Commenting
Posted February 9th, 2008 by namckeand
I have had some success with getting students to write blog posts, but I have never been able to get them to comment on blogs. I would like to know what ideas others have about this topic. Do you think commenting is an important part of blogging or not? If you do, what can we as teachers do to encourage commenting?
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In the little experience I have had so far, I found that when introducing blogs, if a scaffold what they are to do, it becomes easier for them to find their voice on the blog. I only use a class blog, so I am very interested in how others deal with individual student blogs.
So my first step the last time was to ask them to comment on my posts. This worked rather well (I wouldn’t say it was a resounding success, though), and after they were commenting I showed them how to post.
The class before I appealed to their feelings, saying that if someone writes a post, then they want to know that others are reading it and asked them how they felt about having their posts commented on. This didn’t work as well as the idea above. Maybe others have been more successful.
Illya (smielt team)
I think that if your students are just starting to blog it’s a good idea to ask the teachers in your network who have students with more experience to go and comment on your students’ blogs. Some of them will surely start conversations.
I actually tried that the last time I had a student blog. And the teachers were willing to comment. But there was a problem with comments on eslblogs at the time, and by the time it got fixed, the student had lost what little momentum he had. I agree, though, that this is an important step.
Some of my students (very few) did some commenting on their colleagues’ blogs spontaneously but only very short comments like this one you can see here. It seems that there are either no real reasons to make comments or they are not used to make comments in blogs. I think it’s both.
As I have already written in my blog, a German native speaker (Ingrid) who is a teacher in Germany started making comments on the students’ blogs and a few of them started to respond to her comments. They suddendly had a reason to comment. One student even wrote far beyond her skills in the language.
I think it’s a good idea to let students make comments in the class blog like Illya did. It had not occurred to me before, but I think I’ll ask my students to make comments on one or two posts in the class blog. My students have indiviual blogs. The teacher can promote students’ comments on each others’ blogs and also find someone or other students who have blogs to comment on their blogs. Teachers need to guide, show and motivate students to use these tools. This is something I seem to have learned with my little experience and also from the discussion in this session.
Once I had students post to a class blog, but I didn’t ask them to comment on my posts. I think that might be a good idea. I have seen other examples of it that seem to work. One of them can be seen here. I wonder, though, how long you would have to do that before it would carry over to commenting on individual blogs.
Nancy
I also write a blog for my students. It’s the same blog for all of them. I write about topics we’ve talked about in class, or some class situations. I notified each group by email when I wrote a special post for them. I didn’t like doing that. But I noticed that they came to visit. Not all of them commented, but some wrote so spontaneously! I even started to love their mistakes. A mother, other teachers (not only EFL), students from Spain and even some friends of mine also commented. My students were intrigued by the visits of those "strangers".
Yes, comments are great motivation!
Why do you say you didn’t like emailing them when you wrote a special post for a particular class?
Nancy
I think emails are a bit intrusive (well, I don’t feel them as intrusive, but thought that they might be for some people)and most of all, i felt I was pushing them. I tend to push, so I have to be careful with that. I should have talked about feed readers, but it was difficult to teach so many things without using computers at school. Well perhaps you have to be a bit pushy at first until a routine is settled.
I think you have to guide students in the beginning. That might "look" pushy or "feel" pushy, but I don’t know any other way to get students involved. Some will get it right away — just like some teachers do — and others need more encouragement.
Nancy
Yes, I also think you have to guide students in the beginning. You need to tell them what to do or think of activities that give them a good reason to write in their blogs. You need to plan what you want your students to do with their blogs or otherwise they won’t blog just for the sake of using technology.
The challenge for me has been to come up with good assignments.
Nancy
I guess that is the challenge for everyone. Probably experience and engagement will lead you to improve on the quality of the assignments.
Do you think commenting is an important part of blogging or not?
Yes, commenting is an important part of blogging! Blogging is all about making connections and continuing conversations. The interaction through commenting makes blogging really fun! Recently, I started using coComment which allows you to save, track, and tag all of the conversations you are commenting on around the web. Displaying a coComment widget with your current comments may be just one of the ways we can encourage commenting.
