My Use of Blogs

The first blog that had any significant impact on me was Vincent Cheung’s now defunct blog on theology and Christian philosophy (www.vincentcheung.com). It was 2004 when a friend turned me on to the blog because we derived so much from Cheung’s regular entries. It was almost like getting to know the man and spend time with him on a regular basis. I recall feeling disappointed when I would check his blog and find nothing new.

From that experience I went on to visit several other blogs regularly. Bryn Mawr hosts a blog dedicated to reviews of published works in the field of Classical Studies (http://www.bmcreview.org/). During graduate school, it was helpful to have a quick place to check the latest in my field. Later, another friend introduced me to a blog where a former Classics graduate aggregated interesting articles on the ancient world, archaeology, and trends in scholarship, sometimes with a humorous spin (http://rogueclassicism.com/). More recently, I have frequented blogs for law and politics like the Volokh Conspiracy (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/) and blogs for religious issues like The Gospel Coalition (http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/).

Blogs are now a regular part of my Web diet.

I do not intend to use blogs with my students this year. The primary reason I am unlikely to use a blog is the focus of my course in the school’s overall sequence. Tenth-grade English at CCHS is used in large part to work on formal, academic style in writing. My impression is that blogs typically engender an informal approach to writing among students. Additionally, my class emphasizes the use of particular formatting (MLA), and blogs seemingly do not lend themselves to reinforcement of these goals.

From a legal and ethical framework, the greatest challenge is the safe implementation of a web publication for children. Certainly, no educational objective is worth harm to a student. It has been a good to read about the different methods teachers use to keep student identities and locations safe. Instructionally, I think the greatest difficulty is for teachers to tie the use of blogs, like many technologies, to instructional objectives. That is not to say that there are none, but many teachers struggle to make the use of technology about little more than novelty. One of the benefits of using technology in the classroom is that doing it well requires a teacher to have a strong sense of alignment between the tool or method and the objectives.

If I were to use a blog, it would probably be as an additional outlet for creative writing. The class has a segment near the end of the year on Poe’s short stories, and I ask the students to write in Poe’s style. It would both the Creation and Innovation and the Communication and Collaboration standards for students to post their short stories with some image, requiring that each student respond to another’s post by identifying the elements of Poe’s style in the student blog entry.