Towards Reflective Blog Talk

I totally agree with Konrad that blogging should not be a race to publish, to write entries and receive comments but a means to be thoughtfully engaged. As he mentions, it is very important to scaffold learners (and young learners specifically - he teaches English to an 8th-grade native speaker class) to look critically at their own writing instead of judging it by the traffic that it attracts to their blog.

However, in teaching/learning a foreign language, this poses a more important challenge as we need to combine reflection (which does not always come naturally) to the target language in order to express our thoughts. This depends very much on the level of the students, the culture/background we work with and teaching context we are immersed in.

As regards to teachers, many of us are not in a secondary school context. The holistic "educational and cultural" perspective, for instance, is not something that is required in language schools or business classes so some of these skills are most times taken for granted.

Teachers have more than one class to follow (sometimes about 100 or more students) per semester and less time to dedicate to each student so although the blogging environment and evaluating procedures Konrad suggests may be ideal in his particular context, they do not always apply to our reality. This does not mean we should not mix, remix and reuse some of his ideas according to our focus.

I believe, that as language teachers, it is important we guide our learners how to use these tools appropriately (according to their age and interests), find connections and environments where they can practise the language autonomously. We should guide and teach them how discover and negotiate meaning in the target language, how to network, observe and express themselves in the different contexts they have chosen to belong to.

No language programme will provide learners with all the knowledge they will later require in life. Instead of using blogging to focus on the English language per se and “classroom situational dialects” as Edward Hall calls them, learners should become aware of the paradoxes and subtleties of the “living language”, the variety of existing discourses and situational needs. Check P2P EFL/ESL Pedagogy and Technology presentation and article.

My perception is that it is not for us, teachers, to determine the type of blogging our students should or should not engage in. Blogging is about expressing oneself with an individual voice on topics that make (or do not) sense to us. It is not a tool for submitting writing assignments, nor a tool for us to impose a frame of mind or pattern.

I disagree with you, Joao, that blogging should be something more intellectual that stimulates critical thinking. When you use the modal "should" you express and expectation/advice or even obligation. This is your voice and your perception - which may be mine and the learners’ as well, but not necessarily. It is a value judgement. Many bloggers may very well just describe, comment or narrate. Some will just post videos or pictures. This is the way they have chosen to express themselves.

I’d say it SHOULD be the educators’ responsibility to make their learners aware of all kinds of discourse. Teachers should and can impose a constraint when asking for a class exercise or a formal evaluation of a skill . This can be done on a simple sheet of paper, a Word document or the platform Konrad mentions. The exercise is then collected/sent, reviewed and discussed with the student. Students do not need a blog for this.

When Konrad mentions he needs to engage in "more talk about texts" with his students, I believe he refers to showing his students how to engage in different kinds of discourse and engage in dialogue with each learner so as to decide which type of writing structure and words would be better suited to express the message they want to convey.

I see a blog as a personal space and a way to engage freely in experimentation with the language and discourse. In this way, it cannot be evaluated like a formal writing exercise. What teachers and peers could do, however, is engage in dialogue through the comment area, asking probing questions if they feel an idea is not developed.

However, I admit, my vision of what the blogging process is or should be, is
also a frame of mind - open to discussion :-)

The whole afternoon I have been sitting with my laptop at home and translating this article into Chinese, it takes me about two hours to finish my first draft.

I have been reading his blog for quite a long time, and this time I feel I have to translate the post into Chinese to fully understand his writing and really feel connected with many points he brought back about how to encourage instructional conversation with students, so I want to take some time and ask what you think about some questions I have with my students:

1 In this post Konrad makes a very interesting comment on on the BSP he is using with his students:

What I like about this platform - 21 classes - is that my comments appear in a separate space from that devoted to comments left by other students. The author of the blog can use the dashboard to quickly scan the entries where the teacher left comments. It may not be a very important feature to all teachers, but it is of significant value to me and my students because it makes conversations easier to track

I don’t understand why he is thinking that it is good to have two places, one for the students’ comments and another for the teacher’s comments.

2 In another place he said:

In order to engage in truly reflective thought about their work, students must also have opportunities to analyze who they are as bloggers and writers. They must have opportunities to look critically at their own work and see how they fit into the class blogosphere.

