But there is another group that also deserves to be recognized here - my students. Over the past three years, I have introduced three different grade eight classes to blogging. I cannot say that every single student enjoyed blogging, I cannot even say that every single one of them benefited from this innovative and unique approach. One thing, however, that I can state with certainty is that every single grade eight student who entered my classroom in the past three years has taught me one very important thing about both myself and teaching - the best teachers never stop learning.

This past year - the final year of my doctoral research - has been especially illuminating. It helped put into perspective some of the findings that I collected in the first year of my study. It was a time of reflection and a time of looking forward, a time when many of my initial observations in the grade eight blogosphere led to some important realizations, realizations that have completely transformed who I am as a teacher. Some of these moments of epiphany are documented here on this blog. This is one of them, and this one, which took months to develop and is especially valuable because it emerged from my own often uncertain practice, is nominated for the 2007 EduBlog Award in the Most Influential Post category. The fact that the ideas in this entry, although seemingly simple, took months to develop makes this nomination especially meaningful.

It is also a great honour to be in the same category with some of the entries that I have printed out after the first reading and gone back to on a number of occasions because they seemed to open yet another door, because they challenged and inspired me. These include:

Ben Wilkoff’s The Ripe Environment
Karl Fisch’s Is it Okay to be a Technologically Illiterate Teacher?
Kris Bradburn’s How to Prevent Another Leonardo DaVinci

I am also honoured to be in the company of the following inspiring educators:

Clay Burrell
Vicki Davis
Graham Wegner

who, along with me, have been nominated in the Best Teacher Blog category. Their work has often made me ask that crucial question: “And what am I doing that’s making a difference?” It’s important to have people like that in one’s RSS reader. Thank you for sharing your work!

As a relatively new resident of Second Life, I would also like to mention two people whose help and guidance have been invaluable in my journey as a Second Life resident, user, and researcher. Sean FitzGerald and Jo Kay have been nominated in the Best Educational Use of a Virtual World category. Jo’s Second Life island, jokaydia, has already been host to a number of meaningful educational events (and will also host the 2007 EduBlog Award Ceremony!). Jo and Sean’s Second Life in Education Wiki is a rich and indispensable resource for any educator interested in exploring Second Life. It is great to see that their work has been recognized.

This year’s EduBlog awards have also made me aware of new voices from many different categories whose work has already been added to my RSS reader.

It’s an honour to be in the company of educators who continue to reflect and grow. Let’s keep in mind, however, that the nominees in this year’s EduBlog Awards are just a small sampling of all the valuable blogs, wikis, and other resources that we continue to both produce and rely on as educators trying to make meaning of learning in the 21st century.

Today, I want to respond to your questions about student-teacher relationship and technology. I’ve selected the following questions from the list you sent me:

You mentioned that sometimes you end up talking about things not within the curriculum while you are establishing relationships with the students. What would you consider the balance to produce such effective bonds, but also obtain the goals of vigorous curricula?

To what extent do you think you can expose yourself as a mere human being, and not a teacher in your blogs and classroom settings?

Through your blogs, you make yourself seem more “human” to your students and they get to know you on a personal basis. Does that affect the way they treat you as a teacher?

What difficulties do you anticipate as the students start to perceive you in your other role as someone who can learn from them? Do you think that you will come upon classroom management problems? What feedback have you received from the community about your use of technology in the classroom?

How do you censor how much you should tell or show your students about yourself?

Do you ever loose the respect of the students when you actively show them you don’t know everything about your given subject?

These questions reveal the same apprehensions that I experienced when I first decided to redefine my teacherly voice and modify my classroom presence. They betray fear of losing control and the reputation of the content expert. I think it’s understandable - we are taught, after all, that in order to become successful and effective teachers, we need to become experts in our chosen fields and project an aura of expertise. Parents and students expect the teacher to be knowledgeable. Consequently, the decision to “learn with the students,” to use one’s own personal blog in the class blogosphere, to engage as a participant and a co-learner, often leads us to think that we will lose the respect of our students and that we will no longer really teach. The question immediately arises - how will my students benefit from being in my class if I don’t actively teach them?

