Language Arts Journal of Michigan Volume 21 Article 8 Issue 2 Seeking Best Practice 2005 Best Practice Blogging: Connecting What We Know to What's Next Robert Rozema Grand Valley State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/lajm Recommended Citation Rozema, Robert (2005) "Best Practice Blogging: Connecting What We Know to What's Next," Language Arts Journal of Michigan: Vol. 21: Iss. 2, Article 8. Available at: https://doi.org/10.9707/2168-149X.1196 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@GVSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Language Arts Journal of Michigan by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@GVSU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. unconventional spellings, and e-Iogisms, may Best Practice Blogging: nevertheless provide an inroad into adolescent Connecting What We literacy. Educators at every level, and particularly Know to What's Next those at colleges and universities, have recognized and begun taking advantage of this opportunity. In Robert Rozema the last few years, classroom blogs, or edublogs, Grand Valley State University have become an increasingly popular tool, providing many of the benefits of classroom web sites, while Sometime in the next week or so, ask your being far easier to create and maintain. Services like students if they blog. Or better still, ask how many Schoolblogs allow educators to design classroom of them blogged this morning. Chances are, at least blogs (for multiple student users) and take part in a one or two of your undergraduates, high school flourishing online community. And there are seniors, or even seventh-graders will raise a hand: hundreds of commercial blogging services, many according to a recent survey conducted by Perseus offering advanced features for no cost. More Development Corporation, over half ofthe adventurous teachers have installed blogging approximately 10 million blogs in the blogosphere applications like Movable Type or Manilla on their are created by teenagers ("The Blogging Iceberg"). school's server. The rise of edublogging has also You may even need a teenager to explain just what spurred the development of online support resources: blogging and the blogosphere mean. the Educational Bloggers' Network, sponsored in A blog, or web log, is a web site that features part by the Bay Area Writing Project, helps teachers regularly updated, chronologically ordered posts, a at all levels in accessing and using blogs for writing sort of online diary accessible to anyone with an and reading instruction across the disciplines. Internet connection. Beyond this most salient Exemplary K-16 edublogs are archived at the characteristic, blogs vary widely in purpose, format, EdBlogger Praxis, a valuable blog that also keeps and readership. A blog might be a personal diary track of the latest in edublog news. Similarly helpful read by a handful of friends, a journalistic news filter blogs about edublogging include Weblogg-ed, with enough clout to shape (and scare) the CogDogBlog, Pedablogue, and Jerz s Literacy Blog. mainstream media, a soapbox for a political Within the English language arts, a growing candidate, a corporate marketing tool, a celebrity number of teachers and teacher educators are confessional, or a wartime correspondence from Iraq. aligning blogging with the practice and theory of Most blogs allow visitors to leave comments, literacy instruction, and particularly writing sometimes logging hundreds of responses per day. instruction. In a recent issue of English Journal, for In the past three years, blogging has come example, Greg Weiler contends that blogs encourage into its own, its leap from geekdom into the both individual and collaborative writing in multiple mainstream boosted by enormously popular and formats, including the personal journal, classroom user-friendly services like Google's Blogger, now bulletin board, and electronic portfolio (73). Will host to over I million blogs. The popularity of Richardson, whose Weblogg-ed offers the most blogging, particularly among adolescents, may refute sophisticated and ardent advocacy of edublogging, those cultural critics intent on blaming the electronic has shown how blogs can improve discussion, both media for the perceived decline in literacy skills. in and out of the classroom ("Weblogs in the English Every day, hundreds of thousands of school-aged Classroom" 39). Sarah Kajder et al. connect six key kids are writing-voluntarily-on their personal web characteristics ofblogs--economy, archiving, logs. Such blogs, typically focused on social issues feedback, multimedia, immediacy, and active and characterized by truncated syntax, Fall/Winter 2005 29 participation-to instructional activities suitable for program at Grand Valley State University, as well as the English language arts classroom (33). student blogs from a ninth-grade English class in a More theoretical considerations ofblogging Grand Rapids high schooL are also emerging. Panel discussions and presentations about blogging are regular features at 1. All children can and should blog. the