Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

There’s been a bit of a revival in the family conversation around the tea table about blogging recently. My two children have been blogging for years. Last night, my younger daughter revealed that she blogs no more.

These were the reasons she gave:

• My friends write (on their blogs) about the minutiae of their lives, which generally are not interesting because nobody is doing anything different (their lives are like mine);
• Whenever I wrote about my feelings on my blog, my friends comment that that’s not what I should be doing on a blog because it might hurt other people’s feelings;
• I’ve got a lot of other things to do which are more interesting that writing about the minutiae of my life (acting in two productions, reading all the books and watching the 1001 films ‘before I die’ list, covering the ceiling of my bedroom with pictures, mementoes etc.).

I find these comments interesting on a number of levels. She’s clearly outgrown the ‘online diary’ phase and become bored with the concept of peer-to-peer blogging. She’s yet to discover that blogging can be writing about so many things and there are other audiences out there. This is where I see the role of the teacher and educator being so important. While many recognise their role as widening their students’ perspectives, they often fail to adopt and channel methods that their students’ have adopted as their own. This brings me back to considering one of my top tips – “Look at what they [learners] do with computers, don’t take the idea and impose rules and restrictions, but increase the contexts and opportunities to make it more fulfilling and rounded”.