At the same time, it would be silly to try to use blogs or wikis, for example, and try to preserve the traditional type of teacherly presence. These new tools demand that we assume the role of a facilitator and a co-learner. They really don’t work very well when the teacher insists on being in complete control and dictating how students engage as learners. They demand a more democratic and participatory approach.

So, how do we reconcile the new technology with the traditional expectations of most parents and students that we enter the classroom as subject experts? How do we encourage personal inquiry in our students and also maintain the traditional teacherly voice?

Needless to say, as the new technologies open up new vistas for exploration and personal engagement, educators struggle with how they can best meet these traditional expectations and adapt their practice to suit the new reality of a more conversational and participatory approach to learning brought about by the new tools of web 2.0. Leigh Blackall echoed many of my thoughts on this topic when he expressed this dilemma and the resulting frustrations in one of his recent posts. His ideas prompted me to comment on the process of losing the teacherly voice. I’d like to reiterate here the thoughts that I shared in response to his entry.

Losing the Authoritarian Voice

First of all, I’ve come to the conclusion that losing the teacherly voice is not the equivalent of losing the voice of an expert. When I first started blogging with my students and using my blog to learn and not just dispense knowledge or post evaluative comments about my students’ progress, I was under the impression that, in order to lose my teacherly voice, I would have to stop being an expert. I thought that, in order to be a participant and a co-learner, I had to learn along with my students. It took me a while to realize that I was wrong. How can I possibly say to my students that we will be learning together about Elizabethan drama, for example? I already know a lot about that topic. I cannot pretend that I don’t. In fact, I probably shouldn’t because they are in my class to learn from me, and they expect me to be their guide and introduce them to the topic.

And so, the challenge is that when I try to divest myself of my teacherly voice I need to remember that this process is not about losing the voice of the expert but about losing the voice of the traditional authoritarian teacher who enters the classroom as an official persona armed with a pre-defined set of goals and very specific lesson plans for his students to follow. It is about giving the students the freedom to engage with ideas that they find relevant and interesting, not about dictating every step of their learning process.

I believe that it is important to lose the authoritarian voice, the controlling voice, but not the voice of an expert who chose to teach because of his passion for the subject. The students need to see that the instructor is someone who lives and breathes whatever it is that they’re studying, that they have in their midst someone who has a wealth of expertise.

I think that the best way of losing that voice is to say the following:

“I’ve been teaching Elizabethan drama for a long time, but there are still many things that I don’t know very well. So, this term, while you research Elizabethan drama and related topics that you find interesting, I will research one specific aspect of Elizabethan drama that always interested me but that I never really had a chance to explore.”

Saying this to my class suggests that I still see myself as an expert. It also shows that I am a learner, someone who wants to use his blog to research things he’s passionate about. The voice of an expert is still there in that comment, but the traditional teacher persona has disappeared.

Modeling Personal Investment

In one of my recent posts, I suggested that I had decided to use my own blog as a more personal space. I decided to give it a meaningful title and blog about things that I am interested in: film, music, architecture, human rights. Clearly, most of these entries have nothing to do with the work we do in class. But the point here is to lead by example, to show the students that I am more than a subject expert, that I am a multi-dimensional being whose life is not limited to Elizabethan drama, or essay writing, or grammar, or reading Victorian novels. It shows that blogging is about reflection and thoughtful engagement with ideas that are important to us. How can I expect the students to take blogging seriously, if I use my own blog in the class blogosphere only to post assignments and evaluations? They need to see that blogging is about personal investment.

This strategy can have a very positive effect on building a solid relationship with my students. They get to know me as a person, not just a teacher. They see the richness that is in every human being who engages with ideas and shares his or her thoughts. When they see how much you care about different things in your life and how much time you take to reflect on them, their respect for you as a human being and a teacher can only increase.

Does all that writing about things that are important to me personally detract from the curriculum? I don’t think it does. I do think, however, that it redefines what we mean by curriculum. It redefines the curriculum because it shows the students that any topic is of value if it studied in reflective manner, if it is approached as a field to be explored. Northrop Frye once said that “it takes a good deal of maturity to see that every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge, and that it doesn’t matter so much what you learn when you learn it in a structure that can expand into other structures.” In other words, knowledge is not a series of fragmented and carefully compartmentalized units (although school does a great job of presenting it that way). Young people who see that their teacher blogs about things he finds meaningful are more likely to see blogs as personal spaces where they can be themselves and explore ideas that are personally relevant. They begin to see their blogs as a powerful medium for research, communication, expression, and reflection. (For a very insightful glimpse into a classroom where personal engagement works very well, check out Graham Wegner’s Starting Next Round Of Personal Research Projects.

