It has taken me a long time to warm up to blogging. It seemed to me that the world already had too many blogs. Boy, did I miss the point. What I didn’t get, clearly, was that this is irrelevant. It would be akin to saying, students spend too much time writing prose. The reality is, the more we can motivate students to write, in multiple formats, the better writers they will be.
Blogs, because they can be public, are by their very nature high stakes. For many students this raises the challenge and motivates learning. Blogs can also provide a forum for immediate and multiple feedback channels - peers (both local and international, teachers, parents). Lastly, blogs provide an easily accessed record of thought/knowledge development.
So, a better question would be - when to blog? Before getting into when to blog let me say, having learners blog for the sake of blogging is not our intension. In fact, having students simply post the banalities of life, as they might in Facebook or Twitter, is not what is being advocated. Keep blogging relevant.
Although there are many reasons to blog, I am going to target this post on one area for your consideration, reflection. In future posts I will present how blogs can be used for threaded discussion and idea development.
