October 24, 2009
Aw, come on, Bill. Don’t I have enough to do? 
My true fear would be that quantity diminishes quality. I don’t usually post until something really moves me, and then it often takes me an hour or more to put the post together. I’m aware that this does differ from other edu-bloggers, who take a more Tweet-y approach– but then again, our articulated purposes for blogging are different.
I’m also aware that you are putting forth advice for a collective student blog, versus adult singletons. But here too, do we wish to encourage flash posting? I’m not so sure. Does gratifying a “digital” audience trump thoughtfulness? You say yourself that kids will struggle to post meaningfully. Why not work within their limits?
And more to the point– why isn’t student analysis of the purpose of the blog (newsy updates, reflective writing, or aesthetic publishing) driving the amount of posts?
What do you think, readers? How often do you post to your blogs, and why?
October 24th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
When I started blogging in March, Kate Nowak, who blogs on math teaching issues at f(t), helped me get over the humps I was encountering. She recommended posting at least once a week, to “let people know I was serious”. I’ve tried not to let more than a week go by between posts.
Other than that, my frequency varies dramatically, from one to 4 posts a week. I mostly post when I’m moved to, either by what I’m reading – books, articles, other people’s blogs – or by what I’m doing – my math salon, tutoring, or working with the kids at the freeschool. (I’m on sabbatical, so I haven’t blogged about my college teaching much since May.)
I’ve liked pushing myself to write on the slow weeks. Blogging has helped me feel more comfortable with just getting down to writing. I’m putting a book together, and I need to be ready to write a *lot*.
October 25th, 2009 at 1:02 am
No, you really shouldn’t. It seems like many of his concerns would be taken care of by using an RSS reader. I’m subscribed to something like 270 feeds, so if one of them doesn’t happen to post anything one week, it really doesn’t bother me. Getting a bunch of “Sorry I haven’t posted anything lately, but I’m still alive” posts, I do find kind of irritating. As long as you’re generating good content, be it every two days or every month, your blog will be alive. Will it explode into the next Lifehacker? No, but odds are it wouldn’t if you posted half-assed articles three times a week with “sorry I haven’t been posting anything interesting” lines at the top of every one either.
The RSS reader would also take care of the 50 student blogs problem, since they could all just sit in one folder, and new articles would just sit in that folder under their name. I don’t disagree with him on the point of grouping kids though. There is a lot of teamwork opportunities in there if you pitch it right, and some kids might find their trickle of articles a little depressing by themselves, as opposed to having four of them delegating or together building one or two posts a week.
Personally, if I average one major post a week on my blog, it’s a good month. Many of them are solutions to problems that I’ve run into and solved, so much of my traffic comes from people searching for keywords. Those people clicking in a year from now don’t care that I didn’t happen to post solutions to two other problems this week. Having a clear and complete solution to their problem, that matters.
I do post some single paragraph freebies, but I think those still tend to be interesting, if just not as in-depth (eg: protips, etc)
October 25th, 2009 at 7:26 am
I’ve always been a believer of quality over quantity. Bill makes a fair point, that in order for a blog to have subscribership, it can’t be a content void, but such a rule is arbitrary. Of the blogs I subscribe to, I prefer the ones where I know content will be more insightful, even if infrequent, because it will be a better use of my time.
I think another important point is that there are three common general types of edublogs based on their audience and purpose (note these do not have to be discrete categories):
Classroom blogs directed at students and parents (sometimes containing student content, sometimes not), primarily for local communication. These may be a one-way news feed for distributing information from the teacher.
A second kind of classroom blog, the kind Bill seems to be writing about in this post, is designed to garner a wider audience to create a forum for online conversation with others around the world.
The third kind like yours, and also Bill’s (at least the one where he made this post) is directed at other teachers and colleagues, not so much students or parents.
The intended audience builds the purpose, and the purpose as you say should direct the frequency of posting.
While I don’t want to hijack this thread, because I think your original question is a good one, I am curious, do edubloggers who write about pedagogy and their experiences to their professional peers have separate blogs/web communication for their classes, and how separate do they keep these media outlets? How does the purpose of each of these types of web communication you run affect the frequency of your posting for each?
October 25th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Hey Dina,
Good to see you again! I always love your pushback to my thinking.
I couldn’t agree more that the purpose of any classroom blog—which is what my post directly addresses—should drive the volume of content that is posted.
And for me, the ONLY purpose for a classroom blog is to have my students reflect on the content that they are studying in class. Blogs force students to articulate thinking in writing, a process that has incredible “polishing” value for learners new to content. What’s more, the cycle of learning continues as their thinking is challenged by outside readers, whether they happen to be parents, colleagues or peers.
That being said, why WOULDN’T you want your class or team posting three or four times a week on a classroom blog?! Aren’t more opportunities for reflection a good thing?
Now, the quality over quantity argument is valid—-I never tolerate poor content from students, especially when it is being posted in front of an audience.
But I’d argue that when a team of 60 students—-a relatively normal size in the middle schools where I’ve taught—works collectively on a blog, 3-4 good posts per week are entirely doable. On my team, there are always a half a dozen posts in draft stage that kids are working on that go up over time—and only after they’re in final copy form.
Finally, your opening line: “Don’t I have enough to do?” is an interesting one. With carefully structured classroom blogging projects, the teacher doesn’t have to do much at all, outside of training some student editors to manage and oversee the content being created by their peers.
Any of this make sense?