Once they engage as individuals, once they find something that they want to explore as independent researchers, they become hooked and committed. This presents a perfect opportunity to work with them individually on specific skills that can help them improve their work and learn how to more effectively communicate their ideas. In other words, I don’t need the whole class to study the same thing in order to help them become better writers, readers, researchers, or critical thinkers. In fact, my chances of helping them develop in all those areas are much greater when I can interact with them in the context of their own research. Instructional conversations work well only when the students’ sense of ownership is already present.

In other words, I think it’s important for me to redefine my teacherly voice so that the students see me as a learner and not only as an educator. I think it’s important to show them that learning happens when we engage with ideas that we find personally meaningful. Of course, in order to do that we must first be prepared to grant them the freedom and provide the forum where they can become independent researchers. That, let’s face it, is not always easy.

What I am really concerned about, however, is my own voice. For the past three years, my three successive grade eight classes enjoyed blogging and created successful and engaging blogging communities. Most of the time, this development took place without me. While I certainly encouraged my bloggers, discussed their work in class, and posted comments to involve my students in instructional conversations, I have always been absent as a person. This year, I want things to be different.

This year, I want my personal voice to be present in the community. I will, of course, continue to be present as Mr.Glogowski, the grade eight Language Arts teacher. I will be present in my didactic and supportive role of an educator, of a classroom teacher who guides and explains. At the same time, I want to be present as Konrad Glogowski, the human being who has his own interests and views. I want to be present as an individual, not an individual reduced to one role.

In other words, I want the students to see me as yet another blogger in their community, as someone whose reason for being there is not only to support and instruct but also to learn. To learn from and with my students.

My own blog in our class blogosphere has always been used to post updates, assignments, commentary on student work, and words of encouragement. For years, it was called “The Language Arts Blog,” or “Mr. Glogowski’s Blog” or something equally official and unimaginative. The name of my blog has always reflected my one-dimensional presence in the community - the voice of a teacher. I don’t think my students ever perceived it as a blog - a place where the author shares his thoughts, ideas, or experiences and engages in meaning-making. It was a place that my students would visit regularly to read their latest assignment or download a rubric. I don’t think they ever learned anything from my own blog. They learned from the instructional conversations that I engaged with them on their own blogs, but certainly not from my own blog in the class blogosphere. It has always been an uninspiring place, a kind of online bulletin board.

Last year, I started experimenting by posting entries that reflected my own interests. However, I always made sure that they also related to the curriculum. When we read and discussed Animal Farm, for example, I posted some links to articles on totalitarian leaders or on the fragile nature of democracy in developing nations. There needed to be, it seemed to me, a clear link between what we were reading in class and what the students saw on my blog. Everything that I posted on my blog was designed to cultivate an adopted persona and to fit within the confines of the curriculum.

This year, I want to move beyond blogging only about course-related topics. I want my students to see what I am interested in, what makes me mad, what fascinates me, what I write like when I write as someone other than Mr.Glogowski, the Language Arts teacher. In short, I want to be myself and am beginning to take small steps towards this goal.

I started by giving my blog a different name. The titles I used before were too official, too limiting, too school-like. They were institutional and impersonal. This year, the title of my blog is “…looking at things for a long time.” It comes from a quote by Vincent Van Gogh, which, in its entirety, reads: “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper understanding.” I chose it because I feel that it represents who I am as a person and a teacher. I chose it because I believe that the habit Van Gogh recommends in this quote is something that I want my students to develop as well. I want them to be critical, attentive readers and thinkers. I want them to take the time to achieve that “deeper understanding.”

I also chose an avatar. I chose the picture of the fern globe suspended above the Civic Square in Wellington, New Zealand that I took last year (almost exactly a year ago) while participating in the FLNW unconference. It represents one of the most inspiring experiences in my life as an educator and researcher. It also, as a globe, represents unity and peace - values that are important to me as a human being and educator.

