Former Marine, Current Student, Future Teacher, but always a Dad!

As I was searching the Internet in this sometimes frustrating quest for information on using Blogs to teach writing I stumbled across this article title: “Moderating and Ethics for the Classroom Instructional Blog”. The subject matter this title alludes is obviously interesting to me in and of itself but what struck me instantly was the simple notion that using a blog in a writing class might lend itself to teach more then writing fundamentals. I thought back to my writing classes in high school and even recently in college and realized that while there is academic integrity involved, I wasn’t really learning more then just the essentials of writing and the subject matter that I was writing about. Does using a blog in the classroom teach more then that?

Lets take the article and its subject I mentioned earlier as a way to begin answering that question. The article talks about ethics. By merely stating that a classroom blog is going to need ethical consideration in its implementation insinuates that ethics (blog or otherwise) will be addressed with the students. Patricia Deubel writes:

 A blog is still a public forum, even in the gated environment of a password-protected class account you might have created with services such as Class BlogMeister or Edublogs.org. Martin Kuhn (2005) suggested that any valid code of blogging ethics needs to consider values both unique to and shared among those in the blogging culture. The ethics debate goes on, and there is still no agreement about best practices, nor how to enforce a code should one be developed (e.g., Bloggers Code Imminent?). However, as educators, we are charged with keeping our students safe and instilling ethical considerations in them. As you monitor a blog, will you delete comments that don’t meet your standards or appear to hurt others? How much free expression should you permit in the K-12 blog? Should learners define their own blogging rules? According to Kuhn, “Any workable code of blog ethics would need to strike a balance between ['factual truth' and 'free expression'] and encourage practices that would enhance both” (p. 6). In general, the rules of engagement in blogs appear to include the need for truth, accuracy, and accountability for what you say, as well as respect for others even when you might disagree with them. There is also need to ensure that bloggers keep private issues private to minimize potential harm to others.

We can now say that blogs have the potential in a very specific context to teach students about ethics. Now that doesn’t mean that students will learn about ethics but this medium (the Blog) lends itself to that outcome in ways that more traditional writing cannot.  Ms. Deubel also mentions “truth, accuracy, and accountability” or ‘factual proof’ and ‘free expression’. Many will say that a traditional writing classroom is also supposed to teach that. I can’t help but think that the publishing to classmates that blogs incorporate would make the individual student much more aware of these issues. It is one thing to write a paper for the eyes of a teacher that is reading 25-100 of the same type paper and quite another to write to your peers who are going to have the opportunity to critique your work in an open forum. Students are forced to back up their “free expression’ with ‘factual truth’ if they are to retain credibility amongst their academic peers. Once this credibility is established one would think that the individual student will also attain self-esteem and intellectual pride in a way that normal writing class couldn’t provide. Some of the critics of blogs will say that the good writers do get those things from the traditional methods whether their work is published or not. This is true but my answer to that is in the form of a question: What’s wrong with using a different methodology that comprises writing distinct skills along with academic and social awareness to help other students to become better writers who might not otherwise do so?         

Moderating and Ethics for the Classroom Instructional Blog
by Patricia Deubel, Ph.D.
The Journal
February 2007