Blogs & School?

So I’ve noticed something fairly interesting happening lately: Online class websites for high school and college classes have linked to certain posts on Conversational Reading.

Mostly I’ve seen my site linked to on course syllabi. It will say something like "One blogger’s take on X," and people have even clicked over.

So I’ve got to ask, what kinds of connections are emerging between blogs, books, and education? Also, why would you, a teacher, want to link to my blog?

Well, for one thing, you can’t beat the price. You can slap a link to my website up on your syllabus for free, which is a lot cheaper than what you have to pay in order to reprint articles for a class reader. But what if I posted the text of an article on my blog that was still under copyright? Or provided a link to one? Who’s culpable here?

Or maybe one day publishers will get into the act by selling something like a class license to teachers so that they can make a copyrighted article available on a class website and students can print it out as they wish. That would sure beat those huge, cheaply bound readers that I had to lug around through college.

Or, even better, what if there was a professor who, in addition to lecturing and assigning materials, provided a class blog complete with a discussion area?

Getting back to my blog, I think another advantage I offer is that I’m sometimes discussing topics that there isn’t that much published material on. For instance, one of my posts that was linked to via a class website was one on the difference between reading short stories online and reading them in a magazine.

Now I’m sure that someone has written on that topic, but as topics go that one is relatively cutting edge. If you’re discussing something like that and you can’t find too much material to distribute, than blogs may offer a good alternative. I remember that some of my college classes that dealt with contemporary events printed out news stories from news websites (this was in pre-blog days) , so there is some precedent for this.

I happen to think that there’s some intelligent stuff being said on litblogs, and I think we’re both engaging topics that haven’t been given that much thought and providing a perspective that hasn’t been too readily expressed in the past. So far as we do that, I think our thoughts can be valid in an educational setting.

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