21st Sep 2006
my inquiry projects
One of the things I asked one of my classes to blog about this week was the questions they had, for this class and in terms of their teaching (it’s a secondary/middle literacy course). As they’re doing it, I realize it’s important for me to do it too — to think through the questions I’m asking myself this semester in terms of my teaching and research and learning. So here goes.
One of the questions has to do with using blogs in my classes. I think they make much more sense in many ways than the Blackboard discussion area because a blog becomes something that is yours — you get to name it and make the colors and write and add comments and it’s more yours than it is mine. I don’t have the password to their blogs — they do, and that’s important. But why? What is it about that ownership that I think is important? More importantly, how am I going to weave the blogs into class and use them so as to make them more and more important to what we’re doing?
Another question I have concerns my research and writing. I love teaching and spend the majority of my time on it — prepping class, reading things that relate, talking to students, reading their work. Thankfully my research has to do with my students, or at least college students more generally — how they use technology — but I’m still not setting enough time aside to work on it, or to get more writing done. How do I find more time? How do I juggle it all? What do my successful colleagues do? Something to discover.
Those are just two questions to begin with — there will be more, I assure you.
Great point about the difference between Blackboard discussion area and blogging. I’m having my preservice teachers use Blackboard and thus far I’m not all that happy with it. They’re being good sports and trying to ‘give the teacher what she wants’ but they’re not really *discussing*. And I think you’re right, it’s the ownership thing. Blackboard is institutional space and it is controlled by me. Blogging can be transgressive and borderline. If we really want our students to think and challenge texts and institutions, then we can’t hem them in with institutional space. Yet…we need to learn to operate within those institutional spaces so that we aren’t excluded. ’tis a conundrum and I thank you for raising it.
Thanks for helping me to think it through. I think I’m going to do something around this for NCTEAR — so your thoughts are super helpful. There’s a sense of this as a sort of liminal space in some ways — academic and non, personal and public that I want to explore further.