Is it inappropriate to comment on older posts in my blog? I'm new to blogosphere and there is so much to read, fresh stuff as well as some great old articles. I cannot help myself from sharing some of the blog jewels with you.
Here it goes,
Barbara Ganley's post from September 2005 deals with transparent blogging and the sometimes, for students themselves, problematic public nature of a blog. She writes:
"The students are shy, self-conscious, some of them still figuring out how to write in English. They have been conditioned to succeed, to achieve, to excel, and they feel that showing their work like this exposes a weakness, a flaw, a secret. They don't altogether buy it that they are here in college to learn, (I'm not sure they've really thought about what that word means except in the most literal sense of acquiring a body of knowledge to be tested on) not to produce shiny objects, one after another that demonstrate their worthiness according to some unfathomable scale."
Isn't that so true? We should remind ourselves more often that children are in schools to learn, they wouldn't be here if they knew everything! We should recognize students' mistakes as signs of their progress, as steps towards knowledge.
Barbara's Writing Class used to publish their first pieces of writing, their first attempts, and some people thought that wasn't appropriate...to show students' weakness to the world wide audience. However, the participants took it as a part of their learning process and their teacher believed that this was the right approach.
One of her students, Zoey, posted a great comment to Barbara's article. She described how one of her friends took a look at her blog and was amused by her first endeavours. At first slightly ashamed, Zoey soon started protecting her blog. Zoey writes:
"Without those first few novice pieces I would never have gained the confidence to continue writing, searching and discovering the orbit of a blog. It is inspiring and encouraging for me to have such work to read and look back on, it is a personal log of improvement. As I continue to blog I am feeling the benefits of having such a raw experience.
We all have to start somewhere and for a student to aim for perfection with every post defeats the purpose of a blog. We are in a discussion, gradually improving our speech, learning from each other and learning from ourselves."
Isn't that just great?