Beyond comments

A week ago Jeff Utecht posted A Problem With Blogs, talking about the connections made - and sought - in conversations, on blogs. He made an important point about the function of comments. Great post, wonderful follow up comments. I encourage people to read it and think about how their classroom blogging reflects - or even mirrors - their personal blogging habits.

A few weeks ago I made a concerted effort to get my third graders into the blogosphere beyond where they naturally went. They seemed stuck in writing mode only - as if writing were some narcotic they could not get enough of. Sound ridiculous? Not to me. I had kids staying in from recess, connecting from home, using every minute to put something out there for the worldwide audience. Too cool!!! But that's all many of them did. They rarely read the writing of others. It was all about their writing - and comments they got.

So I gave them time when they could read online ONLY. Silent reading, 2.0. After doing this for a while, and thinking about what Jeff said, I struck out in a new direction. A direction in which many adult bloggers move quite often. Writing about the blogs of others. Recommending other bloggers - as most bloggers do, a Blogrolling kind of thing...

This week I asked my third graders to write about 2 or more bloggers they enjoyed reading. Knowing some would see this as a "friendship" thing, and only mention their own classmates' blogs, I said they could only write about one classmate. The other(s) had to be from other places - and they could even be adult blogs. Pushing them out of the nest, if you will.......

And then, just to see how far the envelope would stretch, I showed them how to hyperlink to those blogs, using raw html. To be clear, the blogging tool they use does not have an html editor, so everything had to be hand coded. They got it. They are so totally amazing in this medium. They helped each other, and they taught me a lot in the process.

They chose their favorite bloggers thoughtfully, I thought. Granted, their experience and exposure to blogs is limited, in large part predetermined by links I preselected and made easy for them to get to.... but I thought they chose well. Here are their posts:

• The Blogs I like
• Blogs I Like
• Blogs That Are Really Cool
• Blogs I Like
• The Blog I Like
• BLOGS I LIKE TO READ
• Cool Blogs
• Blogs I like to read
• Cool Blogs
• The Things I Like About People's Blogs
• My Favorite Blogs
• Blogs I like to Read
• Blogs I like
• Blogs I Like
• Blogs I Like
• Blogs I Like To Read and Why I Like To Read Them
• Blogs I like to read
• These are the Blogs I Recommend you Reading (These are also my Favorite Blogs)

Now what does this have to do with Jeff's posting about conversations and connections? I believe it is about qualitatively different CONTENT. What my kids wrote about this week is different. It is exactly what their blogger teachers write about regularly - about their peers - and what they are thinking and saying. This is extending their writing in a different dimension, I believe. Comments are nice, polite, back patting, and sometimes informative. And indeed, a conversation can occur.

But writing about what others think and how they write is a major leap in a different direction, one in which we are not accustomed to taking our kids, at least I am not, with third graders. Not sure where it leads, but it feels absolutely right.