Writing Online: Blogging in the Classroom
Alex Grant
Presented at MEC2003
Arizona State University


Introduction: Literacy in the classroom

One of the major challenges to overcome in the classroom is having the students internalize the lesson at hand; to make it their own. Quite a bit of thought in the last few decades has gone into retooling many of the basic methods used by teachers to do this: Allowing for different learning styles, representing old information in new ways, and by giving students more creative control over how they take the lesson in order to contextualize it within their own frame of reference. A fundamental part of that process, I will argue, is not just churning out worksheets or filling in the blanks, not just writing an essay or completing a lab report; rather it is taking the topic at hand and recasting the knowledge gained as part of their own story; a story about who they are as individuals and as learners.

We identify who we are through storytelling. When I'm talking about stories and storytelling what I don't mean is a traditional "Once upon a time" kind of thing. There are a lot of ways stories play out in conversation and they're often as nonlinear and idiosyncratic as the people speaking.

Through our conversations, our belongings and our actions we retell the story of who we are. It's a social behavior that shows people who we are. Each new idea, advancement , technology, event in which we participate can only be internalized through this storytelling process. It's this fundamental relational tactic that makes us social creatures; the need to relate ourselves to others; to evaluate and redefine our identities based on the swirl of other stories that intersect with our own. We use our stories as a gauge of ourselves and of those around us. Our stories link every person on the planet into a complex narrative fabric. Each of us engages in this kind of storytelling everyday and we're all aware of it, though often more on a subconscious level.

While all this is going on, we're also living our stories, accumulating more and more layers to who we are. Talking about the news, about movies, books, things overheard and seen. Relating those stories and offering opinions puts us into the story as the narrator— allows us to assimilate things that are only tangential to our own lives.

In the classroom, when you look at the social dynamics of your students, the way they relate to each other you can see this storytelling writ large. Their stories, the way they're trying to relate themselves to the world around approaches an almost overwhelming pitch by high school. Dude, she totally did that to him? She said what? Ohmigod!

New technology like email, instant messaging, and texting have been rapidly adopted by today's youth for exactly this reason. Kids will snap up any social outlet they can get to talk to each other. They're fluent in, possibly the creators of common digital shorthand. While the media, teachers, and parents all bemoan the apparent declining literacy among today's wired kids, I see it as a good thing. I'm not suggesting that language will change so radically that CUL8R will ever make it into Merriam Webster's, but rather that they're engaging each other and the world in its written form more and more often.

Our students already can deal with technology that will be years in coming to the classroom while educators catch up. They'll already have their own ways of approaching the technology that you allow them to use. They'll know it from using it at home, from seeing advertisements for it, and from their friends. The future classroom will be a challenge to transform the existing technology from one that "just the kids use" into one where we can use the kids' technology to encourage not just learning, but the assimilation of that knowledge into their own world, in terms that they can recognize and make future use of.

This is about coping with online media, about using new technology in educational ways, and about using both to help kids make the transformation from students into learners.


One: Defining the medium

There are a lot of different communication technologies in the market right now. Many of them we use and see every day: Cell phones, pagers and email. Some are more common in other parts of the world, but slowly catching on here like cellular texting and portable web and email devices. Online, bulletin board threads, chat, and email are all good supplemental features for distance learning courses.

Both chat and email lend themselves to real-time communication. The way respective applications receive, present, and store information lends each a specific set of "things they're good for," but in a general sense they're very similar. Instead of focusing on these near-instantaneous feedback programs, I'd like to look at ways thoughtful, critical writing online might be approached.

Bulletin boards allow students from different locations to communicate thoughts and opinions in response to a prompt or question from the instructor. These online discussion threads make it easy for the instructor to be sure that each student has participated appropriately. They allow everyone the capability to critique and collaborate on the topic at hand. Bulletin boards tend to be impersonal, though, and often are used in lieu of an actual conversation. They're also notoriously hard to parse for specific ideas once a few people have contributed.

