Should blogging be moderated?
Saw this request asking bloggers to respond and had to chime in.
A question for you: Should all student blogging be moderated?
… In general, I think that teaching students to be responsible is a far better approach than trying to block or filter everything that might be dangerous. We should more time talking about 21st century skills and how to act prudently in the world that is out there.
On the other hand, I understand concerns about student online safety. There are many more subtle issues than just a concern that students might write something inappropriate.
Let’s stop right there. When did online safety come into it? Those are two completely different issues, and really merit different discussions.
Addressing whether blogging should be moderated or not, my personal opinion is that it depends on a few factors. Pure and simple, it’s a skill that needs to be taught. I don’t mean the act of typing and clicking submit, I mean the thought process that goes into it. What does it mean to be posting publicly? What do you do if you get a negative comment? Who will actually be reading what you publish? What is the purpose of sharing publicly and when shouldn’t you do it?
The key is, that blogging is no different than most other educational activities. You need to build up to it, lay down some groundwork and ensure that your students are prepared for the responsibility. Perhaps starting off publishing behind the firewall. Then moving to publishing publicly, but with moderation before it goes live. Then going live, but with comments being held in moderation. And so on. It really depends on the age and maturity of your students. If your students are pretty responsible and are ready for it, then jump in feet first! Just be prepared to do some serious observations of everything that happens on those blogs. You darn well better know what’s going on there before you get any phone calls.
Additionally, the students’ parents need to be aware of what you’re doing. Mind you, making them aware of it does not give them veto power over the project. If they want their specific student to do an alternate assignment, that’s their prerogative, but that doesn’t signify a stop sign for the entire class. Making sure that the appropriate people are aware of what’s going on in class is very different than asking permission to do it. If it’s the right thing to be doing educationally for the students, then don’t make more of an issue out of it than it needs to be. By calling a town hall meeting to discuss whether students should be blogging, you are adding the misconception that it’s something major that requires a committee. It isn’t. It doesn’t.
Back to online safety, the reason I said it isn’t an issue is because that’s something that needs to be taught across all subjects and grade levels, regardless of whether a class is blogging. If you decided never to blog in your school or district, online safety would still need to be addressed. So tying it in to blogging once again adds stigma and power to people who are afraid of the world ‘blog’ due to what they’ve seen on the news. It’s an important issue, but it has nothing to do with blogging.
So should blogging be moderated? Absolutely… if the students aren’t ready to do it in an unmoderated setting yet. And only you can be the judge of that.
- Think before you click
- Deleting Online Teens Act
- Glogster and Schooltube partner up
- Now That’s What I Call Blogging!
- What are we banning here anyway?
mwright103
10/8/2008
Should blogging be moderated? /Teach42/ – Saw this request asking bloggers to respond and had to chime in. … http://tinyurl.com/4n9v8q
Elaine Plybon
10/8/2008
I think you hit the nail on the head with your last statement. Only the teacher can be the judge of whether the students are ready to be unmoderated or not. To issue a blanket decision about whether content should be moderated would be unfair to students AND teachers. Each of us know our students the best and have to learn to make judgment calls on a class-by-class basis.
mrsdurff
10/8/2008
When students are first beginning to blog it is helpful to moderate – face it they don’t all listen to what we say. Then eventually we can fade that moderation. I don’t mean filters – I mean approving posts & comments.
mrsdurff’s most recent blog post.. Dream the Very Possible Dream
Mike Maddaloni - The Hot Iron
10/8/2008
Hi Steve:
Is this for students or adults? 
There is a lot relevant here for adult or business bloggers as well as students.
I like your idea of a blog sandbox or having one behind a firewall. And in general, I believe in moderating all comments, especially for a public blog – if for any other reason, to catch comment spam.
mp/m
RustyBadger
10/8/2008
Regarding moderating (or chaperoning, if you will) students’ online writing, I feel it comes down to maturity levels. Different students will be ready to put their best foot forward earlier than others.
That being said, I’d only advocate moderating very young students’ writing. Older students might tend to find the moderation process tedious (if it’s not done immediately) and demeaning. I’d prefer to deal with issues after (or if) they come up, rather than assuming that kids are little pukes and will barf out a pile of crap as soon as they’re given free reign on a public forum.
Now, with regard to the ’safety’ issue: CIPA and its ilk (yes, I use ‘ilk’ in the pejorative sense!) make my blood boil. It’s obviously a generation (age-related) issue; most school administrators and board members are aging Boomers who grew up in the Free Love era. Therefore, they understand that it’s important to teach kids about sex, because ‘they are all having sex anyhow, so we should equip them to deal with it properly’- but they cannot fathom applying the same logic to the Internet. ‘It’s just too dangerous!’, they cry, and slam more filters on their connections than the Great Firewall of China.
Now in MY humble opinion (or not-so-humble!) *those* are the people who should be moderated!
RustyBadger’s most recent blog post.. [Insert Title Here]
Jessica Donaldson
10/11/2008
I like how Rusty used the term “chaperoned” instead of moderating. I think that’s a great way to put it in perspective when dealing with K-12 students. The idea of chaperoning children (tweens, teens, etc.) is that there is a degree of overseeing without policing everyone completely.
That being said, I do believe that blogs should be moderated. As an educator, I have seen respect for others and just plain old-fashioned niceties go down the drain. Blame MTV…no wait, that was my generation- I’m supposed to blame YouTube, right? OK, blame YouTube or whatever you’d like, but the majority of today’s students simply have lost the ability to respect that other people have opinions and feelings that differ from their own. Moderating, or chaperoning, blogs is a must initially. If the chaperon eventually sees that s/he no longer needs to oversee what is happening, then by all means, back off and let the comments fly.
As a parent, I shudder at the thought of comments I’ve ran across via Facebook or MySpace- comments that cannot be retracted once they’re put out there. I mean yes, the person who posted or allowed the comment can delete it, but that’s assuming the comment wasn’t already read by someone else. Adolescence is such a difficult phase to begin with, and not moderating a situation that can quickly become hateful or disrespectful can lead to disastrous results.
As adults (in body, though maybe not in mind for some of us), we can all think back to a blog where we rolled our eyes and thought, “shyguy42 is an idiot,” but we acknowledge and scroll on for the most part. But think back to the rebuttals that some folks just can’t stand to ignore. Ordinarily, those folks have no intention of revealing their whereabouts, which is where that digital-courage came from, but as students who have to share hallways and cafeterias, there is a concern. Maybe that’s why online safety was tied into the original question- though I agree that they SHOULD be separate.
I guess in this world of mash-ups, we have a collision of ideas that are supposed to be separate, but are being combined for lack of understanding. Just a thought (a long, long thought…sorry about that).
J. Rathman
10/14/2008
Teachers should know when their students are ready to blog, and help them, therefore monitoring them, as they do so. It can’t harm the student to have some of their work available for the ‘real’ world to see. This would help the students to become more in-touch with the reality of real-world situations if people they didn’t know, and never will, responded to something they wrote.
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