I ran across a post from Weblogg-ed that got me thinking about school blogs. The topic now appears to be whether specialized blog environments are required for K-12 use. The issue is not whether free or inexpensive blog options are available to teachers (e.g., Blogger.com), but whether the popular alternatives for the general public present some security risks in the classroom (see previous post). The weblogg-ed post suggests some options for educators – David Warlick’s Blogmeister and Alan November’s Learning Communities.
The folks who have taken the trouble to create “educational blog sites” have done great work and I encourge interested educators to explore these sites.
I am interested in educational blogs and have written the software for an “educational blog” for research purposes. I started thinking about some of the security issues and whether or not special “educational blog sites” are needed. Here are some comments:
1) General purpose public sites (blogger.com) are intended to be noticed not to provide security. However, such sites do not necessarily require that attention for the site be encouraged. For example, this blog was predated by a blog I operated for more than a year on Blogger.com (I tried it and it still exists). I tried searching for my original blog (in Goggle) and decided that locating the blog by chance would be very unlikely. If one keeps personal information out of a blog, the odds of locating a blog are not great (try it – another Grabe blog).
2) One approach to specialized educational blogs centers on teachers approving posts before the posts are available to the general public. I assume this allows the teacher to make certain nothing inappropriate or personal appears in student posts. The software used to offer this blog (WordPress) has such a feature (user levels). Any user classified as “level 1” can create what are called drafts rather than posts. Drafts must be approved before they are available to the public. The downside of this software is that a school district would have to install the software on a school server and someone would have to function as blog administrator.
3) A core question is what is it that needs to be controlled – what is posted or who views what is posted? The research tool I wrote requires that any user (writer or reader) be registered. This design defeats the purpose of writing for the general web audience, but it was fairly easy to implement and it allows students to show their work to others (e.g., parents) by first connecting themselves. I took this approach because it seemed a way to focus on communicating for a fixed group in a way that allowed a high level of security (almost to the level of an intranet). I really believe that students would be more motivated by knowing that their work is available to the world, but this openness may not be acceptable to some educators, administrators or parents.
How schools work through the issues of educational value, motivation, and security will be interesting to follow.
