A beloved friend of mine brings layered party dips to our gatherings. Delicious, varied, gorgeous layered dips. I eat myself silly on the stuff. I am not alone in this. A collaborative of party-goers surrounds the dips, tasting and evaluating the football- or birthday-themed designs and the layers, discussing possible and sometimes even healthy additions to future dips, marveling at the theme-shape possibilities of the simple black olive. It's like real-life blogging: generative discussion of the most engaging and tasty kind. Party Dip is Awesome
Blogging is for Everyone
People can and do blog about all sorts of things: war, food, photography, minimalism, even putting weird things in coffee. Blogs offer regular people a chance at the generation of and "entry into...global conversation[s]" (Richardson, W., 2011, p. 19) about anything and everything. As a platform for a running record of development and refinement of ideas, blogging has little competition.
Bloggers personalize the aesthetic of and write content to their blogs, usually welcoming people with similar interests to engage in conversations about the content. These conversations encourage bloggers and commenters to refine their thinking through considering and revising presentation of thoughts before submitting them to the other party or parties. Time to reflect on one's own thought processes is invaluable to generation of knowledge and depth of consideration about the topic at hand and to building a better brain altogether.
Blogging is for Learners
To that end, today's students are perfect blog candidates. Students are supposed to be in the business of generating their own knowledge about the world and its physical and cognitive vastnesses, but too many students are disengaged from learning by the time they hit middle and high school - the culture of boring, outdated pedagogy to which they are subjected daily too often sucks the desire to be active learners right out of them. Blogging, implemented effectively (like this one was and continues to be) of course, could turn those disenchanted masses back into learners of the kind that are able to produce this level of quality even in 5th grade.
To the English/Language Arts curricula, blogging is especially appropriate. Blogging well requires critical reading, careful writing, purposeful research, and creativity. It gives practice with these concepts--practice for which so many students fail to see the purpose--purpose. Educator Konrad Glagowski (2014) blogs about using blogs in his classroom. He urges other educators to change the way we view teaching, learning, assignment, and assessment and to think of our classrooms as he does: as "a studio where learners engage with concepts that they find interesting and personally relevant[,] a place where they are given opportunities to create their own networks and become experts in their chosen fields". In short, blogs get rid of that nagging question so many educators are forced to answer in terrible and uninspiring ways: Why do I need to learn this?
Of course, evaluation of student learning is necessary in out current education model and all foreseeable future models. Below is a student blog evaluation rubric inspired by a combination of this rubric, this rubric, and my own appreciation for effective blogging. For effective communication, really. Feel free to use it as is or manipulate it freely. We share this web, this portal, of and for learning. Let's invite our students to share in it more productively - let's teach them to make some yummy layered party dips all can enjoy.
Labinski, S. (2011). 7-layer dip. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/texascooking/6220126247/in/photolist-atDLPZ-
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Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms - 3rd ed. California: Corwin.