If you
do, what can we as teachers do to encourage commenting?
I think Gabriela had a good idea when she said that teachers could ask for other teachers and students with more blogging experience to comment on the blog too. As teachers, we can encourage commenting by modeling the types of comments that we expect from students. If students have been reading blogs, then they will have a better idea about commenting too.
Also, commenting is a skill that students need some guidance on. For instance, as part of this SMiELT course, we watched the video about using comments to start conversations, and then we had a task to practice what we learned from it. Another useful resource about commenting is How to Comment Like a King or Queen by Vicki Davis. Just like anything else, we can’t expect that students already know how to do it; we should provide some information to them.
Assignment ideas:
One way to encourage commenting might be to have a mystery guest on the blog, or a guest who could be interviewed via the blog. Then, students can read the post, and add comments and questions. Here is an example of an interview with a wedding cake designer. Of course the comments could have been deeper, and we could have gotten more into the cultural differences, but we all have to start somewhere!
Comments are an important part of blogging, they are not essential. Many bloggers do not receive systematic comments on their blogs and some even close the comment area. It is important not to create this expectation or we fall into what is known as a race for posts, comments and popularity - something which many grown-up bloggers also do to raise their Google visibility.
Although I understand students may get more motivated when they see somebody is reading their posts and responding to them, it strikes me as very artificial for other teachers to comment just to encourage them.
When blogging, students should engage with the live Web, according to their own interests and not with an extended online classroom environment, scheduled and controlled by the teacher(s).
Before blogging times, my students used to volunteer to write and publish articles on a platform called Highwired, which had no comment area at the time. However, we did get contacted two or three times by students who wanted to respond to the writers. The articles were spontaneous and fun and no assignment as such was given. The only scaffolding was a list of ideas of topics they might like to consider: a book/film/play/music review, a day in the life of, etc…
I managed to archive them in an e-book before the platform closed its doors and we moved to blogging with free conversation after class on Beeonline, two mystery guests (Dennis Newson and Graham Stanley), a conversation with a school in Naples which culminated in their trip to Brazil. Notice Blogger did not offer the comment option then - so much of the conversation occurred in the posting area.
In Beeonline2 (2005), the comment area was added and so were assignments - a major disaster which totally killed the spontaneity and fun we had had before. Some students went up in arms and expressed how they felt. Most of them did not enjoy blogging as an assignment or a school activity and did not feel motivated to continue.
I think you raise an important issue, Bee. Or rather, several of them.
I agree that commenting in and of itslef is not essential to blogging. But I believe conversation is. That is what makes it different from journaling. If I am only having students write their own thoguhts on a blog without ever interacting with anyone else — either through direct comments on a blog or continuing the conversation in a post, then I might as well give them paper and pencil as I have done for almost 30 years.
I do not want my students to comment to build each other’s blog readership but to develop that sense of conversation. Except during EVO sessions, I receive very sporadic comments on my blogs. But the ones I receive are important because they make me think harder about what I have written. People ask questions, agree or disagree, and almost always add to the discussion in some way.
Teacher comments should, of course, be real attempts at conversation, too. I don’t think that is as difficult to do as you might think. When I comment on student blogs, for instance. I don’t comment on everyone’s post. Or, if I have been directed to the blogs by a teacher friend, I will comment on a post by everyone, but I pick the post of each student based on the content. I want to be able to have real conversation with them, not just tell them I agree or I like what they write.
The question of assigments is another issue. How did you handle issues like grades if there wre no assignemnts? Or was blogging so ancillary that it did not fit into the syllabus and grading scheme at all? I can see advantages to that, but I guess I had a different view of student blogging. I look at Darren Kuropatwa’s success with classroom blogs. Or Barbara Ganley’s. That’s the kind of blogging I want, where blogs are central to the class.
I wonder, though, if the challenge of doing it in the L2 adds enough other pressure that my goal is too lofty. Maybe it is unattainable in a real sense. I don’t know.
I have to get ready for work. I will have to think about this more.