Greg’s Blog

David Warlick in this post poses a number of questions he suggests should be asked by those evaluating/writing blogs. They could equally apply to creating any web-presence ….[my ideas in square brackets like this]

“My questions were intended to be very simple starters of much larger questions, which were eloquently expressed by the commentors, and those who continued the discussions in their own blogs.

1. What did you read [or know?] in order to write this blog?
This is certainly not limited to reading. The broader question is what preparations did you or the blogger you are reading make in writing this entry, or what stimulus provoked the writing? This question seem useful on many levels, not just for academic assessment, but simply in being a responsible communicator in an increasingly networked digital world.

2. What do you think is important about your blog entry?
These questions are worded in the way that they are so that they can be answered in many ways from many perspectives. What was the goal of the writing? Did it seem to have a goal? Are you considering saving this blog for any reason, and if so, why? Would you recommend this blog entry to others, and if so, why? It may not be important. It may be entertaining. Or it may not be anything. But this needs to be thought about.

3. What are both the other sides of your issue?
I think that this could be the most important question, and it is a question that we need to somehow make it our students??? habit to ask. It is a responsibility of literate people, in this astoundingly democratic information landscape, to see, consider, and, in most cases, respect both sides of the issue. [in order to pose a point of view or argument that is not easily refutable or obviously flawed you will need to do this! - see the viewpoint of others]

4. What do you want your readers to know, believe, or do?
This probably points back to the previous questions, and asks the readers how successful the blog entry was, or the blog writer, how success will be indicated [ is not the eliciting of action or thought the main objective of many a blog entry????] . We communicate for a reason. We want to convince people to help us, respect us, believe the same things that we believe, know the same things that we know, or a multitude of other goals for our writing. We may simply what to make people laugh or cry.

5. What else do you need to say?” [ good point - we may simply be being provocative!]

… so it is all about teaching children (and ourselves) to be effective writers of transactional prose then? We make our point through immersion, synthesis, forming opinions, and expressing ourselves concisely and clearly.
Something I read recently was suggesting a good blog entry is no longer than two or three hundred words. The text equivalent of sound-bites??

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Learning and Teaching, Pedagogy, Social Software, Web 2.0, blogging, opinion.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.