A student of mine failed to do her lab assignment because she has no idea how a blog works. I sent students to a blog by a prominent Cuban blogger but this student had no idea what a “blog post” was and how to choose one for a reading assignment.
It is especially ironic that the student approached me to inform me about this while I was posting comments on my blog.
I consider people who don’t read blogs to be very strange.
My student explained that she doesn’t read blogs because “Twitter is so much better.”
Clarissa's Blog 
I have students create blogs during a visual literacy project in my comp class. They complain about it, don’t know what a blog is, or think bloggers are weirdos. Most of them have fun once they’ve finished because they realize how neat it is to get feedback. We use this as an online peer review and to enhance the idea of literacy and community.
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The fact that someone compares twitter to a blog is just…strange and kind of irritating. I can barely get into twitter because of it’s character limit…it’s too short and I just get nothing out of anyone’s tweets.
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“Twitter is so much better.”
Yeah, why read a blog post when you can read 140 characters half-sentences…
My pet peeve, and this is with friends, not students, is that people apparently don’t talk on the phone any more, they only text message. I am not big on phone conversations, but sometimes it gets ridiculous. You have agree to get together with a friend to watch a movie on, say, Saturday, so you have to agree what movie, where and what time. It becomes a 10 minutes back and forth of text messages, instead of a 5 minutes phone conversation that would be much easier. And it’s even worse if you do not agree with the movie your friend wants to watch.
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I agree that it gets ridiculous. I have a friend who texts other people when she’s hanging out with me, and I have known people to text each other in the same house.
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“Yeah, why read a blog post when you can read 140 characters half-sentences…”
– This bodes really well for my literature courses next semester. 🙂
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Thankfully, I have a colleague that always manages to assign twice as much as I do (and I am not considered an easy professor). So whatever I assign, I’ve never had complaints about the lenght
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My blog is linked as a resource to the Moodle site of an online course at a university where I know someone. The sensation is rather odd.
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Wow, that’s cool! You are getting famous as a blogger.
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Twitter isn’t better, Twitter can be all about yourself. A blog has to be about others, too. I use and like Twitter, but as soon as a 14-year old appears in my timeline, I’m out.
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Funny. My Twitter feed is nothing but 80 million links to blog posts!
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Because you are an enlightened blog-reading person.
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I run a blog in which I contribute one column each day. However, I understand that some of these columns do not constitute scholarship. Many of your columns – as mine – in no sense constitute scholarship. Some of them are emotive and irrational. A student who refuses to deal with blogs, in my judgment, should be applauded, not criticized. That student may be a good discriminator between science and emotion. If everyone follows the current trend. Americans will end up unable to distinguish between good and poor scholarship, and certainly unable to contribute in the English language as we currently value it.
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I have a vague suspicion that this student is not reading scholarly journals instead of blog. Of course, I might be too cynical and she is hiding somewhere in a corner with a copy of PMLA.
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Ha, before I got to this part of your post I had assumed the person didn’t have a computer, and that her Internet use was mostly just for email reading whenever she could find an open computer in a library.
I also co-sign Charles’s comment, though in a language class I see value in having students read less-formal discourse.
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The blog I assign is by a Cuban blogger who is reporting the truth about what is going on in Cuba at a huge risk to herself. So it isn;t like I send students to read some stupid, trivial stuff.
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I wish I was in your class so I could see it! I’ve been following a story (to the best of my ability since I don’t speak Spanish) about some Cuban punk rock musicians who were detained for their music and lyrics, which also speak the truth about life on the island, and I’m very interested in other perspectives on it.
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I wish you were in my class, too. I’m actually a very good teacher. And I’m sure you would have gotten my jokes.
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There are a number of bloggers in Cuba who write about the situation there – with the help of people outside the island who are the ones that manage to put up the posts. There is also an effort (maybe you know?) by volunteers who translate these blog posts into several other languages. Might be a good exercise for some of the advanced students, and their translations would be a significant contribution.
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A brilliant idea, thank you!! This is why blogging is great: people give really fantastic suggestions.
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I find the Twitter comment really strange because most of the people I interact with on Twitter are also bloggers!
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This is strange and foreign to me. How does one not know what a blog is? This is a student in the 18-22 age range, I assume?
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