Hello 470;
I have had a few questions about blogging and commenting so I am writing this short blog to answer those questions and hopefully get everyone on comfortable ground. I realize blogging is new to some, or even many of you. There is indeed an art to blogging which begins with mastering the techniques of composing short essays. For those of you who find this challenging, I suggest you read as many of your peer’s blogs as time allows and get a sense of how other’s are crafting their answers. I encourage you to find your writing style and your voice; to be creative or scholarly, or both. Just to give you some examples of what I mean, here are three blogs from your peers that are each excellent, and yet each one approaches my questions with distinctly different styles:
I hope you will all enjoy the process of learning to blog and comment in an effort to build dialogue. If you review the course syllabus, you will see that dialoguing is worth 20% of your grade:
Dialogues: these will include blog commentary, comments and hyperlinks all delivered via student blogs or the class Face Book page. Dialogues will be graded midterm for 8% of the grade and again end of term for 12% of the grade. This is a class participation grade based on the frequency and quality of participation and evaluated on an ongoing basis.
And, let me draw your attention to a discussion we have on dialogue in lesson 4:2.
I use the word dialogue to indicate the kind of discussion expected. A dialogue is an exchange of ideas, never a debate, never an argument; there are no right and wrong perspectives in a dialogue. Rather, differences are explored with the motivation of finding common ground.
Dialogue is not about judging, weighing or making decisions though – it is about listening and understanding. You are allowed and expected to be open to perspectives and positions that are different from your own. Understanding and connecting with a perspective different from your own does not require you to change your position. It is possible to understand an issue from a number of different perspectives, without agreeing with all those perspectives.
There is much academic theorizing about dialogue and its capacity to increase understandings of multiple perspectives and possibilities for understanding. In this way, dialogue is about change and finding solutions. Mikhail Bakhtin and Paulo Feire are perhaps two of the best-known authors to theorize and celebrate the educational possibilities that dialogue opens up.
When you engage in dialogue on your classmate’s blog, your job is to expand the discussion, to contribute and to make connections with your own perspectives or research. It is not your task to critique what others have discussed, but rather to observe and explain how those observations or insights connect with your own, and in turn stimulate new insights – or, perspectives.