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To Blog or Not to Blog? A WebQuest Designed by Judith Cramer
Teachers College, Columbia University  ® Registered Trademark
Introduction | Task | Process | Evaluation | Conclusion | Credits As your school’s journalism
teachers, you have heard quite a bit about the new web phenomenon—blogs
(short for web logs). A number of your top student editors have
already confessed that they are bloggers, staying up late at
night to make their presence felt in the blogosphere by
crafting erudite and witty posts.
Although they continue to work on the school newspaper that you advise,
they see it as less important than the web logs they are now producing.
Making every effort to spare your feelings, they point out that unlike
school newspapers, blogs are "real world." When they engage in
blogging, they are no longer just student journalists, they say, but
writers with a large audience beyond the school—one that reaches across
the world. Nonetheless, a growing number of mainstream journalists have begun to pay close attention to the blogosphere, and there is more and more crossover, with bloggers appearing on broadcasts, for instance, and information from their daily posts making its way into newspapers and magazines. One waggish print journalist referred to the growing horde of bloggers as a vast unpaid army of researchers and fact checkers at his disposal. A well known West Coast columnist recently wrote what she called "a mash note" to the liberal bloggers she reads. Numerous professors who frequently appear as "talking heads" on TV shows now maintain often-quoted blogs on politics, culture, and other subjects. Your first job is to find out enough about this novel subject to make some judgements about it as educators who are both students of language and students of democratic institutions, as well as advisors of a group of budding researcher/writers. Your young editors argue that the blogosphere is now the true home of "the fourth estate," described in their journalism textbook as crucial to the functioning of democracies. They decry so-called "corporate" or "big media," which they say has abandoned serious, investigative reporting for crowd-pleasing "infotainment" and simple "sound bites." Although they aspire to join the army of blogging writers, they actually know very little about this work as a possible profession. Typical of their questions:
The economics of the blogosphere,
and its professional culture vis-a-vis the world of traditional
journalism, are two topics you need research in order
to advise your students. From your own point of view as educators, especially as educators mindful of the distinction your students raise between school-oriented and real-world activities, you want to learn about the potential of the web log form for education. This is what interests your colleagues as well. Among their questions:
Your second goal is to arrive at informed and nuanced educators' opinions about web logs (based on quantitative and qualitative data) to be shared with your colleagues in a presentation you will make using some of the digital tools available in your school to illustrate and support what you have to say. You are doing this work on behalf of your colleagues as well as your students. It is clear that something is happening out there in the blogosphere. Your job is to decide what you and other educators should be doing about it. Process To accomplish the tasks of answering your students' questions, and of making recommendations to your colleagues (and supervisors) about the educational value of web logs, or blogs, you will research the subject on the Internet, taking off from what your student journalists have told you. Obviously the Internet will be your main source of information, but you will also search for some print materials on the topic. Knowing that your research will culminate in a presentation to the school community, you will prepare parts of it as you go along, using digital resources available at the school. Since the school has a number of excellent digital tools—Inspiration, Timeliner, PowerPoint, Excel, among others—you should be able to put together an engaging presentation. Working on it this way will also help you arrive at a nuanced understanding of the meanings and potetial value of this new communication medium. You will first satisfy yourselves as to exactly what web logs are by learning the nomenclature, which you have been listening to in the school newspaper office for some time without fully understanding it (e.g., what is meant by the word permalink?). On the basis of this research (and thinking ahead to the time you will be standing before the entire school community to share it with them), you will create a lexicon, a timeline, statistical charts and conceptual diagrams to illustrate or back up the argument you will make about blogs. It is up to you to choose exactly what to include in these presentations but the focus should be conceptual and comprehensive, providing answers to the questions most likely to be on the minds of the colleagues in your audiences—people who are not ignorant of technology, even though they may be unfamiliar with blogs, and who will want to know precisely why this subject is worth their time and consideration, or why not.