Bill
October 25th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Kenneth wrote:
The RSS reader would also take care of the 50 student blogs problem, since they could all just sit in one folder, and new articles would just sit in that folder under their name.
What RSS readers don’t take care of, though, Kenneth, is the monitoring challenge that 50 feeds in a reader poses for classroom teachers and peers—a student blogger’s main audience. In such a system, many student blogs will go completely overlooked, taking away one of the primary rewards of writing online: Having someone actively listening to your ideas.
While adult writers are often self-motivated and would continue to blog even if no one ever visited their work, middle schoolers are different. If no one ever responds to their digital posts, they’re going to stop writing pretty quick.
By focusing everyone in a classroom community—parents, grandparents, peers, teachers, colleagues, principals—-on one blog, teachers make feedback far more likely because ideas don’t get lost in a mountain of feeds to be monitored.
Any of this make sense?
Bill
October 25th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Bill, if all the students subscribe to all the feeds (a modest startup cost), then there is no difference in readership between having 50 blogs with each one being once a month and one blog with 2 posts a day. Managing 50 blogs where each one has a unique owner is easier than giving 50 people access to a single blog or dealing with students being gatekeepers for each others’ work. If something inappropriate appears on a shared blog, who is responsible?
That is one reason why IT people insist that passwords never be shared.
October 25th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
@Bill: That does make sense. I don’t disagree: grouping the kids is important from a critical mass point. Like I mentioned in my original response, there is all kinds of other benefits that drop out of this as well: teamwork training (which I feel is valuable since it’s more likely that students will be expected to collaborate via email and online in real life, than sit together in class and make a poster), it makes it harder for students to *unsubscribe* from each others blogs (drama? in high school? naaahhh), and make the whole class a more cohesive online entity for third parties to consume (Bill’s point about parents).
From simply a grading or monitoring stand point, RSS reduces the problem of the teacher making sure to read all the new posts, but it doesn’t seem like that’s really the point you were making.
It seems like half of this conversation is about student bloggers, and the other half is about how often Dina should be entertaining us with eloquent prose. We need to recognize that these are two things with very different requirements as far as instant gratification and reader feedback goes, as Bill pointed out.
Strong, irregular content will collect readers. Irregular high school level content may not do as well. On top of that, the need for a few “good post!” comments makes the possibility of the student’s blog falling flat on its face significant.
I’ve got posts going back three years, and that has managed to net me about 30 RSS subscribers. As is about right according to the 89/10/1 rule*, about three of them tend to comment on any of my posts, so I’m certainly not getting regular positive feedback on my work. Luckily, more than half of my traffic comes from search engines, so I see what search terms people are using to find my blog, and that at least makes me feel like my previous work is solving people’s problems, so I keep posting new articles.
* The 89/10/1 rule is a blogger theory that in any online community, about 1% of the users generate content, 10% comment on the generated content, and 89% will consume the content, but never respond to it. It usually tends to be at least along the right order of magnitude.
October 25th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Kevin wrote:
If something inappropriate appears on a shared blog, who is responsible? That is one reason why IT people insist that passwords never be shared.
Spoken like a true IT guy, Kevin!
The good news is that many Web 2.0 services—Edublogs, PBworks, Voicethread, Diigo—allow teachers to create student accounts and to have multiple contributors to the same digital home, eliminating the password paranoia that so many educators fear.
Two additional reactions, though:
1. In almost 8 years of doing digital work with kids—thousands of discussion board posts, blog entries, Voicethread conversations, synchronous conferences, wiki revisions and edits—I’ve had ONE inappropriate post ever added to a digital forum.
The fear of inappropriate content being posted online is so often used as a deterrent to digital projects—and I’d argue that it’s unfounded in classrooms where teachers build strong communities of learners that take pride in their final products.
I’d also argue that if a teacher is unable (unwilling?) to build that kind of community, they shouldn’t be experimenting with digital tools to begin with.
2. When we put digital concerns like password protection ahead of pedagogical concerns like how can we actually pull off classroom blogging projects, we completely stifle any chance of seeing changes in the way we teach our students.
Sure, I’d like to see my students creating and maintaining their own blogs with their own usernames and passwords. But as a classroom teacher who does this work, I can tell you that’s a pretty daunting challenge, no matter how many RSS feeds I’m following.
And while a small percentage of classroom teachers may take up the challenge anyway, undaunted by the task, the vast majority of classroom teachers won’t even bother trying.
Pushback?
Bill
October 25th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Shared sites that still allow identifying individual users (wikis, forums, …) work well. A classroom blog with one owner and many commenters can work well, if everyone comments (though checking to see if students are commenting often enough can be a pain).
The blog format is a post by the owner, followed by comments, which is not that great for getting original contributions from all students.
A forum with threads would seem like a better tool for that sort of participation. Neither is particularly good for group work, for which a wiki is a better fit.
I’m wondering a bit about “pedagogical concerns like how can we actually pull off classroom blogging projects”. It doesn’t seem to me that a classroom blogging project should be a goal, but a means to an end. What is the end, and is classroom blogging a good way to get there?
November 20th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Thanks for all the reflection, guys, and forgive the delay in responding. I think everyone makes the same point when we all collectively articulate the difference between The Line, say, or The Tempered Radical, and a blog whose primary function is academic.
That being said, Bill, an English blog will have a different focus than just reflecting on content– in E/LA, of course, the blog IS the content. I would have to experiment with
how often postings seem to work for or against conventional accuracy in particular. Any thoughts on that?