We're talking knowledge here, not food, and let's define our terms before we bite off more than we can chew. In the educational sphere, a student is "regurgitating" knowledge when they summarize or quote someone else's work in their assignments. But when students take someone's knowledge and apply it to something in their own life, or combine it with someone else's knowledge to bring new meaning to it, we call this "construction" of knowledge.
Typical blog posts are full of regurgitation examples, with some construction examples. Quotes from the web, books, or readers often find their way to blog posts, and serve to highlight good ideas. These are lower-order thinking skills. But when a blogger takes someone's knowledge, and reflects on it to create new meaning, he reaches the higher-order thinking skills.
Obviously our goal as teachers is to lead our students to higher-order thinking skills...at some point. But does that mean they should never be posting on the lower-level? This may leave us to question the value of repeated knowledge - is it valuable to simply quote other's work without reflecting on the message?
Now it's your turn to answer - What's the right balance between lower and higher order thinking in writing (and blogging)?
Blogs are often described as online journals. But are they really just an online version of the traditional pen-and-paper diaries we keep around the house?
On one level, blogs and journals are very similar - both enable anyone to become an author about any topic they can think up. From an educational perspective, both can be used for students to reflect on what they are learning and to make these reflections more concrete by putting them in writing. Blogs and journals also encourage students to write, and thus provide a good avenue to practice their writing skills.
On another level however, blogs enable so much more than just writing, because of the online and public nature of the tool itself. Blogs enable writers to share their thoughts with the entire world, a community of selected bloggers, or just themselves. If shared with others, readers can also write back - contributing to the knowledge already presented, or responding with their own thoughts and experiences.
So how can educators utilize these different, but similar tools of blogging and journaling? Please share your thoughts and experiences of using blogs or journals in the classroom - how did you use the tool, and what were the results?
Want to learn more about journaling? Check out Mark Smith's (2006) article on Keeping a learning journal, where he details the whys and hows of using a journal for active personal learning.
There are many different reasons why people blog. Some view it as a journal viewable to many, others view it as a space to test ideas and receive feedback, while still others seek to build new knowledge by collaborating with individuals in an ever-expanding community.
Whatever the blogger sets out to accomplish will be evident in his or her writing or blogging style - do they compose entries of great depth and length, reminiscent of a doctoral dissertation, or do they push out "tweets" of one or two lines to update you on the latest minute's events?
Each type of blog has its own unique purpose, which is appropriate for the specific community reading and contributing to the blog. In addition to the many different uses for blogs in general, there can be many different uses for educational blogs. Depending on what the teacher seeks to accomplish, both the purpose and format of the blog may differ.
So why do you blog? Check out the video below as one teacher explains how he got into blogging, and why he is still blogging (with students), three years later.
Now that you've heard why one teacher blogs - let's hear your story! Here are a couple questions to get you started:
Are you currently blogging, whether that means reading blogs or writing on a blog of your own?
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