthology, and fleshed out its history, theorists and theory, current state, terminology, and navigation. I admit: it is pretty nerdy and abstruse. But this precisely illustrates the second great value blogs: interaction and community. We carved out an obscure, focused niche, that, although comedic, brought us together digitally in thought and friendship.
Blogs are medium of and for identities and subcultures. We can discover and locate one another based on specific concerns and interests.
Blogs make public and make publics. However, blogs take time.
An effective blogger posts regularly but not too much. An effective blogger posts different media and in different media. An effective blogger has to put in the effort to keep the blog relevant. This is why I no longer am active on either of the blogs I authored. Life became busy, and, without steam, the blogs became artifacts. And, without a consistent audience, they feel too self-serving.
Reaching a real audience is both a great advantage and challenge of blogging.
Right now, I do not read any blogs on regular basis outside of Krulwich Wonders and The Stone. This, I contend, is a matter of time and information overload. (I stay busy enough keeping up with online news, though these often direct me to blogs, such as the two provided above.) Speaking of information, however, an additional value of blogs is its democracy and journalistic value. Blogs reclaim the first-person in a sea of anonymous information. Blogs reclaim the citizen as a source, maker, and sharer of news and information in a society of media conglomerates.
Blogito Ergo Sum
To be the blogger behind the curtain is both empowering and humbling. It gives me voice, especially in a milieu that favors a more naturalistic, colloquial register. Yet it also gives me pause to think about my own voice. One of the main reasons I retired my personal blog was due to concerns about self-refereeing. It was exciting to see my personal writing "out there," with people encountering it, commenting on it. Yet, I was also saying to the writing community that I felt my writing did not need another's review to be deemed publishable. Blogs raise a perennial issue: What are the criteria for good writing and who gets to be the gatekeeper for assessing it? To what extent is writing a personal and a collaborative endeavor? These are indeed some of the puzzles that authoring blogs raise for me, but these are precisely the puzzles we need to be talking about, especially with our students at a time when media literacy is more important than ever.
The other concern I have when authoring blogs is less abstract and more personal: Do I have something worthwhile to say? Do people want to read this? I, myself, have come across many a personal blog whose content I found questionable. Not all blogs are created equal, of course. Some blogs are better than others; there are criteria for good blogs.
Yet, I think these concern miss the ultimate point: Blogs remind us that we all do have something to say.
If the digital age has taught me anything, it is that Web 2.0 does help level the playing field. How many viral videos have shone the spotlight on the "little guy"? Think of all the sociopolitical causes that received epic (a word whose currency was made possible by Web 2.0) attention because of it.
The key, for me, is finding one's specific niche, whether it be photographs of tortoises or using technology in the classroom.
Recently, I have done just that. I have proposed a blog concept to some concerned stakeholders, a concept which, I hope, will give voice where there is none. I will keep you, pardon the pun, posted.
The Classroom 2.0
As part of an educational technology class, I crafted an online textbook page about, of all things, blogs. (Mind the draft.) My research enlightened me in many ways. The power of blogs in the classroom is that they break down old notions of the classroom. A good blog post is not too long, which this one is becoming, so, instead of repeating my textbook page, here's how I feel about blogs with my students.
Blogs:
- Organize, create, extend learning opportunities (e.g., a classroom blog as resource, a unit blog for collaborative writing and reflection, a student-made blog as an independent project)
- Tell students they have a voice and place to express it (e.g., democratic and critical pedagogy)
- Are diverse for diverse learners (e.g., photo-blogs, video blogs, link blogs)
- Build relationships not limited to the classroom (e.g., social networking, connecting to communities of interest)
- Promote traditional and new literacies (e.g., media literacy)
- Capitalize on the assets students bring to the classroom as well as their interests (e.g., digital natives)
- Demand that we take the time to model for students how to read, create, write on, share, and update blogs
- Require we educate students about privacy, netiquette, fair use, and cyberbullying
Yet, as the title of my blog suggests, I have never implemented blogs in my own classroom. So, I have much to learn about, ahem, their blogistics.
