Thing 3

How might a blog support the work you do? How might you use a blog with students? How might they respond to a blog assignment? What concerns do you have about educational blogging?

I think that blogs hold some potential for supporting online book clubs. In the past, I have posted key passages and quotes to provide students with mile markers through a novel . I have always thought that this use of a blog was somewhat unimaginative, but I struggled to design an assignment that provided students with the opportunity to participate in the "un-packing" of the major themes in a novel.

One idea that I am playing with is to invite students to use podomatic to record their personal reading of key passages in a novel ( My test novel is The Catcher in The Rye because I am confident students will not pass up an opportunity to lend their voices to Holden Caufield). Students would then post comments to a blog where they explained why they chose to accent particular syllables, to stress un-italicized words, to pause where there is no obvious punctuation warranting a pause or stop. I suspect that students will have very different ideas about how Holden crafts his alibis and rationalizations and that we will all benefit from hearing each other's voices and reading each other's comments. I believe that this closer examination of the meter in Salinger's prose will lead to a more confident reading fluency.

My concern about educational blogging is that students will pass up opportunities to articulate their own voice and to construct their own meaning of the text. I am also concerned that the students will not be charitable in their reading of other students' ideas about the text. I think that prior to introducing the blog, much preparatory work must be done in the classroom to encourage disciplined inquiry and appreciative listening.