In addition to using an avatar, I also used the “About Me” feature of my blog to post a paragraph that explains my reasons for choosing the title and the avatar. My students need to know the reasons behind these decisions - they will provide them with an important glimpse into my personality. They will help them see me as more than just their Language Arts teacher.

The “About Me” page of my blog also contains two quotes that represent my views on writing:

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
- Thomas Mann

“Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.”
- John Ruskin

I also uploaded my own background image to further personalize my blog. It is no longer just a virtual class bulletin board. It’s becoming a place that reflects the values and interests of its owner:

Of course, these visual changes, while important, are not sufficient to transform my blog into a personal online space. Blogs, after all, are defined by writing, and not merely their appearance. So, this morning, I posted my first personal entry. I wrote about an article on the recent protests in Myanmar and commented on the treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been held under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years. I also linked to a call to action video recorded by Jim Carrey. The post has little to do with what we are currently studying in class. I wrote about it because it moved me as a human being. I posted it on my personal blog in the class blogosphere because I want my students to understand who I am as a human being. Why? Mostly because that human being will walk into their classroom tomorrow. If we are to be a community of learners, we need to know each other as individuals, not people who, for six hours every day, play assigned roles.

In other words, I don’t believe teachers should engage in self-censorship. If we do, then our students end up interacting with an automaton, an actor performing a role. Our schools, administrators, and classrooms cannot demand that the richness that makes us human be stripped down because the students are only fourteen, for example, and should not read about human rights abuses, or because time in class should be used only to study the curriculum.

Tomorrow, I will post an entry about a book I started reading last week. It is entitled 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa. It does not relate to our grade eight curriculum. It does, however, reflect my interest in social justice and I will blog about it every time I finish a chapter or two because that is how I learn, that is how I interact with things that I find important. So, I’m beginning to use my blog to define myself as more than a classroom teacher. Mr. Glogowski, the teacher, is an important part of my life, but it should not exclude other aspects of what makes me who I am.

So, fairly soon, my students will see that I am more than my role as a Language Arts teacher suggests. They will see that I am a teacher who is also interested in social justice, foreign affairs, and human rights. They will see that I am a teacher who is also interested in photography and who collects old books and maps. They will get many glimpses into my life. I hope that they will understand that what makes a community is a network of human beings who have the freedom to be who they truly are and whose richness enhances the value of the community they inhabit.

If education is essentially a social process, then the teacher needs to be part of the learning community, not only as its facilitator but also as one of its members. When students are part of a learning community, a blog titled “Mr.Glogowski’s Blog” will stick out and suggest that the community is really a school-sanctioned place where Mr. Glogowski presides because he has already learned all there is to know about his subject. I do not know all there is to know. I use Web 2.0 to expand my knowledge and to engage in meaning-making. I want to be connected to the class community as a learner. I want my students to see how I engage in negotiating meaning.

I have taken the steps I described above because I believe that a teacher’s blog needs to be a personal space. It needs to be a place where I become visible as an individual and where my experiences - joys, disappointments, struggles, successes, moments of inspiration and epiphany - are shared with the community. It needs to be a place of authentic personal attempts at meaning-making, a place where I engage as Konrad Glogowski and not only as Mr.Glogowski, the content expert.

In her preface to Teaching Community, bell hooks argues that her book “offers practical wisdom about what we do and can continue to do to make the classroom a place that is life-sustaining and mind-expanding, a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student together work in partnership.” There can be no true partnership in a classroom where the teacher can hide behind an adopted persona while students are encouraged to be individual learners and bloggers. We cannot expect students to engage as individuals, to blog as human beings, to share their experiences, passions, interests, and struggles if, as teachers, we are not willing to do the same.

And so, my inspiration for the coming weeks comes from Teaching to Transgress where bell hooks states:

When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging others to take risks. Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share. When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators. It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material. But most professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit.

Two approaches proved to be quite effective: instructional scaffolding and the related concept of instructional conversations, often defined as “a dialogue between teacher and learners in which the teacher listens carefully to grasp the students’ communicative intent, and tailors the dialogue to meet the emerging understanding of the learners” (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991). Over the past two years, I have been learning to make instructional scaffolding (or its variations) a natural part of my classroom.