Conference on College Composition and In the populist publishing world of the Web, Communication and the Computers and Writing the blog may be the most democratic form of all. Conferences. In these venues, blogging is woven With minimal expertise, very little time, and no into scholarly discourse on rhetoric and composition money, anyone can create and maintain a web log. studies. This includes, as the New York Times recently The richest theoretical treatment ofblogging, reported, elementary-aged children: second-graders fittingly, may be the online essay collection Into the in Maryland school used a classroom blog to write Blogosphere. Published by the University of about their field trip to a Native American farm; Minnesota, Into the Blogosphere explores the third-graders in the same district blogged about a rhetoric, community, and culture ofweb logs. Here, statewide book award (Selingo G7). Primary school Charles Lowe and Terra Williams examine the examples like these are still rare, but as more rhetorical effects ofonline publishing, arguing that teachers learn just how easy blogging is, these "[public] web logs can facilitate a collaborative, numbers will increase. By lowering the bar on social process ofmeaning making"; Kevin Brooks, expertise, the blog may help to bridge the new digital Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe find print divide--the knowledge gap between haves and have­ antecedents for three dominant types of weblogs­ nots that has emerged even as hardware equity has the journal, the notebook, and the filter-and improved. In short, even students without extensive contend that familiarity with print-based genres Internet experience (and their numbers are growing influences student motivation in maintaining fewer each year), should be able to set up and weblogs; and Christine Boese, arguing within a maintain a blog. My own classes are populated with Freirian framework, problematizes the "knowledge students, both traditional and non-traditional, who revolution" that is optimistically envisioned by have never heard ofblogging when I introduce it on media-independent bloggers. These and other Into the first day of the semester. Ten minutes later, these the Blogsophere contributions represent the students are delightedly posting their first entry. The developing body ofblog scholarship. inaugural message reads: What may be most useful to K-16 English I never would have imagined someone language arts teachers who are considering blogging would create a writing tool called blog. I is a set of guidelines, enriched by emerging blog never would have imagined myself being a research and rooted in what we know about effective part of this new phenomenon. I realize this is writing instruction. What we know about teaching new to me because blogs have been in writing, without oversimplifying, is succinctly stated existence for quite sometime now. There are in the best practice principles established by even blog awards. As of today I am a Zemelmen et aL These principles can also provide a blogger. template for using weblogs in the writing classroom. In addition to attracting both the young and What then, is best practice in blogging? The the inexperienced, the "new phenomenon" of answers provided here are drawn from my own blogging may also hold a special appeal for girls, experience as a writing teacher, teacher educator, and who have long been more ambivalent toward for the past two semesters, edublogger. I also rely on technology than boys. According to the Perseus excerpts from the blogs kept by my students, pre­ survey, girls or young women create 56 percent of service teachers in the secondary English Education new blogs; 67 percent ofthe blogs at LiveJournal are 30 Language Arts Journal of Michigan maintained by female bloggers ("LiveJournal a guy trip and fall down right in front of me, Statistics"). Such evidence suggests that all children these are the things that I think about when can blog, regardless of age, experience, or gender. I'm writing. On my Xanga blog, which is Whether all children should blog remains this linked to all of my friends, I write all the article's burden of proof. random and trivial things that inspire me and make my day. ... When I write about 2. Teachers must help students find real purposes classrooms, and teaching practices, and to blog. blog's effectiveness, I feel like I'm holding As many war blogs, military blogs, and back. I think people just project what they're political blogs demonstrate, a blog can provide a supposed to be. My goal is to infuse as much platform for purposeful writing. A blogger may of myself into the educational blogs as I do purport to offer an alternative view on a politics into my Xanga blog. (DailyKos), critique the mainstream media (lnstapundit), or supply specialized information to a One way for teachers and teacher educators particular audience (Slashdot). In each of these to counter the potential purposelessness of cases, the purpose of the blog coincides with the edublogging is to consider how students might write point ofview of its writer.