Writing and thinking in public
1 05 2007Hi everyone,
The question of whether blogs should be private (and accessible only to a pre-determined group of class peers) or public (and hence accessible across the entire web) is an important one.
The first thing to say, though, is that what’s crucial is the fact that students are writing, from the beginning, for a (semi-)public forum. Even if only class peers can read your blog, this is still very different from the lecturer being your sole reader. Given the larger size of the audience, you need to begin to develop a public persona which you project through your writing. As you are no longer directing your writing to a single individual, you need to carefully consider how to make your expression as clear as possible and your arguments as convincing as possible - to any and every potential reader.
The second important point is that there is the possibility - or even expectation - of feedback from more than one source. Yes, there will be comments from the lecturer, but peers and others can also comment. This can potentially lead to a rich exchange of views and perspectives, and to the co-construction of knowledge within the peer group. Much the same principle applies to asynchronous discussion boards of any kind and also to wikis. I’ve worked extensively with the former and feedback from students often focuses on the advantages of the exchange of views, particularly in multilingual, multicultural cohorts.
There are plenty of students blogging publicly, whether as part of courses or not. This can begin at quite low levels. In the area of language teaching, for example, there’s a lot of interest in getting students involved in writing public blogs, adding information on a regular basis as part of class assignments. For a list of good examples of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) blogs, see Dekita. The main advantage is seen as the fact that from the very start, the writing has a strong communicative purpose - it’s not just a classroom-based exercise.
It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing situation, though. Students could begin working on closed class blogs and, when they, the class and/or the teacher is/are ready, those blogs could be made public. There is a certain attraction in writing for an international audience … especially if and when feedback starts to come in from other corners of the globe.
It’s also not necesary for every student to have an individual blog. A class blog is one option which would take the heat off any individual, especially in the early days of publishing a public blog.
Another alternative might be to use wikis rather than blogs. Although they’re similar in many ways, wikis are in principle set up for collaboration from the very start. They are useful if the whole class is working on a single project, with each student or group of students working on one subsection. I recently taught a group of teachers in an e-learning unit on a Master’s course up in Hong Kong. Wikis were the most popular technology we covered and several teachers have since set one up and are actually using it with a current class. About half the teachers chose to keep their wikis private, while the others made them public. Among the public ones are a maths wiki and an American history wiki, which are well worth looking at to see how they’re running.
I’ll look forward to hearing other people’s views on this new technology which, it seems to me, has huge potential in education if harnessed well.
Mark
I have used a blog for the first time in a joint French/History unit on French intellectuals. One of the most pleasing aspects for me has been the way the students have independently made it a place of communication and collaboration. While the students have been required to make a number of posts on different intellectuals’ thought and critical commentaries on secondary texts, I have been delighted to see students continue conversations started in tutorials or in the postings themselves through the comment function. Interacting in this way has been encouraged, but is not an assessable part of the course, so it has been great to see the students’ imagination to be sufficiently fired to do it on their own. I think collaboration through a carefully designed blog is a wonderful way of increasing students’ comprehension of a unit’s themes and generating a sense of team spirit.
Bonnie
[…] Jill’s writing, we’re left with a number of similar points to those already raised by Mark Pegrum: digital literacy is about getting comfortable writing for an audience (even a microcosm […]
It’s interesting that idea of public writing/thinking on blogs. Last year when I was teaching a unit called selfnet: identity in the digital age, many of the students who already had blogs (which was about a quarter) understood that their blog was a private community. They kept reinforcing the common ‘rules’ that you never write anything that can identify you on a blog, which is quite different to the way academics’ blogs generally work as part of a professional profile. This idea that blogs are understood to be private spaces was reinforced for me when I stumbled across 2 students’ ‘private’ blogs that both had references to me as their teacher, which they obviously didn’t count on me reading. (I would have preferred not to read them too.) The way students and teachers use blogs then might be based on quite different understandings about the public sphere and how it us constituted. That dissolution of the private/public is part of the potential of blogging, but also entails a shift in thinking. I’d be interested in others’ examples of the overlap/intrusion of public/private blogging.
cheers,
Alison
Hi Alison,
It’s really interesting to hear about your experience of stumbling across your students’ blogs - and to think about the private/public distinction which, I agree, is crumbling away in the current era.
What makes this so curious is that there are plenty of options open to people who wish to have private spaces on the web, accessible only to those given passwords. However, the students you mention had obviously not chosen to set up a genuinely private space. Of course, the drawback with a private space is that a lot of people you might want to read your writing won’t be able to access it directly - and a lot of web users won’t go to the trouble of requesting access in order to find out what’s behind the barrier, so to speak.
So it sounds as if your students were torn between the wish to have an essentially private space but the need to have it publicly accessible on the web. This is a conundrum which must be faced by a lot of bloggers and which will no doubt lead to future clashes as people read comments about themselves which weren’t really intended for their eyes. It’s probably an interesting area to discuss with students in internet- and e-learning-related courses.
By the way, your course sounds fascinating, judging by its title alone!
Mark
[…] getting the most out of using blogs; certainly the public/private debate mentioned by first Mark Pegrum and then Alison Bartlett is especially pertinent, as students increasingly familiar with the […]
[…] Writing and Thinking in Public […]
[…] Writing and Thinking in Public […]