Thing #4

Blog writing, in general, seems like a very laid back form of writing. Many contributors took time to make sure their writing included facts to back up their opinions as well as links to other sites that they referred to while writing. There was generally a variety of writing samples where the authors were sometimes direct, sometimes factual, sometimes colorful, sometimes just plain cute as in the 2nd graders blog about ducks. Most provided some information, it wasn't just opinions. I found that blog reading can be tedious, and took weeding through much information to get to a few good ideas from responding bloggers. It may have felt this way because I was choosing blogs from a preselected list of blog posts. Had I been independently participating, either writing my own blog, or reading/responding to a blog that I had chosen to go to on my own, it may not have seemed so tedious. While I do not see myself reading or writing blogs for entertainment, I did find at least one to be entertaining. Blogging was very much like a conversation between a group (classroom type discussions). I saw value in the development of the discussion about homework as each person posting continued to expand their ideas, and thus the conversation, about assigning homework, taking into consideration what the previous (or original) blogger had written. This was an excellent example of how you might want a blog to work with your class at school to facilitate learning. I am uncertain about a blogging literacy. I did not see any use of acronyms or text-messaging type of spelling. Most bloggers used language & grammar that was correct. The conversations were easy to follow. I did notice that often, the comments just went on and on. In the Why I Don't Assign Homework blog, the conversation developed and redeveloped. In the blog about plastic grocery bags, the conversation just went on and on about the same thing. I wanted to quit reading, but was afraid I would miss a great pearl of wisdom if I didn't read it all (that is where the tedious came in although the original post was interesting information). Also, in Spies Like Us by CoolCatTeacher, while the actual blog post was very factual and good information to have, the comments tended to be thank you for talking about this or that was a good idea instead of an evolving discussion.