Chapter 3: Weblogs Get Started

Short, sweet and collaborative:
This chapter is interesting in that Richardson gives a narrow definition of blogging as ALWAYS collaborative.  I would assume the world of WIKI style free-blogging is continually self-defining--a little like the Occupy Wall Street voices.  Under his definition, however, blogging is to be interactive and entries must be short.  This is a plus for the classroom, where short, clear summations could help students help each other focus more sharply on items of significance--a difficult and developing skill for middle-schoolers.

Finding middle-school blogs with content that is well phrased, non-repetitive, and insightful, is difficult.
I expect it may be difficult to get kids to subscribe to Richardson's definition of a REAL blog as a metacognitive, interactive exploration of ideas.  I assume that kids are more familiar with blogging and tweeting celebrities.  Recent publicity about Scott Brown's site employing an intern who carelessly plagiarized an Elizabeth Dole site shows one of negatives of a writing form that is left to young people, basically self-published with little supervision, and spewed out rapidly.  Many legitimate writers post interesting and well written content, followed by something less than sharp "metacognition."

In Time this week, Wilco singer Jeff Tweedy is quoted making the following comment on web discourse in an interview with Magnet magazine: '"Look at this beautiful kitten." "F*** you, that kitten's a socialist." "You're a f**." Basically that's the crux of all Internet discussion."


I look forward to trying to elevate the level of kids comments by requiring kids to respond to each other and build on each other's ideas.  The problems I assume they will have are similar to the challenges we in this course face.  It is hard to find time to READ comments, write comments, and do all the OTHER work required for school.  I will not blame my students for taking the blog assignment as a quick thing to check-off, rather than as a Socratic dialogue.

I intend to post questions that THEY develop, in the hope of them buying into this a little more.  I have a suggestion box for quotations that kids would explore and respond to and about 3 kids have submitted ideas to post to spark discussion.  I did this a couple of years ago and it inspired a handful of kids to respond, occasionally to each other.

I will run 5 separate blogs--rather than one question posted and commented on by all sections at once as I did the last time I tried this.  Perhaps limiting the comments to a group of 25 will produce less repetition than what I got with the question open to all 120 kids at once.  I did not grade to encourage participation--but making it extra credit only resulted in my hearing from the same subgroup of mostly overachievers.  I am anxious to see if this the couple of years of increasing Internet savvy among kids changes the complexion of the discussions.