Making Blogs Work - Journal Entry 9

I recently read an article entitled "Avoiding the Five Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students" by Ruth Reynard. It appeared in the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) on-line publication, T-H-E Journal, on October 15th, 2008. You can find it here: http://www.thejournal.com/articles/23434_1
The author cautions about five dangers in blogging pedagogies: ineffective contextualization, unclear learning outcomes, misuses of the environment, illusive grading practices, and inadequate time allocation. In Reynard's article, mistakes 1 and 3 would have been better grouped together because they are so closely related. She cautions that the first 'caution', Ineffective Contextualization arises because students and teachers fail to decouple the social networking aspect of blogging from the self-reflection and thought processing benefits of the blog. Though these blogs provide areas for reader commentary, students and teachers alike should not lose sight of the fact that these are monologues, not dialogues. These blogs should function more like individual journals, not wikis or discussion boards. This last point is really emphasized in the third 'caution', Misuse of the Environment.

Likewise, Reynard's second and fourth 'cautions', Unclear Learning Outcomes and Illusive Grading Practices respectively are really two parts of the same claim. What I take away from these points are that there needs to be a rubric provided right at the onstart of the project; and there needs to be clearly articulated task components such as reflection statements, uploaded artifacts, and other benchmarks. This allows for a mappable arc of development of growth from analysis to synthesis to application.

I will ask and answer two things of this article:
1. Why does there need to exist these unnecessary demarcations between blogs, wikis, and discussion boards? Does the blog have the potential to be 'abused' as merely a social networking 'toy'? Yes, but it needn't necessarily be so. Use that dynamic adolescent networking energy to the benefit of the students by creating group blogs and blog rings where there is some cross-pollination. This can result in a hybrid creature that is neither blog not wiki but something that draws on both.
2. How can this be accomplished? The best proof would be to pay a visit to one such project I did with some composition students using Julia Alavarez's quasi-historical novel In The Time of the Butterflies. That can be seen here: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=177222837