An option that has been growing in popularity is the web journal or web log or just blog. Blogs are frequent journal entries intended for public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author. Topics sometimes include philosophical musings, commentary on social issues, and links to other sites... There are a number of variations on this idea and new variations can easily be invented, the meaning of this term is apt to gather additional connotations with time. (Techtarget.com) Blogs are easily parsed, daily or weekly archives can be quickly accessed or linked to. Insofar as they're the product of one writer, they present a consistent point of view, but allow enough flexibility that they can be amended if further learning reveals new perspectives and discoveries. Comment features allow feedback from other people that, unlike bulletin boards, also form a kind of blog themselves. Collaboration between students, between teacher and student, and with the world at large become constructive and worthwhile the longer the student maintains a blog.

Blogging began as a somewhat self-aggrandizing geek-chic thing to do, but in the last few years has become wildly popular. There are celebrity blogs, artist blogs, news blogs, blogs about cities, blogs about politics, group blogs, there's even a blog "authored" by Samuel Pepys from the 17th century. Rebecca Blood's "Weblogs: a history and perspective" is a fantastic discussion of where blogs came from, what some of their common uses are, and where they've come since then.

I want to spend time talking about the advantages of blogging over other online communication tools and how they can be taken advantage of in the classroom. First, though, are examples of blogs and a discussion of the software involved.

Two: Tools, tips, and tricks
Listed below, with some commentary on each, are online resources and tools for making your own blog. All of the options below offer robust free services, some allow more functionality for a modest fee. Once you've either gone through making an account or installing the software on your server, it's easy to make multiple blogs. Also, most of the online-based blog software gives you the option of making your blog public or private, a great feature to retain privacy. This isn't even close to a complete list of all the available options, so if you've got some time you know where to go.


Blogging applications accessible on the internet.

Blogger
Blogger isn't the newest, or the best blog software available, but it's the easiest to set up and use. Blogger provides a quick and unintrusive sign-up procedure and gives you the option of a free .blogspot site, or allows you FTP capabilities if you already have a website somewhere else. You can upload a site design if you're familiar with CSS, or you can pick one of several templates they provide. Blogger keeps blogs private or public, allows you to search your old postings, and lets you keep multiple blogs active at once. A complete list of features is available on the Blogger site.

Blogger has been... unreliable... since it hit the market. It boasts tens of thousands of blogs and has a fantastic user interface. Unfortunately Blogger hasn't had the resources to prevent almost routine server failures and disconnections. Recently Pyra, the company that's responsible for Blogger, was purchased by Google. Hopefully by mid-summer Blogger will be taking advantage Google's massive infrastructure and be much more reliable.

Journalscape
Journalscape is great. It's actually a lot like Blogger, but with fewer layout options (you can't make your own) and not as unreliable. It's quick and easy to set up an account, and has all the basic features that make blogging fun: comments, archiving, and great privacy options. A complete list of features is available on the Journalscape site.


Blogging applications you install yourself.

Movable Type
Movable Type is far and away the best deal as far as blogging tools go. However it requires that you have an existing web site with Perl and CGI and either mySQL or BerkleyDB enabled. If you're considering this option, you'll probably have to talk to your network administrator about setting it up. It's a reasonably straightforward process, but definitely requires an understanding of how your server is set up. Especially in educational environments it might be easier to lift yourself up off the ground by pulling on your collar than mucking about on the district servers. You're also going to need some knowledge of CSS2 in order to customize the template that's provided.

Movable Type, once it's installed, is slick. The user interface is beautiful, reliable, and extremely flexible. Movable Type supports commenting, serchable archives, and trackbacks. A complete list of features is available on the Movable Type site.

Greymatter
Greymatter is not quite the tool that Movable Type is, but it's also a lot less complicated to set up. All you need is Perl 5 support on your server and FTP access to your site. If you have a website chances are good you have both of these things, as well. Greymatter supports comments, archiving, and multiple bloggers to one blog, among others. A complete list of features is available on the Greymatter site.


Three: Online/ offline collaboration
The first time I started thinking seriously about children, writing, and personal development was during my third or fourth summer as the head counselor for 6 to 9 year-olds at the Orme Summer Camp. At the time, the idea was born spur-of-the-moment when there wasn't a planned activity and we had some time to kill before dinner.

