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…