Blogging appears to be a useful tool for discussing a topic in great detail from many different views. Reading a blog is very different to me from reading from a textbook, newspaper, magazine, or any other paper communication tool. Everything is in a fairly narrow vertical area and does not allow you to scan all of the content at one time. Instead you scroll through the material to read it or find what you are looking for, because you are limmited to the size of the computer screen you are using to access the information. After reading through the recommended blogs as well as other content on the internet, I can say that I do prefer reading out of a book. I can get more information in less time, because I can easily look over the content that I am not interested when reading out of a large book. For some reason, when I am looking at a blog I feel the need to read everything I see and thus spend more time than I would like obtaining the desired information. My time seems to be waisted rather than used to its fullest extent.
A positive difference is that when blogging you appear to have more tools on the internet to use in demonstrations (in my case mathematics). You can link to videos and (I imagine) include music on your blog which is not something any other written form of communication can do. This can add an incredible amount of interest to your topic and even set the mood you want when reading your material posted.
Commenting is a very unique aspect to blogging. When writing an article or book the reader can never talk or interact with the author. Blogging has totally chnaged that and it seems to have a lot of positive results. I was really interested in everyone's take on homework, or lack there of. The discussions of math teachers and how they assigned homework was interesting. The only way to get all of the different views on this topic was to see how his readers were commenting.
It also can be used to allow students to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of specific topics. I really enjoyed the students' posts in this SCRIBE blog from another math teacher. A scribe is a student summary of a lesson that is posted in a blog. The best scribes are selected by teachers and other students and are added to the "Scribe Hall of Fame." It was a very different way to assess the learning of each student and can even add to the learning of the student readers of the scribe posts because the info could be presented in a different (and possibly more meaningful)manner than the original lesson.
1 comment:
I too am a Math teacher, and see the scribe as maybe one tool I could use in the class. I was not impressed with the particular blog because of all the different color font and the organization made it hard to read.
In your post, you did mention something that I did not think of before, and I think it is a definite advantage is that with blogging, you can communicate/interact with the author of the article.
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