Blog Moving Day

Today was blog moving day. A quick tour around learnerblogs, a 10 minute Word Press tutorial and off the students went. They quickly got it. They have gained enough experience this year using web - based tools that they found their way around the software fairly easily. Word Press gives them much more control over their content, their templates, and also lets them look at ideas like referrers, something they did not consider before.

What was most interesting today though was some of the comments made by the kids while they were setting up their new blogs.

"Can't we take our old posts with us?"

"It seems awfully quiet without our other stuff"

"I'm proud of my comments. Do I have to leave them behind?"

"No one will know what who we are and what we've done!"

Similar to what Konrad found when his kids lost their content.

They value what they have written. It has given them an identity in the blogosphere. They have formed connections and people have found them. They are impressed with Word Press, but they are worried about starting over, about finding a new community and about having to re - insert themselves into a network of learners who don't know them because they feel that they have lost their voices and their history.

Blogging has given many of their ideas a sense of permanence. As adults, we feel that blogs are transitory and formative, a space where we can place our ideas down and ask for critique. But for students, while they definitely see the formative nature of blogging, compared to assignments that pass across a teacher's desk and no one else reads them, blogging gives their ideas a sense of time and themselves a sense of progress and change allowing them to refer back to their ideas from the beginning of the school year. What will this be like for kids when they begin blogging during their early years of school and carry on over years?

Moving day is only the beginning, we still have a lot to learn.

technorati tags: blogs, change, learnerblogs

Comments

[Will Richardson]

Amazing how similar my own worries about moving are to the kids. Did we ever even think about what might happen to our old work before blogs?

[James Farmer]

With any luck, in the next upgrade I'll be bale to add an 'import' tool so they can get all their content in that way. It's already in the works but hasn't been totally sorted yet.... so all might not be lost just yet!