It also could be one of the best avenues for connection in a world where more and more we are separated behind our keyboards. It offers a place for ideas to be shared and truly explained in more than 140 characters.
Downes’ article shows the potential for blogging in education, but I think it misses one point. Using technology to reach students should be more about putting things were students want them than about putting things together in ways that are convenient for teachers. It should be more about informating than automating, and that means it will have to move forward almost as quickly as technology moves forward.
If blogs are meant to replace a class Web page, then it’s just layering a new technology on an old idea instead of moving forward.
Blogging would be a great way for teachers to interact with one another, for telling our stories as November suggests in his article. But for students, I don’t think it would fit their needs. Today’s students want short, quick bits of information and a blog or a Web page is too dense for the millennials. The potential Downes’ sees can be met with using new technologies like Twitter or Facebook and putting the information in front of where these younger students are, instead of where we would want them to be.
I believe that blogging can be useful, and that it has a lot of potential. I think that one trap in technology is seeing the potential of that thing and never updating its potential as new technology replaces the old. It is the one thing that stood out the most for me from November’s article, that methods have to change and adapt to the new technologies, not that the technologies are selected and adapted to old methods.
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