The Orme Summer Camp, also an international boarding school, has numerous out-of-state phone books in the administration building. We took a few, Denver and Chicago I believe, gave the kids copy paper and Crayola markers, then told them that we were going to write "Letters from Camp." They were let in on the secret that we would send their letter to a stranger's address: someone who didn't know anything about them, and that they could compose what amounted to a "crank letter" about whatever they wished (as long as it had, however tangential, to do with being at camp).

Once the kids understood that there were pretty much no constraints on whatever their imaginations could cook up, they began concocting frightful stories of blood-drinking counselors, enormous monsters lurking in the night, and other fantasies of dread.

An unorthodox activity, sure. I think it also bears mentioning that we didn't really mail those letters to the unsuspecting public. What was fascinating about it and why I'm bringing it up has a lot to do with what happened after the kids lifted their markers and put them to the page. The classroom became thick with noisy conspiracy. Someone would yell their idea to myself or another counselor and get a benign nod of approval. Then another would feed off that idea and craft an even more outrageous story.

Everyone writes differently depending on their audience, even young kids can make the jump intuitively from engaging a peer to a teacher to a parent. When the audience is a looming unknown, I think, kids feel they can be more free with their words while still maintaining a dialectic that wavers between how they might address a friend and how they address the adult world. In fact, most of our monster stories, albeit disturbed, were lucid and well-structured.

While the kids were bouncing their imaginations off the wall in our decorum-free zone, it was absolutely apparent that there was a fluidity of ideas, suggestions, one-upping and mirth. In part, I would assert, these stories found their final clarity and good grammatical, chronological, and grotesque structure from the opportunity to engage among themselves their own ideas before approaching their audience unknown.

Comparisons can be made to the time-honored in-classroom writing assignments that dictate a specific audience (a paper on Lincoln's life for the teacher, a letter to the President about patriotism, letters of sorrow and condolences to the NYFD in the wake of 9-11) and to the peer-review revision process. I think that neither produces the kind of constructive elaboration on personal opinion that occurred in our classroom that afternoon.

Four: Using blogs in the classroom
How can this be a valuable classroom tool? The structuring and organization as well as addressing security and privacy concerns will certainly factor into how a blog or blogs are implemented for a given activity. Daily journaling of ideas and concepts learned in a specific area like literature or history can be accomplished much like a paper-based writing assignment might, with the added benefit that the kids could access others' writings either later that day or in subsequent days— that they're going to be more interested in what their classmates have to say about the subject than yourself or "the book" goes without saying.

As an instructor, the fact that you can email your peers, contacts, experts or whomever to peruse and add comments to your student's work offers amazing potential.

In addition to encouraging your own students to write, there are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs online from which you can link to as reference, for lessons, and for fun. Reading improves writing skills second to none, and there's more than enough out there right now to keep you busy for years.

Another advantage is that the student's entries remain in a place that isn't easy to lose, can fill to the brim with things they've learned in particular lessons, their own musings, personal stories, or really, just about anything. Instead of having a blog for a particular lesson, like a bulletin board posting often is, a blog can last over the span of a school year (or even longer). Your students can return to older posts and elaborate with new information or reference their old ideas as approaches to make new discoveries. When they return to the things they've previously posted, they can see their growth and gain a sense of identity of who they are.


Conclusion: Technology and productivity
Giving students the opportunity to explore themselves and their world through writing is a topic on which quite a lot has been written. Giving our kids ample time to reflect on things; allowing them to assimilate the information presented to them in lessons, books, by peers, parents, from the TV, and everywhere else is an important process that will ultimately make them more thoughtful and aware.

None of this happens overnight, of course. In addition to struggling with the technology ourselves, we'll have to teach our students how to use blogs in responsible ways. Using computers to aid teaching and learning brings up issues of privacy, security, and ultimately requires teaching our kids good judgment and media literacy. Allowing students to not just learn to be safe and familiar with the internet, but also to be good netizens is easier and more fun when they're also a part of the larger, interconnected world.

Using blogs to let our children to experience and participate in the classroom and in their daily lives will ultimately help them understand these things; it will also help them gain a clearer understanding of themselves and the world around them.