(the new) bgblogging

A couple of days ago, I noticed that someone from Burlington, Vermont had linked to my blog. I was delighted and a little surprised because people from my state almost never read or link to my blog. So I took a look and found to my even greater surprise that it was my daughter firing up her first blog (as opposed to Livejournal and Facebook and MySpace). Her first post struck me as really very interesting–about why she was moving from Livejournal to blogging–that she wanted to talk rather than rant, that she sought connection and conversation instead of a public journal. Her reasons for wanting to try blogging outside of a classroom mirrors that of many of my students who go on to blog beyond their formal learning experiences.

One interesting tension they find is the pull of just being in the experience and the pull of reflecting on it as close to the experience as possible, or even at a distance. And the disappointment when readers (or at least those who will comment) don’t come. Remy has written a recent post about that tension as a writer about travel–whereas edubloggers tend to go offline (as I am about to do) when they travel, seeing it as a time to get out of the computer altogether, my students are playing around with blogging as a way to chronicle their travels as they’re having them for their own benefit and for those at home, and as a way to extend their thinking and learning about their inter-cultural experiences. As he writes in Blogging technology vs. time vs. perfection:

Here are some examples of students and former students, who blogged with me, taking blogging outside the classroom–

Mike –blogging as part of his job with th Appalachian Mountain Club

Lizi

Katie

Drew in Africa

Dena in the D.R.

In thinking about their practice, these bloggers are making important observations for themselves about levels of living and thinking, about when to be online and off, about why blogging might serve them and why it might not. As I sit here in a little bookstore with wifi up on the coast of Maine getting online for the one time I’ll do so this week (have to prepare for a conference), I once again am drawn to the experiences of my students as they venture away from the classroom to see whether the kinds of blogging we do there will feather out into their lives online outside academia. But I’m not going to think too hard on that one today–I’ve got to get back to the important work of Maine:

Filed under: Classroom Blogging, Discoveries in the Blogging World, Students online, Teaching and Learning |