Glenn Groulx

Ultimately, the idea of blogging as a task requirement in the conventional pedagogical model does not work. I fundamentally disagree with requiring students to blog in the following circumstances:

1. Tying the task of personal blogging to external validators not of the bloggers' own choosing;
2. Externally imposing learning outcomes not negotiated with these bloggers; 
3. Requiring student bloggers to blog in the open for grades without having the educator fully participating in these same blogging processes and guiding them as an active role model;

There are a series of assumptions that underlie the nature of autonomous blogging as I see it. I have seen many learners blog to the task at hand, or blog for establishing and building a network, or blog for oneself, deciding at some later time to blog in the open for a select few. There are many different reasons for choosing to blog, for choosing to put one's ideas out there. The nature of the power imbalance often in place between instructors and students serves to objectify autonomous, personal blogging and strips it of its intrinsic value.

You cannot get students to blog. Period. You cannot convince a single student to invest themselves into a long-term blogging journey if the educator is trying to convince them to participate with simple "carrot and stick" motivators. Students should instead enter into a conversation that encourages them and reassures them that their personal investment is worth the effort. This conversation should be moderated by a learning companion, by a mentor who is an active blogger, who is completely convinced of the significance of long-term sustained personal narrative as an end in itself, as an incredibly important tool that guides and shapes oneself over time, through transitional events, through courses and programs and seminars and conferences. 

Such a mentor would model the journey, model the processes, and model both the serious sense-making activities and the rehearsing and play-building and celebrating. Students need to experience the mentor's blogging firsthand if they are to be convinced that the blogging journey that starts with a first step is worth embarking on at all.

It is the blogging tool (and related network learning tools) that ties learners together and threads personal identities over the lifespan. Encouraging learners to start a blog and sustain their personal commitment to blogging is best done by serving the individuals' long-term core identity needs, not the short-term goals of making the grade for the course in the short-term.

The thing is, blogging as I am referring to it is fundamentally different from cohort-based interactions within an asynchronous forum.

There are many who assert that sustained autonomous blogging in the open without the benefit of a guarantee of a cohort or circle of peers to comment and encourage further contributions is a seemingly pointless exercise ... it seems even more pointless in the absence of direction or prompts by the moderator about what is to be discussed, what the group is going to work on together, without the leadership of another. Blogging seems pointless and far too subjective if it is lacking a method for formally assessing the activity in terms of learning outcomes.

So it seems. So, many educators and their learners can't or won't contribute to their own blogs without some possibility of reciprocity and sharing by others, without some form of external validation or sense of externally imposed purpose. The extent to which we are dependent on others' comments and feedback or on meeting explicit goals determines the extent of personal commitment to using the blogging tool as a lifelong learning tool. Doesn't this bother anyone? Doesn't it bother anyone that the majority of things worth learning in a formal setting is what is in fact externally imposed?

So I come back to the question: should we get students to blog? I would answer no. There are plenty of other tools for enforcing compliance among learners and reinforcing extrinsically-motivated learning. Leave the blogging tool alone for the autonomous bloggers and their peers who voluntaily engage in lifelong learning.

Please visit my blog and comment on your own favourite tools and strategies.

Here are three new blog posts about using blogging tools within WordPress, ELGG and an LMS for network-building:

Monitoring and Coordinating Personal Online Activity: Amplifying and Attenuating

Piling - Reviewing Tagging Strategies

Jigging: Twitter and Activity Streams

PageFlakes:

I have aggregated the individual blogs of participants onto one pageflakes.com at http://www.pageflakes.com/edublogging/

If you have other blog URLs you want added, just let me know in this forum, and I can add them as flakes to the aggregation. I have also added bookmarks and a blog search flake.

Wire Feature Within ELGG

Within ELGG, I use the wire feature frequently to announce shifts in my blogging activty, and announce new content published with the Academic Blogging Circle, a group I maintain to focus on academic blogging issues and strategies. It is a lot like Twitter, but I need to distinguish between the two, as they serve different needs, and are intended for the most part for different audiences.

I have made this differentiation largely because of my own personal preferences of what I find useful/distracting as content within ELGG. Everyone's preferences differ, and so here are my views:

use the ELGG Wire for 'Internal Community' business

If I find a cool link related to my topic, I add it to my bookmarks; if I know it is of use to a few of my colleagues, I post it to the group as a bookmark. If it is a link of possible interest to a larger audience, I blog it, and set it to a public access setting. The Wire posts relate to shifts in direction, such as a new photo portfolio, or a new series of blog posts, or a new set of files uploaded,or a new poll, all intended to promote the academic blogging group. I sometimes use the Wire to re-promote older content, or promote a link to a research presentation of potential interest to the ELGG community.

Twitter

I don't use the Twitter in the same way as the Wire. I don't, for example, post interesting links I may find in passing to the Wire; instead, I post it to Twitter only if I do not have the time to analyze the content and I am on the go. Twitter, to me, is a mobile (micro-blogging) app, useful for capturing resources quickly (I cannot help but think of skimming) .

I also send out a general announcement to larger audiences of some of my new blog posts using Twitter, and feed-forward the link to other learning communities external to AU landing. This is done sparingly, as every single Tweet is archived, and viewable by anyone searching using your twitter name (in my case, @ggroulx).

I cannot help thinking about the use of twitter as the more advanced app that builds upon the strengths of both USENET newsgroups and IRC. For this reason, I consider it an extension of the networking capacity that spreads out my social web. On the other hand, I consider the blogs as the information hubs, the repositories, so to speak, to which other content is connected.

In effect, for me, the Wire is a tool within ELGG to announce events relating to the group, or to announce the publishing of significant new content such as my own published papers, presentations, interviews, links to my academic portfolio and the recording of the academic portfolio defence.

Twitter, for me, is intended as both an announcement tool, like the Wire, as well as a mobile blog, to drop content while on the go. I have been watching the ways in which others have been using twitter, and this, for me, seems a reasonable way to add value for those who follow the tweets you create. Like the use of the Wire, the Twitter tweets can potentially benefit others, and so the announcements need to reflect that.

Here is my take on the issue of addressivity (blogging for different audiences). Perhaps we can ask our learners to adopt different "voices" that address different audiences.