My Blogging…
Real Responsibility…
Writing for a real audience not only encourages students to become habitual writers, but also to take seriously the responsibility of writing to the web. Involvement with weblogs helps students realize that they are adding to the rag-tag body of knowledge that makes up the Internet. Search engines index weblog content and even when a project produced as a weblog is finished, it is still accessed many hundreds of times each year by people looking for information using search engines. Every book review completed by a student on their personal weblog adds to the body of online knowledge of that work. Pupils are always amazed to see, via their referrers log, that their writing has been pointed to by a search engine as a potential answer to someone’s question.
The Internet is not a global online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, brimming with trusted content from trusted sources. It is more a ragged assortment of information from a wide range of sources, good and bad, reliable and biased. Retrieving, evaluating and communicating information make up the cornerstone the of the ICT curriculum and are vital components in learning across all curriculum areas. Misquoting someone, or providing inaccurate information on a given topic is not very important, in the whole scheme of things, if a student’s work is only read by himself and his teacher. However, when the same data is put on to a weblog, that receives hundreds of hits and is indexed by search engines as a source of knowledge on a given subject, the awareness of the responsibility to get it right moves out of the realms of the hypothetical and into practical reality.
Equipping students with this sense of responsibility to research and report accurately has always been a priority in schools. It is, however, fast becoming a life skill and not just a purely academic one. Children are becoming much more than just handlers of other people’s information. They are active researchers and providers of information that could affect the knowledge base of others. Mike Roberts, the Principal of The British School of Amsterdam, comments,
Adults and children, whether we like it or not, are destined to have a presence on the Web in years to come. The sooner they are prepared for that eventuality, the better. Weblogging offers students a real context in which these crucial life-skills can be developed.
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