Blogging is so different from in class participation, not necessarily in a good way though. Blogging definitely has its benefits but there are also things that blogging doesn't work for. For increasing participation blogging is good. It is easier to get your "voice" heard through blogging because you don't need to compete with other people as in a class setting. This makes it so that even shyer people can express their feelings when in class that might be a problem. Blogging is also helpful because in class its not efficient to pull out a laptop and start researching. It would detract from class time so blogging lets students get their ideas down after researching them out of class. However, blogging has negative aspects. After class is over, most students, I am generalizing my experience here but I feel as though it's fairly accurate, forget about what they wanted to say in class or what was even talked about in class. It is not until those topics are revisited that you can remember what was said in class but at that point there is a significantly lower level of interest in the topic. Since blogging happens after class is over, there's hardly any enthusiasm for the subject. Also, because blogging is on the internet, there is a significant productivity drop while doing it. With distractions like Facebook and everything else on the internet, it is hard to remember to blog or to keep on track while blogging. That is more of a problem with the students themselves, but for me it was major issue this semester.
After evaluating these pros and cons, I will probably not blog in the future. It does help somewhat to bridge the gap between informal class discussion and more formal writing, since there is slightly more research involved in blog posts, but it doesn't work for me very well. Apart from the distractions of the internet, blogging doesn't work for me because it isn't always available. I get many ideas randomly and it's easier to write them down or even put them in my phone than to get to a computer and blog them. There is a mobile app for blogger that I got on my iTouch but it was really poorly made, the keyboard wouldn't flip sideways making it impossible to type, so I hardly even used it after downloading it. Finally, what I have to say really isn't that important and when I do feel particularly narcissistic I can just use Facebook. Blogging is just not for me.
