Blogs and Reflection
I wonder about the buzz surrounding blogs and their use as a reflective tool. I recently attended Edublogging Hootenanay at Moose Camp and there it was, “tool for reflection!” “learners can reflect!”.
I don’t doubt that blogs are useful for reflection, but the motiviation to reflect must come first from elsewhere, not from the simple act of having a blog. It’s like a teacher handing out a notebook to each student and saying, “Okay, now you are going to reflect!”
Reflection is a skill and reflective writing is a genre. Like all genre, it has its ways of being. When teachers sit down to “mine” blogs in order to evaluate learners’ reflections, they are looking specifically for those attributes that define a reflective piece of writing. But have these attributes been described to learners beforehand? And more importantly, have learners been coached in becoming more reflective; have they been explicitly told what reflective writing is?
Having used dialogue journals for years in my language and literacy classes, I know two things:
1. Learners have to be shown what kind of writing I am looking for; and
2. While journals are an enormous amount of work, they are amzingly successful at developing literacy skills.
I am concerned that just throwing new tools at the learner without the needed support will lead to the glib, reactive and superficial blog entries that I have been held up to me as examples. Taking a quote from another web page and prefacing it with, “I thought that this was interesting because it relates to X” is not reflective writing.
