Blogtalk

Weblogs for mentoring

I don't use weblogs myself in teaching, as I don't really see an application for my subject (math) right now other than possibly as a simple course blog for announcements or some such. What did get me interested in the idea of weblogs in education a few years back was looking at Lloyd Nebres' The Internet Classroom and the Advanced Internet Classroom, part of UC Berkeley's Academic Talent Development Program. (See AIC2003 for the latest version of the latter course, for example.) It's been written about before, so rather than re-articulating points already well articulated elsewhere, let me point you to the excellent 2000 article (originally called A Pedagogy of Nudges) by Laura Shefler. The whole article is interesting and relevant; please read at least the first page to see what I'm talking about in the following.

The key to the process is Lloyd. Lloyd's avocation is mentoring, an avocation he practices with these kids not only during the summer course itself, but often long afterwards. Links to their individual weblogs line his own weblog's sidebar. Though he teaches at Berkeley only for the six weeks of the course (he appears to spend much of his time in Maui), his posts reflect his continuing involvement with his mentees (here and here and here and ... )

Two factors I think keep the kids motivated to write:

• Each has his/her own personal weblog. Most not only post to their weblogs, they often design very individualistic decors for them. Their weblogs become something they own, their own personal space, their own voice - not a class weblog run by a teacher that they're invited (or expected) to contribute to, in which their individual identities become merged into a collective identity.
• There's a community here, but not a community of writers as much as a community of listeners. Lloyd and the other students not only listen, they respond, and nothing is more motivating for continued blogging than someone else saying "I'm listening".

How well would this sort of setup work in general for education? It's obviously very labour intensive; not many of us have the time or energy for mentoring at this level. I'd guess it'd probably not work at all if the aim is to get students blogging about some course topic they may or may not find interesting or relevant. Lloyd's kids are most involved when they're writing about something that's personally meaningful to themselves, their own lives. What's going on here is not so much learning as self-actualization: kids discovering who they are and what's important to them by writing about themselves, with the aid of a very capable mentor.

Lloyd is using blogs in what I think is their most powerful educational form: nurturing individual thought rather than community discussion or collaboration. I like Laura Shefler's take on it: " 'constructing knowledge' does not necessarily mean constructing consensus". Successful community blogs do exist, but they tend to be the work of several editors collecting newsbits rather than thought-out expression - Boing Boing rather than Riverbend. In my opinion, weblogs, at their best and most powerful, are the work of individuals, not communities. If we're going to use blogs in education, I think that this individuality is the aspect we need to foster most, whether within a course structure or outside one.

Some time in the future - perhaps in the very distant future - I think mentoring will become an essential part of education. Learning is already becoming more distributed across space and time, and we've started to look at teaching content online via disconnected "learning object" chunks instead of full courses. As this trend continues, mentors could very well become the keystones of learning, helping students to integrate the various strands of what they're learning into a meaningful whole, to make sense of it all. Alexei Panshin's science fiction classic Rite of Passage presents one possible model for a mentored learning future. Mentoring by blogs - or whatever they evolve into - could be another useful way to go.

Course Blogging

At the moment I've got three course blogs:
Shop Talk (http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/shoptalk/) for students in our new Professional Communications Certificate Program
Legal Technicalities (http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/legals/) for the Legal Secretarial students
T.Recs (http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/trecs/) for the Outdoor Rec students

When you visit them, you'll notice a lack of activity—just a couple of student comments, and everything else is teacher-generated. I've recently invited my students to become joint authors, and while a couple of them have expressed interest, no one has taken up the invitation yet. I'll be delighted if and when they do.

The tentative conclusion I'm drawing from this is that students have to be as interested as the teacher in the blog as a way of succeeding in the course. We (relatively) early adopters often forget that our colleagues and students aren't always as interested in these gimmicks as we are.

So unless the experience of showing up and contributing to the course blog is a happy and productive one, students will give the blog little or no attention.

I can put something on the blog that's critical to some short-term need of the class, like a heads-up about a snap quiz, and I've done something like that with the Legals (whose program induces a lot of quiz anxiety). Students, being highly efficient, don't want to expend any excess time and energy on a course. If blogging seems unneeded for course success, they'll avoid it.

That puts the onus on me to figure out ways to make the blog seem at least as important as the textbook and other learning materials. Well, I'm working on it!