Post #3: Posting now because of my trip

Oravec, Jo Ann. “Bookmarking the World: Weblog Applications in Education.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 45.7. (2002): 616-621.

As the first two articles I mention in this course’s posts cited this article, I decided it might be interesting to see if Jo Ann Oravec said anything that could be useful for my purposes. Oravec immediately makes the case for two important and distinct uses of blogs in education: 1- (the use most-often cited) blogs can be used as a venue for students to create and post their own content and reflections, and 2- (the use I haven’t really seen mentioned in other articles), blogs can be a source of “useful information” and “high quality relevant material” (616).

Considering its brevity, this article does manage to cover many applications, benefits and drawbacks of blogs in the classroom. A couple of particularly appropriate applications of student blogging include strong supplementary journalistic and marketing/business training. These applications are strong because of a couple benefits of the blog format: its immediacy and potential for direct contact with the world (620). Although Oravec believes in blogging, she cautions against many drawbacks of blogs: potential for abuses with plagiarism, their constantly changing content, and possible movement to another URL, or even complete disappearance (618).

I found the article helpful and would recommend it to anyone who is still ambivalent about blogging’s academic usefulness. I would echo Oravec’s point that we’re so used to asking students to post to blogs, that often we don’t value the resource that they can be for finding information. However, Oravec doesn’t address what to do with the fact that blogs do not carry the same amount of weight or clout in academic discourse. Granted, this may be due to two more drawbacks she does mention—the issues regarding verification of information and potential problems with intellectual property and copyright. Some content may be created by published and highly-regarded scholars, yet blog content is often regarded as personal, anecdotal and it often lacks verification through the peer review process. However, I agree that blog content isn’t entirely useless.

One caveat about this article: whereas Oravec cites academic contributions in her article, these quotes mainly stated generalizations about blogs in higher education and really didn’t offer grounding to the claims made by Oravec. Although I believe the content is sound, I think Oravec should have included examples or results of studies to substantiate her claims. Definitely there should be more study on the praxis of blogging in the classroom.