The Potential of Educational Blogging

Now that I have created a blog and posted an entry (see Introduction, below), I am considering the extent to which a tech-savvy teacher might use blogging in an educational capacity. Blogging certainly has some positive potential for classroom application (using the term "classroom" rather loosely, of course), but I find myself viewing it with some skepticism. It seems to me that blogging comes with a multitude of risks, and I fear that it might have an adverse impact on the social element of schooling.

With respect to the risks, I fear that the privacy issues associated with blogging my be too senstive to be placed in the hands of young people. They may lack the maturity or capacity to fully understand the intricacies of freedom of expression, and the potential for breaches of privacy in the public domain is considerable. Indeed, I, a cautious individual by nature, had a difficult time writing my previous blog entry without including personal information that might identify myself or others. For the sake of brevity, I will not elaborate further on this point.

Another concern I have is one related to sociability. While I understand that online interaction is itself a form of sociability, I think that increased student-student or student-teacher interaction via blogging will come at the expense of face-to-face interaction. That is, students uncomfortable with face-to-face social interaction may choose to participate in class discussions and projects online instead of in the classroom. This, in turn, will stunt the development of those students' social and communication skills, which remain important even in our technology-friendly world.

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this, or the benefits of educational blogging may simply outweigh these potential costs (or there may be ways of avoiding these problems altogether, such as security measures for privacy protection). For the time being, however, I am approaching the subject of blogging with some reservation.