More than a journal

Chapter 2 of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson may turn into a seminal text in developing my dissertation. Before reading this chapter, I had no idea about the possibilities blogs had in education.

First off, blogs can be used as a class website or portal. A well-used blog is updated far more frequently than a traditional website. Teachers can have complete transparency - allowing parents and administrators to see what students are working on a weekly or even daily basis. This would also allow easy communication between teachers and parents. As a class portal, blogs could be used by students to keep track of and turn in assignments.

Blogs can also be used to store class work, which is a great tool, both for students and teachers. It's nice that students don't have to worry about losing their homework or for a file to get corrupted on their computer. Likewise, teachers don't have to worry about the myriad excuses that tend come up around every assignment deadline. (Well, there will be fewer excuses, anyway.) Since, assignments can be stored on blogs, the next logical step is using blogs as electronic portfolios.

Ultimately, I am very interested in blogs because of their implications for public writing. We are by definition writing in the public sphere when we blog. For most of us, our audience is small. However, we have seen the potential for a wide national and even global audience for blogs. Richardson sites Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign as a good example of the power of blogs to raise money and awareness (3). Students should feel a sense of accomplishment and pride of work in publishing a blog that is read and responded to by people outside the school walls.

The next step for me is to start implementing these ideas into my classrooms. My current section of English 1100 is making use of WebCT Vista . It's working fairly well, but its limitations are becoming apparent to me. Nothing we do there can be considered public writing, since only people in the class have access to what we publish. Students don't have access to each other's files, so it's difficult to do any real collaborative work (at least through their tool set).

The question is, do I create another set of tasks for my students this semester or do I wait until my next class? I'll probably wait. Although I always tweak my classes as I go to meet the needs of each particular set of students, I don't want to create more work for them this late in the game.