Blog Project: Findings

Although I have not completed reading all of the evaluative responses from my students, I have found several things of great interest already as I have watched my students work through this project. One of the first things I noticed was that students were clearly split into two groups; those enjoying the new experience and those fearing negative feedback from unknown participants. I believe this came from their confusion about who their audience was since blogging can be, as a fellow graduate student put it, “like screaming into the void.” Still, even with these fears and hesitations, I saw that, overall, my students seemed more willing to write since their occasional grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors were less of an issue in this format. This, then, created higher amounts of blog posts and greater participation in both personal blog entries and peer comments. Also, although side conversations frequently cropped up, most commenter adhered to the topic presented and full-blown rants were rare. Ironically, the only rants I saw were between fellow classmates who knew each other; it was as if having a known commenter say something negative felt like a personal attack while an unknown commenter may have misunderstood or could be more easily ignored.

These findings have lead me to the realization that I need to spend more time helping my students understand their audience and how to deal with situations where an audience may not be easily identified. Also, it quickly became obvious that there was a need to solicit comments for people outside of the peer group in order to truly enter into a more global conversation. When (not if) I do this project again, I will restructure my lesson plans to include sessions on audience identification and presentation. My other change will be to assign students the task of researching and participating in another person’s blog who is discussing a similar or related topic. The one student I had who received comments from an outside source, has found his blog work very enlightening and engaging as well as having the benefit of getting a perspective from a person from another part of the world. This student has not only continued to communicate with this other gentleman but has also gone to his blog and made comments. In a recent email from my student, he told me that he had just joined a discussion group on the topic of socialism around the globe – a great addition to both his knowledge base and his global awareness!