Yesterday I showed a group of students how to start their own blogs, on Blogger. (I rewrote this sentence: I didn’t teach them how to blog, I think that comes with practice. Also, aren’t there almost as many different types of blogs as there are bloggers?)
What surprised me:
I expected that blogging was a topic university students aged in their early twenties would know about, but none in the group of nine students knew the word. An earlier group I spoke to (some forty students) also had no idea.
What surprised them:
Several students commented on how easy it was – one student said that her initial response to anything “technical, on the computer” was that it was going to be too hard to even consider doing, but “this looks really easy”. This makes me wonder how many people would blog but think it is all just too difficult.
What I hadn’t accounted for:
The fact that Blogger, after years of having the same interface, would go and release a new version in the week before this second class. I stuck to showing the class the old Blogger, mainly because I’d already shown other students in the class the old version a few weeks ago, and I thought it might be confusing for these students if they compared notes and realised that they were using different Bloggers. Also I’m not sure how Blogger Beta will develop over the next few weeks and months.
And working with an online tool can be challenging, when the tool suddenly stops working while you are showing a group of students how easy it is to add team members to their team blog. Blogger decided to have an Unscheduled Outage just as we were finishing with setting up one of the blogs. Hopefully the team won’t have to go back and set things up again.
I was disappointed that the students haven’t found RSS as useful as I’d hoped they would. I’m not sure if this is because I didn’t do as good a job in explaining it to them (likely – nothing else gets me as tangled as RSS does), or if it’s because they’re in the middle of a challenging part of their studies and using RSS is not immediately relevant/too much information overload for them at this stage.
To end on a positive note, their lecturer says that so far he’s been finding it a valuable experience, and he thinks that most of the students have found it useful as well – and he’s considering introducing blogging to his students at even earlier stages of their studies, so they can get used to the technology early on!
12 Comments
Now, that i find surprising. I thought everyone knew about blogging, even if it wasn’t something they did.
And more on Blogger Beta… I can no longer click on the heading of your blog to go from an individual post to the entire blog.
Did the academic include the blogging instruction after you had converted him, or of his own volition? Either way, it’s great that he can see the point.
RSS feeds and blogs have to be used to be appreciated, and this is where people are reluctant, as you pointed out. By “used”, I mean over a number of days to appreciate interconnected posts.
I don’t think one hour of instruction can replicate this – other than telling them about your own experience. Bit like saying – you’ll feel great after you’ve worked out in the gym for a few weeks – well, yeah you will, but you can’t show that in one hour.
That’s all very interesting!
To be honest, this doesn’t suprise me at all, only having discovered blogs last year myself, and having lots of friends(including ones at uni) and family and colleagues who didn’t know about blogs till I started talking about it.
The RSS thing doesn’t suprise me either, if they don’t read blogs they wouldn’t really need it yet, even if they read the news online. Also, as sirexkat says, it needs be be needed and used before it becomes useful. And yeah, it is definetly hard to explain! I don’t even really try to, to people who don’t even know about blogging!
The ‘easiness’ of blogging is what got me excited about it straight away, and I opened a blogger account. I am not a tech person at all, and it was so exciting that I could have my own website! Within a year I’d moved to WordPress, with my own hosting, etc etc. It’s all very exciting 😀
Right, enough rambling, back to work!
Another way that I usually use to explain RSS is that it keeps track of blogs and sites for me so that I don’t have to.
I know instantly when a blog has been updated, as opposed to me having to visit each one of my regular reads. When you have more than a handful of sites to keep track of, that’s when RSS shines. 🙂
I ran a session for colleagues at MPOW and got a similar split between enthusiasm about blogging and bafflement about RSS. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to explain (except how role-playing games work, but that’s a different story).
It sounds like the session was initiated by a staff member. I was thinking about running something here on an ad hoc basis – any suggestions on a “hook” or other marketing sugeestions?
jl, evidently not! maybe it’s the word blog? I dunno..
Sirexkat, thanks for letting me know about the nonlink in my header. Not much I can do at this point, I don’t think, because Blogger Beta isn’t allowing users to tinker with the innards yet. And you’re right about not being able to convince someone just by telling them about it. Like exercise, having to use a new techie “thing” is very daunting for many people…
Simone, that’s the thing that blew me away about it, too – how easy it is. And maintaining your own blog is a great way of learning more about HTML and the net as a whole…
Thanks Mooiness. I think the problem for many non-RSS users is the idea of having to use another application (whether desktop-based or web-based) to use it. I have had many people say that they just arent used to it or forget to “switch it on”. I guess we would have had the same problems back in the dawn of email… not that I can really remember life pre-email…
Tom.. eek got to go (will respond to your comment soon) 🙂
Hi Tom, sorry about that – it was time to go home and I had to log off. Yes my two sessions were requested by a couple of academic staff members who are investigating the use of blogging in their classes. They realised I could help them with training their students because they’d attended a session for academics and researchers I’ve presented here, on RSS and blogs. The aim is to provide them with an overview of these new technologies – and the response has been very good. We still run these and include information on RSS as part of our “Keeping Up to Date” session. People are very interested to learn about RSS and blogging so I reckon any class/seminar/workshop you present will receive a lot of interest.
Yes, I started with blogger, and so now with wordpress on own hosted domain. I now know how to get a domain name(with a bit of help from my husband), install wordpress on a site, use html a bit(I usually use the wysiwyg editor, but that often stuffs things up that I then have to fix), use plugins, use css a bit(husband the web designer helps a bit), use dreamweaver to upload to server, learn about seo (search engine optimization), use adsense etc etc. 6 MONTHS ago I didn’t even know the meaning of most of these words, I’m turning into a total geek and loving it!
Oh, biggest news: Since Saturday I now have my own Macbook!! ha ha!
I am not surprised either about the students not knowing. In my setting, when I mention that I have a blog, I get a lot of blank looks. When one of them is brave enough to ask “is that like MySpace,” then it clicks. A lot of them probably blog using the feature on MySpace, or Facebook (if it has one. I don’t have an FB account), but they do not know it is blogging. They just know they can post about themselves and any notes they want online. As for RSS, I don’t have the type of crowd that would be using a feed reader regularly. Could be wrong about it, but based on observation, they visit MS, FB, and a couple other social sites. Something like Bloglines is not in their radar.
Still debating if I will switch my two Blogger blogs over to the beta. Best, and keep on blogging.
Simone, you go girl! There’s no shame in being a geek, especially when your newfound skills are helping you achieve so much and have such fun! 🙂
Angel, you’re right, perhaps it was the word “blog” that they didn’t get. As for RSS, I have noticed that many of those I work with (colleagues, students, lecturers), don’t use an RSS reader either. As Sirexkat says its usefulness seems to be hard to convince people of – but those one or two who do try it out usually do find it useful…
Oh, and as for Blogger Beta, I can understand not switching – but I debated with myself (for a good five minutes 😉 ) whether I would or not and in the end curiosity won! 🙂 So far so good…
I’m still trying to educate my colleagues about blogging 🙁 Can’t even imagine teaching students.
It’s funny how people struggle with RSS at first. I agree with sirexkat – it has to be used to be appreciated I think. People are so used to having stuff arrive in their in boxes or something. They don’t necessarily grasp the idea that having an RSS feeder programme or a Bloglines equivalent is actually simpler and more easliy controlled than having multiple folders and rules for your email client to deal with. That’s the way I used to do it, and I’d end up deleting whole folders of email because it seemed too much trouble to read it. With RSS I can schedule time into my day to deal with it.