Blogging in the Classroom

The old saying “Think Before You Speak” has long been replaced with its digital age equivalent, “Google Before You Tweet”. Continuing with that line of thought, CS Krishnamurthy wrote this article advocating the use of blogs in schools as a way to teach writing, to encourage “individual participation in the marketplace of ideas”. One of the advantages?
“Typically, when students write essays in school, their work is mostly read by their teachers. Students spend hours together on Shakespeare, wars and history only to find one single person evaluate the end result. Blogging will help get a greater audience for every published piece.”
Another reason:
“Reading the blogs of their peers may spur the students to read, analyse and question more.”
I doubt this would happen in our schools though because Internet access and computers/tablets are not going to be available in most schools.

Ironically, even as Krishnamurthy recommends blogs, the digital world is already treating them like yesterday’s news! But first, you need to know the term “un-bundling”. Let Benedict Evans explain :
“One of the recurring themes of the consumer internet is the cycle from aggregation to disaggregation - bundling to unbundling. There is a lot of value in services that pull everything together in one place, but over time that value starts to recede, the lock-ins keeping people there weaken and the appeal of having separate, specialised products grows.”

Jason Kottke wrote that the blog has already been un-bundled:
“Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium.”
And:
“Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD.”

This is the problem of trying to get tech into schools. The educators are hardly up to date; and by the time bureaucracy allows them to make a change, that tech is either dieing or already dead! I guess that makes me old school…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more