Chris Lehmann writes about what blogging is, or at least should be:

It’s about putting ideas out there, exploring them, sharing them, and taking part in a larger community. Sometimes, yes, it’s just about an announcement or two, but at its best, my blogging helps me think, brings others into my thought process and improves it because of their input and forces me to make sense of my thoughts — which is why it’s so damned hard sometimes.

I feel this.  There’s some tension around these parts (”these parts” being where my practical and utopian sides meet and wrestle) when it comes to what the purpose of all this blogging really is.  There are some teachers here who are just getting into blogging, and that’s great, but since I (and by extension, my ENG213 classes) are being held up as a model, I feel some real pressure to demonstrate a real honest-to-goodness need for blogging on something like Edublogs, versus something like Nicenet or, for goodness sakes, our official school website thing.

I can spend five minutes a day and use this blog, this space, as a place to post assignments.  This is not a bad idea.  I have plenty of students who miss class from time to time, due to illness or vacations, and it’s great for them to be able to keep up with what’s going on.  And since my assignments are, for the most part, either in a book that the students have been issued, or else in a text that’s available online, that solves a lot of problems.  But I’m afraid that if I just model that, then the students’ blogs will just contain perfunctory responses that don’t really benefit from being in a public space, for public consumption, and inviting public response.

So I’m trying, I really am, to make this a more reflective space and to encourage my students to reflect more.  I think the racism posts are a step in the right direction, but every time I get excited I immediately have to ask for more.  If anyone has any ideas, please, by all means, post them–I’m looking for anything I can get.  I just don’t know how to take them over that ridge and into the vast meadow of reflective readership.