OMDE 603: Is Blogging Worth It?

It depends on the objective.

This question has been asked about blogging for as long as blogging has been around. I remember sitting in class almost ten years ago, as an undergrad, with my awesome professor, a woman who had little patience for--well, many things. Blogging was one of them.

"I don't understand blogs," she said dismissively. "It's like putting your journal online. Your private life. Who cares? Who cares about your private life?"

Lots of people might, depending on who you are. But she went too far here; blogging needn't be private. It's personal--one's own thoughts about something. About ideas. It's the difference between memoir and personal essay. Thoreau would have been blogging from Walden Pond. Emerson would have been a prolific blogger. Their essays were written to be read--they wrote for an audience, like bloggers. In other words, blogging is branding. It's sharing who you are and what you do for the purposes of building an audience. For readers, it's a way of getting to know someone better.

In education, blogging is another way of promoting critical thinking and reflective learning. We figure out what we think by writing, as Joan Didion (and many others) have said. Written. As a writer and writing teacher, I believe this wholeheartedly; this is what I teach my students. I don't ask them to blog, however. It's not a primary medium for them. They don't read them. They may stumble upon them while looking something up, but they don't read blogs, or blog posts, in situ. (Well, they don't read anything in situ, but I digress).

I'm far more interested in getting students to write and think and discover with each other, in community. This is my problem with blogs: they're devoid of context. The vast majority of them, especially the ones we ask our students to write, don't have a real audience. They're public, but virtually no one reads them. We read the discussions. Instructors read the discussions. Blogs? Not so much. Who has the time to read a bunch of blogs? That requires clicking on 15 different links. That takes work.

We were assigned two articles on blogs in Module 3: Web 2.0 Technologies for DE. One of them is Pang (2009): Application of blogs to support reflective learning journals. In it, Pang lists the following advantages:

1. Blogs provide an opportunity for an instructor to gain rapport with the students and understand their needs and backgrounds. 
2. Blogs allow for monitoring of student progress so that the instructor can step in if the student is falling behind. A blog provides for continuous student feedback as opposed to waiting until the end of the semester for student feedback—which may be too late for corrective action.
3. The instructor can identify issues and challenges faced by students by reading about their experiences with the assignments in their blogs.
4. For an information technology course, students can learn and understand about a blog itself—both the concept and the technology.
5. Students modify their behavior in reaction to the content contained in the instructor's blog.

In my experience, none of these apply to this course. The first one happens in the discussions, not the blogs; the instructor isn't commenting on these blogs. Only we are. That affects #2 and #3, as well; there is no continuous feedback, so these are moot. #5 isn't applicable; the instructor doesn't have a blog, or hasn't asked us to read it. So, the only one that applies is #4: this is an education course, so we're learning by doing--learning about blogs and their value by keeping our own.

In that sense, this activity has been useful in reaffirming why I don't ask my students to blog. I want to engage with the course content and ideas--with other people! So, I'm heading over to the discussions now. At least I know that what I post will be read.

References

Pang, L. (2009): Application of blogs to support reflective learning journals. DE Oracle @ UMUC. Retrieved 4 July 2014 from http://contentdm.umuc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p16240coll5/id/1