Last we left off, I had just set up my classroom blog, Hope Future Now. I had big dreams of it becoming a community of socially responsible young bloggers from around the world. My students would be at the center of it all, both as authors and peer reviewers.
This has not yet occurred. At this point, I am posting up new student writing framed by my own personal commentary every week. I am constantly emailing people and begging them to leave comments on the posts. This is annoying, but completely necessary. The kids really live for the comments. I have even aggressively pursued input from other classes. I presented at our districts one-to-one laptop learning team in hopes of making connections. Nothing yet. However, this takes time. I know that.
In order to keep my kids connected with the project, I decided to create student blogs. My vision for these student blogs is that they will become the space in which they chronicle their own personal attempts to make a difference in a very tangible way. I have hopes that they will seek mentorship with real community heros, volunteer with various community organizations and participate in fundraising activities. I also hope that it will create the motivation and empowerment that David Huffaker in “Spinning Yarns Around a Digital Fire” (2004) suggested comes from the self efficacy students experience when they are able to exercise creative control, share feeling and ideas, and collaborate with others.
How did I set blogs up for such a young group of writers? This was actually quite easy to do, although it took quite a bit of thinking to balance the need to protect young students from over-exposure in a public, online environment with the need to give students ownership of the projects. When researching the idea, I read an article on blogging entitled, “Writing With Blogs and the Talkback Project” (Shelbie Witte, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 2007). Some of the issues in this project certainly gave me pause. Witte, at one point, was forced to abandon blog writing when her administrator became uncomfortable after an anonymous student mentioned his/her neighbourhood in one of the posts. Should I let my students use their first names? Should they be able to state where they are from? How about their ages? It all seemed a little crazy, although there is something so special about knowing that a real child of a definable age wrote something amazing. I personally have a hard time respond to an anonymous author, and I really want people to respond to the kids’ writing.
In the end, I let the parents decide. Some are allowing their students to use first names, some are not. I personally took measures to ensure safety as well, however. These included making myself the administrator and comment filter for all of the students blogs. I also created standardized usernames for each of the blogs to help sustain a certain amount of anonymity. In order to give the kids ownership of their blogs, I set a temporary administrator password and allowed them to use it for one computer block. They chose their own themes and widgets. Later, I gave each of them author privileges and allowed them to set a personal password for their sites.
So far, so good. The kids are learning to write effectively for an authentic audience and also learning to leave constructive, appropriate comments. The only trouble is that the audience is a little too hidden at the moment. Not enough people are responding to the blogs (even after all of my begging) and the kids simply have to trust that a genuinely interested, enthusiastic audience is reading their wonderful work.
Even though my dream of a worldwide community of young writers is not yet a reality, I have not abandoned it in a fit of cynical disillusionment. On the contrary! I often find myself so excited by the notion that the dreams are so DOABLE that I can barely stand it. It tries the patience, to be sure. All of this will take time, but I’m willing to persevere.
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