Konrad Glogowski’s one of those teacher/bloggers you should be subscribed to. He raises this point:

How to Grow a Blog
In education, however, the product – the grade, the final draft, the test mark – still often takes precedence over the process of learning – the sense of personal journey without which the final destination is meaningless. What is even worse is that many of our students are very comfortable with that idea. To them, school is often about “playing the game.” They follow along, raise hands, submit assignments, study for tests. Of course, there is nothing wrong with these activities as long as they do not impede their progress as independent thinkers, researchers, and writers. Unfortunately, most of the time, “playing the game” means following the rules that we’ve set up for the students. We bring in the hoops, and the students jump through them. It’s an easy process for everyone involved.

He also suggests something that we didn’t really talk about when we set this whole thing up — growing the blog.

Personally, I hadn’t really thought about it before. Mostly because I don’t give any consideration to it. The whole idea of having a goal for my writing implies something that I don’t associate with my blogging and maybe I should. When I blog, it’s to find out what I think about a subject and not for some outward, longterm goal. I’m into the immediate gratification. If it aggregates to something larger — gravy.

But that made me think about why I have my class blog. It would be NICE if you continued beyond the class. Not because of any notion of the course, but because blogging is what I consider to be the heart of personal learning environment. It’s the reflective component that helps me organize my own learning and give me the “excuse” to continue reading and learning.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 8:18 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.