By Aaron Campbell · October 10, 2005
I kicked off my visit to the JALT 2005 conference yesterday in Shizuoka, Japan, with a group discussion on blogging in EFL, led by Jamie Hall of Iwate University. Jamie shared with a group of about fifteen participants his “successes and failures” with a blogging project he carried out with his English teacher training students earlier this year. We then discussed informally the various issues that arose when using blogs in the EFL classroom, touching upon such topics as how to increase reader participation, student access issues, the nature of a blog post, perception of audience, group versus individual student blogs, blogs versus discussion lists, and the ethics of having students write in public, amongst others. Overall, it was stimulating to sit in a circle of colleagues and share our stories, knowledge, and feelings with one another on a topic of interest, and Jamie did an excellent job as facilitator.
One of the most poignant issues for me that arose in the discussion involved motivation and evaluation. We spoke about two fundamental approaches to classroom blogging. The first approach to getting students to blog is through extrinsic factors of quantitative evaluation and accountability. Students are given blogging assignments at consistent intervals, and the teacher tracks the quantity of student posts and comments, considers the quality of writing and effort, and finally assigns points or grades accordingly. This ‘crack the whip’ method coerces students to post to their blogs, read other posts, and comment on them. In doing so, students will read, write, and post; and if they don’t, they either receive a lower grade or, depending on the assigned value of blogging in the curriculum, fail altogether. In the end, students will have most likely improved their reading and writing skills, gotten some insightful feedback from others to consider, and have even exercised their reflective and critical skills. Whether or not students will enjoy blogging, see the potential value of it, and continue blogging on their own after the course is finished is secondary to the pedagogical goals set by the teacher.
The second approach involves drawing upon the factors of motivation intrinsic to each student. In this case, the teacher takes a qualitative approach to getting students to blog, encouraging them to write about their interests, use social networking tools to meet new people, post photos and sound files, etc. An important aspect of this approach is to see the act of blogging as something fun, expressive, enjoyable, conversational, and poetic. The blog can and should be anything the student wants it to be. The teacher sees herself as a facilitator of a process of creation, not as an enforcer of behavior. She makes no demands on quantity and does everything she can to inspire her students to blog through her own examples, stories, enthusiasm, and passion. Qualitative and reflective self and peer evaluation are both encouraged and valued; and students are given considerable, if not complete, control over the pace, content, and direction of their blogging activities. Whether or not students will enjoy blogging, see the potential value of it, and continue blogging on their own after the course is finished is the primary consideration.
I am certain that few teachers adhere to either one of these two approaches exclusively; most, rather, are striving to find some sort of middle ground that works for their particular situations. In my own practice, for example, although I resonate with the qualitative approach philosophically, I can see that certain elements of the ‘crack the whip’ approach, like structured homework assignments, are necessary to induce my learners into the blogging process, positioning them in such a way that makes the second approach possible. After twelve years of being exposed to authoritative methods of heavy testing, rote memorization, and deference to superiors, it is virtually impossible for most of my students to view the act of blogging as being anything other than part of the only kind of schooling they have ever come to know. Breaking down this mental barrier is the first obstacle to overcome if a blog-driven movement toward more autonomous language learning is to be achieved.
Until now, my approach has been to design assignments that mimic the activity of a self-directed blogger: choosing a topic to write about, using social networking tools and tags to find other bloggers, linking to those bloggers in the posts, linking to resources for further reading, connecting ideas and expressions of emotions to images and photos, following up on comments in future posts, etc. My hope is that by acting like bloggers, they can get a taste for what it feels like to communicate their own ideas in a foreign language and develop their own social network based on their interests. They will also be in possession of a tool that empowers them to be in control of this process and encourages them to interact in a direct way with their peers. If they can come to this understanding of blogging through the weekly assignments and reflective evaluations, then they are in a position to decide whether or not to continue engaging in the medium after the term is finished. The beauty of using blogs this way is that students own the tools, the content they create, and their online identity and social network of which they are a part. Ideally, their blogs won’t reek of institutional affiliation and all the emotional baggage that comes with it, making it far more likely that learners will come to embrace them as both learning tools and vehicles for expression and discovery.
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