There seems to be a consensus among the comments that blogging is a highly motivational tool for students, but there can be problems with sustaining the conversation and with access to the internet. (I’m going to be thinking about those issues the rest of this week, as well as the nitty-gritty of getting blogs set up and managing a class-worth of bloggers.) There’s a great blog checklist to get the action started, a link to a vivid example of “letting the conversation happen,” and LOTS of blogs-in-action.

Writing a blog could teach kids to be adaptable tinkerers, to develop their own writing style, to develop restraint and tact, to be diligent and follow through. Blogs are very simple at their root, but most blogging software has a wide range of customizable features. Playing with these–trying to get your blog to look a certain way or mimic something else you’ve seen–teaches you how to play with new technology and breaks down the “fear of the new” that can keep adults from experimenting with computers. The regular short format writing necessary for a blog helps the writer develop a personal style. Pen-and-ink journal writing also helps this, of course, but not with the same attention to an audience that a blog does. Bloggers write to inform, to please, or to provoke a response… all necessary forms of writing that good professionals and citizens need to know how to do. Through trial and error, kids can use a blog to learn how to write with good sense and tact, adjust their language to a certain audience, write persuasively, and control their diction.

This type of writing can’t be practiced as easily in a traditional literacy classroom, where revision and the long form which adheres strictly to a given genre. But short-form blog posts more closely mimic a lot of real-world writing we’re called upon to do as adults: composing emails, writing query letters, providing copy for a job, writing a letter to the editor, and participating in academic social communities.