Blog Reflection and Social Networks vs. Blogs

For this blog assignment, I read over my classmate, Stephanie Ellis' blog. I chose Stephanie's blog because we sat next to each other in the majority of EDM310. We also worked together in our group podcast. It's funny to work next to someone and not know very much at all about them. Her posts are very well thought-out, as I expected, since she always completes her work thoroughly. There were some similarity of thought with our blog postings, often we agreed or disagreed for the same reasons. I enjoyed reading her blog posts because of her eloquent writing style.

In my podcast, Facebook as an Educational Tool, I discussed the problems with allowing students to access a teacher's personal information on a social networking platform. Facebook does not allow the user to control who sees and posts what on their personal page. This being said, blogs are a much more professional alternative to Facebook as a teacher with regard to keeping the teacher's personal life separate from the classroom.

Blogs are also much more accessible to students of all ages, whereas Facebook and Myspace require the user to be at least 13 years old to access the site. Many times, as Facebook and Myspace are discovering, children under 13 are still gaining access to the site and its' inappropriate material by simply entering a false birth date when signing up on the site.

One drawback of blogs that social networks have is that you cannot add networks or groups of friends to interact with on blogs as clearly and easily as with social networks, such as Facebook and Myspace. The networking of these sights has a double edged sword. As a teacher, using blogs prevents you from networking, but using common social networks opens up a door for privacy issues and inappropriate teacher-student relationships and access to inappropriate material all for what, exactly?

Blogs were a great idea in their inception, but their purpose for teaching tools are not so logical. As I understand it, the goal of blogs and social networking pages is to keep the student informed, potentially communicate with other teachers, faculty, and parents both in the local school and beyond. In the ideal world, the student would be able to access the teacher's blog outside of class for classroom assignments, online quizzes or polls, and new online postings or discussions, for example. In the real world, not every student has access to a computer. Even fewer students (middle school aged students and younger especially) have access to the internet, even if they're parents have internet access at their home. So the idea of having a place where your students can go if they need to reread the syllabus or were sick and need to see what happened in class that day to catch up just is not sufficient enough for the needs of the student.