Act like one. In spite of its slightness, my tiny moment of reflection upon filing a 1000th posting here has stayed with me and kept me thinking. I mentioned these values that I thought were connected with staying on task with a blog:

If you can find a way to stay engaged in a project as a writer and reader, you can learn more than you imagined, enjoy the distant partnership of many generous and interesting people, and possibly help reinvent some portion of your field, and maybe even some portion of your career, too.

Remove the word distant and replace reader and writer with a new topic and you have a sentence that describes what a student or other person gets out of most any serious commitment. I wonder, then, if we should widen the rhetoric we often use in trying to sell blogs to our colleagues and our students. It's not (just) the democractic possibility of the web that make blogs valuable -- there are the character-building traits of commitment to a worthy project, collaboration, and professional development. When you're in school you're usually not a professional yet, but blogs give you a place to start acting like one. There are values there that our colleagues might find persuasive because they do believe in them, even when the structures of our courses too often contradict our values.

We all face from time to time the incredible passivity built into a student's experience of public education. On a blog you can be as adult, as professional, as you are able, and you can leave behind that passivity, if you dare. So while we might be able to use that rhetoric of commitment, collaboration, and professional development, we will do so knowing that deep down the task of blogging contradicts unstated values that are played out in thousands of classrooms every day.

This is all the more clear when we think about an old conversation among edubloggers -- whether to assign particular tasks on the blog or to leave them to the students' individual judgment. I have two classes using blogging software right now, but one is using it to post work for feedback and the other is actually aiming at blogging. When I read the posts by the first group and compare them to the posts by the second group, I can see the shadow of the assignment on the screen much more readily in the first.

Yet I do (for the moment, at least) still see a role for some structure, even in the class with the (what I hope will be) real blogs. Because these students won't win an audience for some time, their classmates and I need to be their audience. I require that, for now. I'll need to think and talk more about that along the way, but let me say this much now: the first time I took a classmate's post to class for discussion, people seemed happy enough to talk about its strengths. Talking about how it might be developed further seemed much riskier, more evaluative though it was not meant to be. There was a hint of this in the air: "What I write is mine -- nobody should be talking to me about changing it." (Not from the author, it seemed, but from a classmate or two.) Do these blogs exist in some sort of utopian state where nobody should touch them, or do we need to risk an open exchange with others if we are going to be citizens and professionals. That seems like an easy question to answer, unless we want, once again, to say that students are not ready for the world. [0 & P]