Another Year of Education Blogging

With the 2004-05 school year over, I should comment on how course blogging has gone. Not much has changed: The students seem to appreciate their blogs as useful additions to their courses, but they take very little active part in them. The blogs are a convenient source of handouts, and maybe they're using some of the links, but that's about it.

Nor have I been able to interest my colleagues in using blogs, whether in their own courses or for administrative purposes. This is true also of a non-college teaching project I'm involved in, teaching creative writing to teenagers. I've created a "Zine" for the kids to publish their work, a "Workshop" for them to post drafts, and a "Teachers" blog for the other instructors to share ideas in. The kids have been offered author status in "Workshop," but only one has taken it up—and he hasn't actually posted anything. One of the two other instructors has posted to the "Teachers" blog, but only once.

So the vast majority of my students and colleagues are still unpersuaded by the attractions of blogging. Still, I plan to create new blogs for my courses in September, and when the creative-writing workshops resume then, I'll try to get the new crop of kids to get involved.

What I will not do is to try to coerce students or colleagues into blogging. That seems to me a failure to understand what this medium is all about: a chance to express oneself freely and to seek free expressions from others.