Gina Bennett's comments on Blogs as new narrative format

I wanted to highlight this comment left by Gina Bennett a few days back. (The *fact* that I have to highlight probably belies one of the things that has likely become evident through the course of this 'discussion' - blogs on their own are not really a good mechanism for threaded or 'focused' discussions. The facilitators were pretty aware of this coming in, but took the chance for the opportunity to expose people directly to the medium.)

But as Gina says:

On a discussion board, we are expected to stay on topic & follow the thread; in the blog, it seems that we are sort of talking to ourselves but with the hope that someone might be listening/reading over our shoulders. The act of reading a blog seems to call upon my active listening skills more than my debating skills.

Boy don't I know this sense of feeling like you are "talking to ourselves"! (maybe now more than ever ;-)

Gina goes on to say:

"Maybe blogging could be used to assess learning outcomes that are more affective in nature; those pesky outcomes that have less to do with the development of knowledge & skills & more to do with the development of attitudes. Maybe a blogging activity could be used to practice freewriting or 'freethinking' exercises; an open-ended, personal exploration of anything from a video clip to a mathematical equation...

Great ideas! These are exactly some of the reasons I've seen given by other educators for why they are atrracted to blogs as a potential medium.

We had another reflection through the mailing list from Laurie McAvoy that one potential use she could see was for "Reflective Practice Journals." And we've also had Crawford suggest that 'student publishing' in general is another potential use, although as he points out not without its perils.

Any other ideas? Anyone intrigued enough yet to have set up their own blog? Tried to access some of the blogs out there with an RSS Reader?