- Phase One: Exploring blogging and the general topic (in this case, Shakespeare)
- Phase Two: Focusing and deepening a topic
- Phase Three: Authentic application
These are overlapping categories, but useful nonetheless. Let me explain them in more detail. Where do you stand in your blogging? After blogging for a month, I expect my students to be in the second phase.
Phase One: Exploring Blogging and the General Topic
During this phase students get acquainted with blogging in general and learn that their posting needs to be frequent, generally brief, and related to one's personal life and interests. Students must get comfortable with the casual nature of blogging, allowing themselves to range widely across various interests, media, or approaches.
However, this initial type of blogging is not a free-for-all. Students show that they are aware of and independently pursuing the stated learning outcomes for the course. That means that even if they may post somewhat randomly, they are still explicitly referring to the course learning outcomes and generally documenting their learning. To state this another way, they are not merely posting mini opinion pieces or sharing interesting links or media; they are talking about their processes of reading texts, doing research, thinking through issues, and connecting with other people who help them with their thinking. Even though this sort of online writing is more casual, they are taking seriously the topic at hand, or the texts assigned to be studied. There is evidence that they are engaged in the texts, topics, and issues.
During this phase students are learning that publishing their process is not just okay but desirable, and that it is far more important to post frequently, briefly, and casually than to post infrequently (weekly or less often), at too much length, or too formally. This is a kind of "get to know you" period where blog readers get to know the blog author at the same time as the blog author is getting to know both this new medium and the subject of study.
Very importantly, the student is beginning to interact with readers through comments or by explicitly responding to others' current work to which they can link. If they merely post their ideas without showing signs of "social proof" (responding to others, or engaging others in the commenting), then they are treating blogging as a simplistic electronic dropbox, as though the only audience for their thoughts was the teacher, and the only purpose of posting to turn in an assignment. If the blog comes off that way, then the student has entirely missed the goal of academic blogging, which is to socialize one's learning at the same time that one is growing their interest in a topic.
Phase Two: Focusing and Deepening a Topic
Once a student has accumulated a good number of blog posts and comments over the course of a few weeks, and once the students have read enough and shown evidence of their reading and research in that blogging, then they can come to a reflective point where they reassess, focus, and "take it to the next level."
In my courses, I require students to do a midterm self-evaluation post. There, they list all of the course learning outcomes (in terms of which they should have been writing their blog posts), and then give a narrative, with appropriate links back to the relevant posts, detailing how it is they have met the learning outcomes to date and what their plan is for addressing areas needing attention.
Next, I require my students to evaluate their own interests and directions as this has been made evident in their posts to date. When the identify the fact that they have several posts that all seem to be circling around a similar topic or text, then they can make plans to focus in that area and deepen how they have been reading or researching about that.
And, just as in the first phase, in this phase students continue gaining "social proof" of their topics by manifesting interactions with others. However, during this second phase, the social component becomes more serious and direct. Initial, informal conversations can be elevated to formal interviews, longer and more involved interactions with others, or other forms of visibly connecting to people who care about their topic and who are not fellow classmates. This often takes work and what I call "social discovery."
Phase Three: Authentic Application
That social component in phase two is what makes possible the last phase, in which the topic and content of the student's blog is then applied in some kind of project, performance, event, or collaboration that engages others. Since I promote students doing creative engagement, this naturally leads to sharing their ideas, media, talents, etc. But in this final phase, that sharing is taken up a notch to something that is more formal than an online exchange or sharing a link or having a conversation. This is where I expect them to produce something: a performance, a book, a work of art, music, or media -- but not for turning in to a professor. No, students must get their project or product or performance "out there," where it will be of manifest value to people beyond fellow classmates.
I allow a lot of leeway in the type of creativity, but I do require students to work in groups on authentic projects, which means products that people would care about independent of students who are being graded. Last year students put on an "Engaging Shakespeare" showcase event that included a theatrical production, student art, student music, an audiobook version of Hamlet, a music video, and a documentary film. In other classes, I've had students stage big events (including live online TV; a webinar), or create an eBook. I'm looking forward to students proposing authentic projects that are tied more to others' projects outside of the class.
I realize that this final phase is not a customary part of blogging per se, and in fact it really reflects my personal pedagogy more than an inherent requirement of educational blogging. However, as much as I value blogging, it can be superficial or unfocused. As soon as students have a clear expectation for a formal project that must be performed or shared with real audiences or readers, suddenly their blogging becomes more interesting, more purposeful, and more productive.
That's the trajectory I see for student blogging. Where do you stand with your blogging? How do you plan to become a better academic blogger?