According to Judith A. Langer, instructional scaffolding “builds on analyses of the characteristics of parent/child interaction that contribute to the rapid pace of early language development” (1984). She argues that the following five characteristics of instructional interaction are critical to successful classroom activities (Langer, 1984; Applebee & Langer, 1983; 1984). I would add that they also work quite well in the context of a class blogging community.

Ownership of the Learning Event

Langer argues that in order to use instructional scaffolding teachers need to ensure that the students have ownership of the learning event: “the instructional task must permit students to make their own contribution to the activity as it evolves, thus allowing them to have a sense of ownership for their work” (Langer, 1984, p.123). The project can be initiated or suggested by the teacher as long as the student has his or her own reasons for participating in the activity and is given opportunities to develop the topic as an independent researcher.

In other words, think about teaching English or social studies by organizing the course around one broad theme - social justice, for example. Then, give your students the freedom to pick specific aspects of that broad theme and then research them. As a class, the students will be engaged in exploring a variety of readings and events related to this topic but, as individual researchers, they will be able to focus on a very specific aspect of the topic and make their own contribution within the context of a class community of researchers.

Appropriateness of the Instructional Task

The task that the student is engaged in needs to be based, to some degree, on the skills and knowledge that the student already possesses. However, it “must pose problems that cannot be solved without further help.” Let’s say that the student has chosen a specific aspect of the broader topic of social justice and is in the process of collecting information and resources. In today’s world of the world wide web and information overload, the student can begin to feel lost amid all the information. This presents the teacher with a perfect opportunity to introduce RSS, for example, or a tool that can be used to aggregate video clips, such as VodPod or a YouTube account. It also presents a perfect opportunity to work with the student on specific curriculum related skills, such as summarizing. This can also be a fantastic opportunity to help the student start a research journal (on her blog, using a del.icio.us account, or a tumble log) or use mindmapping to develop a plan for further research. The point here is that once the student feels stuck, overwhelmed, or discouraged, a perfect opportunity presents itself for the teacher (or a more knowledgeable peer) to step in and offer support.

Supportive Instruction

In fact, this is where real teaching takes place. According to Tharp and Gallimore, two neo-Vygotskian researchers, “real teaching is understood as assisting the learner to perform just beyond his or her current capacity” (1991). This interaction in the student’s zone of proximal development awakens those faculties which have not yet matured but whose “buds,” as Vygotsky calls them, are already emerging. Langer explains that this process could take the form of “direct instruction in the form of questioning, modeling, or constructive dialogue … to help the student develop a successful approach to the task.” In other words, the student who has by now become passionate about the task needs to learn certain skills in order to complete it. Motivation is thus built into this process. The teacher engages in dialogue with the student only when the student is already motivated by both the work that has already been done and the student’s own goal that she is working towards. Whatever the student needs to master will be done not in the context of schooling, or in preparation for a test, but in the natural context of the activity chosen by the student - in a context that is meaningful to the student. The student won’t mind the teacher’s involvement (or that of her peers) because the sense of ownership is already present. In fact, that involvement will be seen by the student as one of the steps necessary to achieve the personal goal.

This is where instructional conversation is most effective. Once the student is engaged as a researcher/writer/thinker, the teacher can focus on conversing with the student. In a blogging classroom, the student’s individual blog can thus become an “activity setting” which, according to Tharp and Gallimore, maximizes “opportunities for coparticipation and instructional conversation with the teacher and, frequently, with peers” (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991). Instruction, in other words, becomes a communicative event.

Shared Responsibility

As a result, both the traditional view of school work and the role of the teacher are redefined by supportive instruction. The traditional role of evaluator is reconfigured in this context because the focus switches from testing how much the student has learned to assisting her in exploring new ideas and building her own knowledge. It shifts from testing prior knowledge to assisting in developing new understanding. The teacher is no longer waiting passively for the project to be completed and handed in. Instead, he or she is actively involved in the student’s research. The student and the teacher become co-participants, engaged in building knowledge.

Internalization

Langer claims that, over time, as the student internalizes the new patterns of learning and the new approaches to learning practiced with the teacher, the teacher needs to recognize that growth by adapting instructional strategies. The focus here is to extend learning and to understand that the relationship between the student and the subject matter has changed and that, in fact, it continues to evolve. Once the initial scaffolding has done its job, it is no longer needed and can be replaced by a different set of scaffolds, a different kind of teacher involvement.

