Learning the Hard Way is Better Than Not Learning At All

About four years ago, I had what I thought was an educational epiphany. At the time, I was trying to resuscitate a dying course offering at our high school whose target demographic was seniors who were on an academic track leading away from post-secondary schooling. Understand, I do not mean to insinuate that the reason this class was on its last leg was its clientele. Quite the opposite. In reality, the course was on the ropes due largely to low expectations on the part of our faculty as well as the misguided idea that it would be good to isolate a large, mainly heterogeneous group of struggling readers and writers together in their own class. It was my task to find a way to refashion the course into something more meaningful than what it had become over the previous few years.

Thus came my epiphany; my students would become bloggers.

One of my main aims was to get my students into the habit of writing; however, I did not merely want them writing for me. Instead, I wanted them to write for a wider audience, to write as if they were not simply pleasing their teacher but rather communicating with a potentially unlimited number of readers beyond the walls of our school .

Early in the semester, I announced these intentions to my students (who were noticeably underwhelmed) and we marched down to become bloggers.

And, sparing the gory details for now, I'll simply say that this experiment tanked miserably.
Why did this happen? Are blogs meaningless in the landscape of education? Absolutely not. Blogs as educational tools can be tremendously powerful, but incorporated poorly, educational blogging can quickly be robbed of its potential for positive impact. In the years since, I've come to realize that I made several rookie mistakes that doomed the project from the start. Below are a few, some of which were clarified and reemphasized for me in my reading of Will Richardson's Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.

1. I did not allow students to pursue an existing interests and build expertise on that topic. Whereas instructor Ken Smith advises that "we should assign [students] to go read and then link to what interests them and write about why it does and what it means" (qtd. in Richardson, ch. 2), I peppered them with a variety of my own interests and concerns, expecting they'd latch onto them and blog to answer questions they had no interest in answering in the first place.
2. I did not provide sufficient examples of quality blogging. I did not provide examples of exemplary blogs which took a sustained approach at examining topics by bringing together and processing relevant content from varied sources. Thus, my students saw their blogs as a lesser MySpace (yes, that was big at the time) and treated their blogs as such.
3. I did not teach and stress the art of synthesizing information. Richardson suggests that a minimum, real blogging should contain "Links with analysis and synthesis that articulate a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked and written," but perhaps due to the aforementioned failures, my students' blogs seemed more or less personal journals that occasionally contained uninspired posts about topics I, not the student, found interesting.
4. I did not blog. In hindsight, this seems like a failure in common sense. Professor Babara Ganley rightly questions such practice by asking, "How can a teacher expect her students to blog . . . if she doesn't use it herself, exploring the impact it has on her thinking, writing, research, and creativity?" (qtd. in Richardson, ch. 3). Though my aim in having students blog was to train them for real-world writing situations, the fact that I was not a blogger certainly debased the credibility of the task.

In the aftermath my first foray into the world of student blogging, I could easily recognize that I had a much larger hand in the endeavor's failure than did my students. While I wish I had not made some of these errors, all addressed in Richardson's text, I have found that each of these mistakes provided a learning moment for me, the instructor, and have helped me know what pitfalls I need to avoid as I continue to employ blogging as an instructional tool in my courses.

Richardson, Will. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks: Corwin, 2010. Kindle.

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