Reading Notes 4/4/2007

"Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs"
-Brooks, Nichols, Priebe (North Dakota State Univ)

• Blogs in classrooms (a.k.a. genres): journals, research tools, sharing ideas
• As discussed in class, people creates blogs for many different reason. (For education purposes, is far from the top of the list for reasons to blog)
• Weblogging= relatively low-tech
• Is it possible? Weblogs have the potential to "encourage that person to continue writing where he or she might otherwise stop" (1)
• "The writer who is self-motivated and community supported" (1)
• I could see where this vision, blogging for educational purposes, might anger some bloggers. Blogging for some is a place were people can vent, misspell, share opinions, say basically anything, and now it's being looked at as an educational tool. I support the use of the blog in the classroom; however, I can see some who may have mixed feelings about this...like at the beginning of this class when some classmates were not to thrilled about blogging class notes.
• This idea of motivation in students is nothing new.
• Research questions: "Which weblog genre(s) engage or motivate students to make significant contributions to their personal or class weblog?" (1)
• "The web is remediating all media that has come before it" (2)
• Research assumption: "An engaged and motivated weblog writer will become a better writer of other genres" (2)
• A pretty big difference to w/i a year to go from 79% to 52% students who had never heard of weblogs before their class (don't see many other surprises in the other tables)
• Five Points: Point 2: "In both semesters, our students preferred the journal weblog regardless of which course they were enrolled in, and as student awareness of weblogging increases, the personal, daily reflection seems likely to be the defining characteristic of weblogging" (again not much surprise there)
• Would be interesting to repeat this study today. I would go to show how much and how quickly technology is changing.
• The notebook=seems likely to be most successful
• From Point 5, seems like beginning with weblog is a great thing to do, before you start moving on to more advanced technologies in the classroom.

AAK