A dictionary definition by a blogger
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0415/p14s02-stin.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31944-2003Feb5 http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm http://www.clickz.com/stats/big_picture/applications/print.php/2238831 http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/thebloggingiceberg.html http://www.livingroom.org.au/blog/archives/blog_statistics-length-of-stay.php http://www.truthlaidbear.com/TrafficRanking.php http://researchblogs.org/joemoxley/Some thoughts on the economics of the blogosphere: http://shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html About gender and blogs: http://culturecat.net/node/view/312 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/05/30/most_bloggers_are_teenage_girl/
Horizontal knowledge
http://talkingpointsmemo.com
Highlights of the
Nieman Report on blogs: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2003/10/23/doc_inconclusive.html http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/03/08/weblog_demos.html From the USC Annenberg Center Online Journalism
Review (J.D. Lasica): http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1017958873.php From the online Microcontent News: http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/borgjournalism.htm Some Blogger Manifestos: http://www.andrewsullivan.com/culture.php http://www.ratcliffeblog.com/archives/000120.html http://davenet.scripting.com/2001/06/18/integrityInWebwriting Other articles from the online media: http://www.ariannaoline.com/columns/column.php?id=705 http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2002/05/10/blogs/print.html http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/012603/d0126blogsmediaside.html VI. The Impact of blogs on contemporary politics Center for Communication and Civic Engangement at the University of Washington Center for the Study of American Government at Johns
Hopkins University Blogs Pump Bucks into Campaigns, by Chris Ulbrich, WIRED magazine First with the Scoop, if Not the Truth, by Julie
Bosman, The New York Times Are
Web logs literature? Scholars who blog: The educational value of the
trackback feature of blogs: Articles to acquire through
ProQuest, university libraries, or these publications: Kajder, S. and Bull, G. Scaffolding for struggling
students: Reading and writing with blogs. Leading &
Learning with Technology,
31(2). Richardson, W. Web logs in the English classroom: More
than just chat. English
Journal, 93(1). Oravec, J. Bookmarking the world: Weblog applications
in education. Clyde, A. Shall we blog? Evaluation A rubric is an assessment tool that you may want to use to help develop comprehensive and thoughtful answers to some of the questions posed in your investigation of web logs. This particular rubric is a template developed by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University, who is the inventor of the WebQuest. It is meant to be adapted to suit the needs of teachers devising WebQuests for classroom use. If I were to use this rubric to assess your completion of the WebQuestTo Blog or Not to Blog, I would enter into each purple box on the left one part of the assignment: a) research; b) knowledge of subject; c) lexicon; d) timeline; e) charts/graphs; f) concept maps; g) collaboration; h) oral presentation; i) technology use, and so forth. Then I would develop specific criteria by which to measure each of these particular products or performances—on a scale from beginning through exemplary work—entering a brief description of each level in the boxes in every row. Such a rubric can be used to arrive at a "score" for each part of the assignment. However, I believe you can
make a more
sophisticated use of this assessment tool by using it as a matrix to
"locate" web logs, or blogs, along a series of continuums. One example
might be a continuum extending from personal, or "subjective," to
impersonal, or "objective," writing. Another
might concern differences of diction or tone. A third might indicate
various degrees of interactivity. The research you have done in this
WebQuest will undoubtedly suggest others. Instead of arriving at a
"score," then, you will arrive at a series of judgements about Web
logs, or blogs, that will allow you not only to answer you students'
questions (that's the easy part) but to make an informative and
persuasive presentation to your colleagues about the novel form of
communication that has captured your students' hearts.
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Conclusion
Like good educational software,
WebQuests are
easy to use but hard to make. In my view, blogs represent an
enticing topic for WebQuesting because blogs were born and live online;
presumably it ought to be possible to learn everything there is to know
about blogs by undertaking a BlogQuest like this one. In fact, a number
of books about blogs have already been published by bloggers, an
indication that even they think there is still intellectual life
offline and outside the blogosphere. A word search at Amazon.com will
show you what's available already. I would certainly offer several of
these books (anything edited by Rebecca Blood, for instance) to a class
undertaking this WebQuest—not just for variety's sake, but also
because holding in your hands a book about blogs is provocative. It
makes you think about the history of human communication and
technology's role in it. Some writers have compared blogging software
to Johann Gutenberg's printing press—but that's a topic for another
post, or perhaps another WebQuest.
I hope you know more now about the blogosphere than you did before you
started on this WebQuest, and also that you find it a useful model for
constructing a WebQuest of your own around a topic that interests you
as much as blogs interest me. Since I haven't opened my own blog
for business yet, please send your comments to me
by way of email. I look
forward to hearing from you.
Thanks to Yvonne Liu for her patient instruction in the vagaries of OS X and Fugu.
Last updated on APRIL 18, 2004. Based on
a template from The Web Quest Page