Blogs in the classroom

This article in the NYTimes is remarkably free of content. Correction. For those who already know about blogs, its remarkably free of content. As an announcement to those who live in caves that blogs are now in the classroom, I suppose it has something to say.

I'm still of the opinion that mailing lists (such as Yahoo Groups) are better suited to many of these purposes than blogs are. Teachers have a strong propensity to reach for the fashionable tool rather than the tool best adapted to the job. For example, "For teachers, blogs are attractive because they require little effort to maintain, unlike more elaborate classroom Web sites, which were once heralded as a boon for teaching." When web sites were the big thing, teachers flocked, now the vogue is for the blog. Mailing lists never had a vogue (its e-mail plus one other thing, too high a barrier) so they never became a pedagogical tool.

"In one blog entry, for instance, Ms. Poling asked her students what qualities they looked for when rating books for a statewide award. When several students responded that a book has to be creative and grab their attention, she posted a follow-up question asking them if they used the same criteria for both fiction and nonfiction books."

This thing must be a nightmare to read. This kind of query and response must be in the comments, where there is still no organization to the posts. As I think about it, the ideal form these schools may be looking for is the message board.

Its no wonder that technology doesn't produce the benefits promised. Teachers by and large doesn't use it very effectively.

Web sites: Good for one way flows of information, best use are for schedules, policies, requirements, announcements, all put together might be understood as a hyper-syllabus, with units organized by date, clickable for more in-depth information.

Mailing Lists: Good for information flows by communities, since one message not only goes to all, but is easily organized by date, sender, or subject. Mailing lists also have the characteristic that they are pretty insular. Unless efforts are made to publicize ways to view the archives, students can assume that their posts are not public.

Boards: Good for the same reasons as mailing lists, they function slighly different, but have no clear advantages or disadvantages in function. The main difference between these and mailing lists is that its much easier to make boards a place for public viewing. Boards are possible media by which students could maintain a portfolio viewable publicly. Boards are more easily connected to web sites.

Blogs: Like websites, blogs are better suited to the dissemination of information than they are to a conversation. Even with copious links, a blog doesn't support lend itself to a conversation without making it difficult to read all of the posts. Blogs don't strike me as nearly as useful as some of these other tools. Obviously its not because I'm not fond of blogs. Having students maintain their own blogs certainly won't hurt, neccesarily, but its not the best solution out there.