Saturday, June 11, 2011

Blogging is hard?

Last semester I tried to incorporate blogging into an undergraduate agricultural technology class. After all, we talk about current, past and future innovations that are related to agriculture. The Internet and more specifically, Web 2.0, falls into that category. I hear from students all the time they do not want to be "lectured to" but rather want "to do." So, how could encouraging students in a technology class to blog go wrong?

It did. I asked students (not all were agricultural media and communication majors) to do a feature story on a local innovator. Rather than turning the paper in through tradition methods, I wanted them to post it to the class blog (which I created). Simple enough, right? This assignment was not a new assignment in the class, but the way it was turned in was.

I assumed college-age students were familiar with blogging. After all, they do it everyday right? Wrong. Most of the class knew what blogs were but had never read a blog nor had they ever commented on one (not even a news story).

Where I failed was not properly training students on the technology. I assumed digital natives knew enough about web applications to post to a blog. And most did. From my observation, the idea of blogging, its significance to the course and real-world, the steps needed to post (creating an account, finding the blog, attaching files to a server, etc.), and its relationship to agriculture were foreign to students. Thus, my failure was in preparation. I assumed students knew the importance of new media to the overall cause and promotion of agriculture, its people and its products. However, when students do not see personal gain in a technology, how (without assistance) will they see professional gain in a technology?

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