I have a question. I have been using a website and class blogging with my students for the last year, and I found that it is very interesting when I allow other people to view my students’ work, and also leave comments, so does 21st class also allow other strangers to leave comments on your students work ?

3 The problem of me using blogs and Haokanbu.com), a photo blog, with my students is that I found it hard for me to engage my students all the time because we only have two assignments: one is a group project and the other is individual, so if next term I am going to teach the same class, how can I make my students use the blogs and the photo blog more often than last term, which means students not only use this as a place to submit their assignments, but also use it as a communication tool to talk with their classmates? Any advice is appreciated.

4 Another question is: do you think it is good to let other people comment (rather than me and the peer students in my class), do you think I need to have more control over this aspect?

[Post edited by Rudolf, 8 Feb 2008]

Bee,

What I meant was not that it should be the teachers the ones who determine the type of blogging but that it is often the students we have and the context that influence the most suitable blogging activities. I am referring to the blogging of students who are learning a foreign language. I can’t expect from my students who have just started learning German to write critical and thoughtful texts right from the beginning although I hope that they will be able to do it at a later stage. So it seems to me that my students need a different kind of approach to blogging than, for example, Konrad’s students.

A blog is certainly a tool to express oneself using our individual voice but to do that in a more effective way we need to learn how to think critically and how to engage with ideas. I support Konrad’s engagement in teaching his students to think critically. In my point of view, this should also be a concern of a responsible teacher.

I agree that the "should" sounds too restricting. Well, of course it’s not my intention to limit anyone’s way to express his voice. I was just too enthusiastically advocating the idea of the teaching of critical thinking and engagement with ideas which, in my opinion, is what Konrad meant with "more talk about texts".

Namckeand, I agree when you say that "we have to expose students to these things, just as we are exposed to lots of tools in these EVO sessions. From that exposure can
come a truer kind of blogging." From my little experience in blogging with students, I think we need to guide them to blogging, we need to expose them to other blogs and comments. The students need to see the purpose of blogging. A great help can be having someone to make comments on their blogs to give them a perception that there is a real world out there that can interact with them and is different from the classroom work. Once they find out the real purpose and benifit of blogging, they will blog naturally. Until then we need to give them stimuli to use their blogs.

What I have also learned during this short period of time using blogs with students is that we teachers need to be patient and persistent. If we give up too soon on motivating our students to use their blogs, it’s most likely that they will never use them.

The kind of stimuli I was referring to was simply telling them what they could/should post, sometimes even requiring them to do it. Speaking to the students about the blogs now and then is also important. It gives them the feeling that you didn’t forget about the blogs.

I think there’s nothing wrong in telling them that you expect them to post what they have written in class. This is a way to get them in touch with the blog and it also creates opportunities for the teacher to make comments on their posts, either to praise them or just to correct some mistakes. I am not sure if this is right. Some students may not like to see the teacher’s corrections as comments to their blogs. I have done that but sometimes I ask myself if the student appreciates it or not. Maybe we should ask the student how he feels about it. This all sounds more like giving students writing assignments than letting them express their own voice through blogging. But I still believe that this is a process that they have to go through before they can use their blogs to express themselves critically and really interact with the target language outside the classroom.

I believe once they have accepted the blog as just another tool to be used, they will use it more naturally. It seems to me that it’s a process that needs time to evolve. And the less experience teachers have in using these tools with students, the longer it will take to get students use them.

I agree, Gabriela. If we want them to learn to comment on blogs, we have to model that behaviour for them.

Also, I think it turns blogging into even more of a "homework" assignment. Our intereaction with students on blogs should encourage them to see blogging as theirs, not as something they do for us. Surely there are other places and ways to correct grammar.

Now, that being said, someone told me one that I should correct their grammar because I was being judged as a teacher by the quality of their posts. I decided that, for me, it was a chance I was willing to take. It is, however, an individual decision.

Nancy

I would be interested to know how you both use Google Docs for this.

Nancy

Thanks! I have used Google Docs (Back when it was Writely I used it more.) in a similar fashion. One day we I had a few studnets in the lab and they uploaded their work to Writely. I marked problems as you described, and we worked for an hour in class like that. I was able to give almost immediate feedback on their corrections that way, and I think it was good. I know they sure liked seeing the different colors being replaced by regular black type as they make appropriate changes.