When you are met with a new frontier, what do you do? Should you forge ahead with old patterns, tools, and expectations – and expect to know exactly how everything will interact and work? Can you alter it, manipulate it, and control it until it looks like what you already knew? I’m guessing that neither would be the case.
Here we stand as educators looking into a new world of information. As Clay Shirkey calls it, “a new ecosystem”. The world is at our doorstep. Should we close the door and peer through the window? Should we wait a few years, until somebody tells us that everything is safe – and then open the door? Here’s what some anonymous educational laymen think about using blogs in education – one of the new life forms of this unchartered ecosystem.
From Revellian: “Our education system often teach brilliant children as if they are mentally challenged and most are never inspired to reach early intellectual potential.”
From lilyputts: “I think it really depends on what the class is to blog about. After many years with a child that has Asbergers Syndrome (autism), knowing his strong point is the computer I must agree. However in classes with teachers that are just there for the paycheck, well there’s a different matter. You would be surprised how many teachers are computer illiterate!”
From Theresa 111: “All right put on the brakes. Food for thought. If blogging is an art form and a way to express ourselves then it would be a good thing to encourage our children to BLOG. However, and this is where a line of demarcation should be drawn, they should only be encouraged to do this internally. Within their school system. This way they learn many necessary skills and begin to develop and learn to enjoy interaction with others, on a wholly more intrinsic level than they would in the classroom or on the playground. As long as the school monitored the blog interactions to keep the children safe, perhaps they would be more supportive of one another and less prone to violence. Allowing them to BLOG on the Internet would be pure folly!”
From legbamel: “The idea of intranet blogs for school systems is, however, a stroke of genius. Make the date and time stamp unchangeable and you’ve got a great way to write about the book your supposed to be reading for class, trouble you’re having with your math homework, and the confusion engendered by a new topic in science class. Your teachers can see exactly what question came up and address it either in the comments or to the class as a whole in school. Fantastic! Now, how do I propose this to my school board…”
In this one post, we find many of the pros and cons surrounding blogging in schools. On the one hand blogging may be a valid learning tool for our brightest students – a way for them to reach out to the world. It may be a tool for those students whom otherwise might have great difficulty connecting to other students. On the other hand, we can’t control the blogosphere. Should we limit our students to a school system intranet? Should we monitor their blogs 24/7 and tell parents that we will keep their students safe?
If we use a definition of blogging as written by Will Richardson, ” Blogging as in writing that has “Links with analysis and synthesis that articulates a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked [to] and written [about] with potential audience response in mind.” – then perhaps an intranet option would work. Except there is only one problem. Do we want our children to learn how to interact with only people like them – in a pending global economy? Or, can we trust that they can learn – and more importantly – learn how to be safe - in a larger audience? Is Theresa111 right when she asks that as educators we must, “As long as the school monitored the blog interactions to keep the children safe, perhaps they would be more supportive of one another and less prone to violence”?
Education and educators cannot solve society’s problems nor can it predict with pure accuracy that forging ahead in a new ecosystem will be flawless. Do we stay with what we know in order to be safe? Do we allow our students to participate in a limited blogosphere that eliminates their interactions with anyone outside of the schoolhouse? Yes, there are reasons to do both – but that should not be the absolute answer.
Could it be possible that elementary students could successfully blog with students from other nations? Absolutely. The problem is that there can be no absolute assurance that something might not go wrong. That is not to say that there cannot be guidelines in place to try to make sure things go right! Educators can make sure that all comments go through them first. Students can be taught nettetiquette and how to analyze others writing while linking it to their own analysis of content, world events and interests.
I think that we must allow our students to begin to enter their new frontier in school – where we can teach them how to navigate as safely as possible. To wait for absolutes may render them lost in an ecosystem that is theirs to own.
