What makes a strong post. Today the main task was to set up blogs, but we had enough time to open a conversation about content and the question of what makes a good blog post. I asked students to read three prominent bloggers in three different fields for about 10 minutes, then jot some notes about their first impression of what makes a good blog entry.

I like to downplay the teacherly authority in different ways, as many teachers do. Sometimes I take notes about our class discussion, for example, leaving students a chance to do more of the talking. So these are the notes I took today -- we had about 10 minutes just at the end of class to talk together about what they saw in their brief introductions to those three blogs. It was our second class meeting. Here are the notes I took:

The personal feeling of a journal can be appealing. A focused topic seems to help.

Style seems to matter greatly. The writing can be engaging, visual, appealing to the senses. Style creates some of the energy and pleasure and engagement.

Organization and a clear page design to help focus things for a reader. Photographs help attract readers, as well as diagrams, illustrations.

Generous with supporting links -- informative. Time and effort is visible.

Conciseness can be a strong style -- Ed Cone. There are different ways of being generous to readers beside just writing long posts.

Blogs are so much better than newspapers!?

Length: long posts create a community in the comment area / short posts not so much.

Some of the comments you hope to see, while others make for an interesting suprise. I hadn't expected the last one, for example, and while there are no doubt plenty of exceptions to it, I want to keep my eyes open and see whether the idea holds up. One thing nice about having a computer in the classroom is that the class notes can readily be posted to the class site, and we can build on them later. I hope we'll unpack that idea about blogs being better than newspapers, for example. There's more to consider there. [0 & P]