The sense of partnership that developed through the initial set of instructional conversations needs to evolve in order to be of benefit to the student. Since I now know (I have seen) that my student has made progress, I need to use different tools and engage in different conversations in order to ensure that the student does not see my involvement as patronizing or intrusive. The set of competencies that developed as a result of our instructional conversations now demands that our conversations increase in sophistication. The old rubrics, in other words, can no longer be used in this context. The rubric used in September will be inappropriate in May - there has been too much internalization and my attempts at assessment or evaluation have to reflect the progress made by my student.

Why Instructional Scaffolding?

I think that the most important impact of instructional scaffolding is that it dethrones the teacher from the traditional role of content expert. It also ensures that the transmission model no longer dominates classroom discourse. Learning happens because the students are involved in the process of researching their own topics. Schooling gets replaced by conversations about things that matter to the students.

From the point of view of instructional scaffolding, blogging and, specifically, blogging in a supportive community of peers, becomes a psychological tool - the practical activity that the student is engaged in is internalized and allows for the development of higher-order cognitive operations:

Many relations that first appear in real group activity are later internalized by the student as the relations between his or her inner intellectual processes. Thus the role of the teacher as an expert and advisor working within the group becomes internalized by the child as his own function of reference and control. (Kozulin, 1998, 57)

The instructional conversations that we engage in with our students (or interactions that the students have with their peers) are likely to be internalized so that the next time our students face a similar problem they will no longer need support. They will most likely need support with a different and more complex problem, but not something that has already been tackled in an instructional conversation. As a result, our conversations will continue to evolve and increase in sophistication. That progress towards increasingly more challenging tasks emerges from the student’s own involvement, not from our curriculum expectations. To me, this means that while instructional conversations can certainly seem like a template to be applied in a blogging classroom, the role of the teacher will always follow a different trajectory depending on the needs of the students. What we do depends on what the students are working on and not on a pre-defined notion of what a grade nine English teacher, for example, needs to teach.

What emerges from all this is the kind of learning that is de-institutionalized, where every student is not defined as a unit to be taught but as an individual who is free to learn and who can rely on the support of a more knowledgeable peer or the teacher.

Instructional scaffolding is not easy to implement with a class of thirty students. It requires time and demands that we read carefully everything that the students write. In my classroom, I see it as an approach that demands that I do the following:

_____________________________
Notes:

Applebee, A.N. & J.A. Langer (1983). Instructional scaffolding: Reading and writing as natural language activities. Language Arts 60, 168-175.

Langer, J.A. (1984). Literacy instruction in American schools: problems and perspectives. American Journal of Education. 93, 107-132.

Langer J.A. & A.N. Applebee (1984). Language, learning, and interaction: A framework for improving the teaching of writing. In A.N. Applebee (Ed.), Contexts for learning to write: Studies of secondary school instruction. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Tharp, R.G. & R. Gallimore, (1991). The Instructional Conversation: Teaching and Learning in Social Activity. Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence. NCRCDSLL Research Reports. Paper rr02. http://repositories.cdlib.org/crede/ncrcdsllresearch/rr02

We did not use all of the above but the ones that we did use helped in two significant ways. First of all, they made it easier to navigate around the online community by displaying links to all student blogs and to the most frequently discussed entries. Secondly, they also helped create a sense of community among the students by making all contributions (posts, comments, photos) clearly visible. It helped the students see the global progress of the community and their own place within it.

One of the most valuable features of this platform, however, turned out to be the ability to personalize the look of each individual blog.

For the very first time since I started using blogs in my classes (over three years ago), the platform I chose allowed my students to customize the look of their individual blogs. The software I used before (Manila, LifeType) allowed users to change the themes (I had to upload them first in order to make them available to my students) but did not give my students the freedom to personalize any of the specific aspects of each theme, such as the blog header, the background, or the colour and size of the font.

Unlike the other software we used in the past, 21classes allows every blogger to modify the background, the header, and the colour and size of all fonts - practically every little detail of one’s blog. The students can also choose from a variety of different widgets that can be embedded in the blog’s side panels (Calendar, About Me, My Favourite Blogs, Most Recent Comments, etc.).

