I love to read and struggle to read Zero Seconde, which is a blog about blogging and research and things that really interest me and that’s written in beautiful French. I can read French, but slowly and with an understanding that is often rather skewed, which can be quite interesting and quite frustrating. (I can fake a conversation quite well!) Anyway, In a long post partly responding to my post about how I’m not blogging with my students this semester, Zero Seconde writes that blogging is the future of academia, yet also that once a new academic has the network blogging gains, and can publish in more traditional ways, things change. I’m going to have to read the post again, with a dictionary, I think, because I think it makes some interesting points. Another response to my not blogging with students post is from Barbara Ganley. All worth thinking about. I’m still kind of relishing not blogging with my students to be quite honest. I did sit down last week and set up our LMS (our university uses dot lrn) with discussion forums for students to participate in and one for assignments to be posted to so they can see each others work and discuss it. Maybe I’ll blog with next semester’s students.
2 thoughts on “responses to not doing student blogging”
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Kristin
Please do 🙂 Being a part of your previous webdesign class, I was given the tools to design and maintain my own blog. Having my very own digital playground that encourages constantly maintenance made me learn faster – and still makes me learn one year later. I know a lot of the students from my class feels the same way!
Martin Lessard
For the benefits of your readers that aren’t familiar with French language, I’ll provide here an English translation of my post (please bare with me as I had to struggle with your vocabulary to stay coherent 😉 and you may save struggling moments with my original post 😉
What I like of you, Jill, is that you represent for me the essence of a good blog. Professional, personnal, (not too much, nor too few), never hermetic , never impersonal. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, your human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived (that is, clue train compatible 😉
But here you are: “not doing student blogging”!?
That strucks me.
Maybe you didn’t had time, maybe blogging wasn’t as appropriate as before. From “communication” driven blogging seems now to be towards “self-representation”.
Enlightened comments from Shaded, AndreSC and Lachance gave some clues to understand what going on. Maybe a forum can be appropriate as well. For sure blogging isn’t for “early adopters” anymore…ìhelping them use their blogs to discuss and network” could not be restated to ìhelp them network and discussî. True.
Students could become responsible for their own personal archive.
This is where I found out where will come the next blogging generation. Blogging is really a self-representation tool that authenticate an individual in his/her communications with his/her peers. Who in the world does needs badly such features? Academic world, I pressume!
All knowledge workers must maintain a social network and a reputation rank. Blogging is one of the way of doing it. Cocktails-gooers knows another one. In fact professionals have thousand of tricks for networking.
The academics wannnabe, from the start and as long as they want to succeed, must publish. To publish or die. A blog fits very well at this early stage. Later, when they have build their network, are well known or devote themselves to classical distribution (namely books, magazines or symposium), they will be able to give up their blog, if they feel to.
Each personal blog follows a life cycle (from birth to dead). In the blogosphere, where will come the next generation when all our beautiful blogs will abandonned? The general layman does not have a specific interest for the networking on Internet (they are already struggling in real life for basic needs). Only the academic world does produce enough people that needs such features. That’s where the next genration will come, there ares the ones the blogosphere will count on. (I do talk here on an horizon of 50-100 years or so)
Yes, “teenager” blogs are massively dominant (a fashionnable, generational behavior). At least as a massive phenomenon, this may last a while, but surely it will slow down. But for the students, who wants to become professors, or wants to be knowledge workers on the liberal market, the simple idea of archiving the trace of his/her interactions with network peers will be as essential as breathing.
Blogging is the most simple tool yet to achieve it now and on foreseeable future. Not the only one. Blogosphere may also die, if one may think so. But self-representation won’t dissapear as long as the world as we know it does exist.
Keep doing your good job.