My Blogging…
Real Audience…
Critics often slate the simplicity of weblogs, and dismiss them as ‘merely vanity’. Yet it is precisely these two factors that are the keys to their potential. Children are vain, just like adults. They desire and require an audience for their thoughts and achievements. Every teaching college in the world extols the virtues of providing students with an audience.
The simple, intuitive nature of weblogs is precisely what is required to allow students to express themselves on their own terms. Children’s involvement with websites has to add up to more than a posting of a few pieces of their work on a third person’s static web-site for a virtually non-existent world to see. There is little ownership in that.
Year Six children at the British School of Amsterdam have been running personal and project weblogs since 2001. They are in control, making regular designs and writing choices with a real, potentially worldwide, audience in mind. The inbuilt statistical functions let children measure their own audience. They can see who on the web has linked directly to their weblog using their ‘referrers log’. They can assess their most read stories and even access their hourly number of hits over a twenty-four hour period which is useful in pinpointing from which side of the Atlantic hits originate.
An awareness of audience is one of the underlying principles across the whole curriculum, yet so often students have to make do with an imaginary audience, or one limited to the teacher and any random individuals who might peruse a classroom display. With weblogs the audience is real and is, in most cases, large. The average Year Six weblog was read between four and ten thousand times in the first year. The class weblog accumulated almost treble that number of reads over the same period. Even if the amount of reads by the student himself is subtracted from this total, the size of the audience remains impressive, and motivating.
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