So What?

As administrator of our 21classes.com portal, I was able to give my students the opportunity to pick a theme and then modify it. At the beginning of the term, when I gave them one class to get to know the community and the software, the students used it to learn how to modify their blogs. These are some of the questions and conversations that I overheard and jotted down:

How do you change the title?
You mean the header?
Yeah. That top banner.

How did you change your background to yellow?
You can upload a picture, too. See?

Can you change the size of the font?
Where?
In my title.
Sure. You can change the colours, too. Just pick a theme and then click on it. That opens a new page … here I’ll show you.

Look at …’s blog. She changed the borders. How do you do that?

In other words, they spent one hour and then also some time at home learning how to personalize their blogs. Most of them kept the same theme and modifications throughout the term. Some made minor changes on a regular basis.

Why is this important? I believe that the effort they had put forth to personalize their spaces contributed greatly to their sense of ownership and involvement as writers. Initially, I was concerned that this would lead to an undue preoccupation with the visual appeal of their blogs and distract them from the focus of our blogging community - writing and research. It didn’t. The students seemed aware of the fact that the visual appeal of the blog, no matter how inspiring, would not ensure readership. They knew that conversations emerge from interactions with and about texts.

The ability to create a virtual space that is uniquely one’s own turned out to be much more important than I had anticipated. It helped the students define themselves as individuals, not pupils who use a teacher-sanctioned tool to post work. When I compare student blogs from two years ago or from last year to the personalized blogs that the students created with 21Classes, I see a collection of individuals, not a classroom. I see evidence of personal engagement but no evidence of an institutional setting. The uniformity that the other platforms forced upon us was gone and what emerged was a creative and engaging mosaic. Take a look:

Some of the students modified their blogs to reflect the focus of their research, not their personalities. Take a look at the following examples (move your mouse over the photo to see explanatory notes on my Flickr site):

Blogging is about personal expression. The ability to personalize one’s space is something that needs to be an integral part of every community. I believe that it is an important building block that can help us build communities with our students. If a blogging community focuses primarily on creation then why not start by creating one’s space, one’s atelier where the process of creation will take place?

This reminds me of John Dewey’s statement that the self depends for its wholeness upon its surroundings (Art as Experience). In other words, what impacts the work of every individual blogger is not just the community itself or the connections made in the World Wide Web but also the immediate environment where he or she creates and “resides.” This immediate environment also allows students to become emotionally attached to their spaces. Without that involvement, Dewey argues, there can only be craftsmanship and not art. In other words, a blog I cannot personalize is a place where I have no control and no personal investment. This will greatly limit my ability to engage as an individual.

Perhaps I’m exaggerating but it seems to me that it is important to use a blogging tool that allows students to redefine their spaces as other than strictly academic sites of engagement. I have spent quite a bit of time looking at the screenshots above and have come to the conclusion that, for the most part, they do not look like school writing journals. Yes, you can see that the students are clearly engaged in school work and that there are certain elements that make these blogs similar (the “About Me” page or the link to the home page of our community), but there is also a lot of individuality in each blog. There is evidence of personal and creative engagement. These are (or have the potential to become) out-of-school learning spaces and not just school journals.

Of course, one can argue that it is all about contributions and ideas, not visual appeal. I agree. At the same time, I think it is crucial to allow all participants to create sites of inquiry that are uniquely their own. To some, this might mean using widgets. Others might choose to modify the header or font size. Whatever it is, as teachers we need to remember that it all starts with freedom - this is not just about creativity but also about stretching the boundaries and the control that characterize institutional settings.

I want my students to be able to say “This is where I write about things that I am interested in,” not “This is my school blog.” In other words, perhaps it’s time to liberate my students from the mindset of uniformity imposed upon me by the school and, instead of telling them to come to an online place that I have chosen, ask them to give me addresses of their own electronic spaces. Instead of saying, “Bookmark this URL, this is where all our blogs are going to be,” I could say, “Give me all your URLs - flickr, facebook, myspace, blogger - wherever you are - so that I can put them into one OPML file for all of us to share.”

I realize that due to various institutional constraints, many of us may not be able to use that approach for a very long time. Giving our students the freedom to build their own spaces, even within a teacher-sanctioned portal, is a good start.