I’ve been doing some work on my issue brief, which will be discussing the use of student blogging as an instructional method. So far I’m pleased with what I’m finding – the majority of articles I’ve found on the subject are pretty positive. I actually do still want to find an article from the point of view of describing the problems inherent to using this idea – I think finding something like this would make it easier for me to make a case for why such problems are minor compared to the scope of what such a project could accomplish, and/or how the problems can be overcome. The paper will be stronger overall if I can present a view from both sides … and then show why my view is, of course, the correct one …

So far I’ve found a few promising PDFs (thank you, Google Scholar) that I plan to look at more in depth this weekend – mostly from education-related journals. As I said, I also want to find a journal article describing some downsides of student blogging. My other main source (which was actually the first thing I thought of when I came up with this topic) is going to be an interview with P.Z. Myers, the writer of a popular science/evolution blog – Dr. Myers is a professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris, and he has his students create a class blog when he teaches courses in Developmental Biology. (Developmental biology is, of course, a bit beyond the scale of what I expect from middle or high school students, but Dr. Myers has enjoyed enough success in his student-blog endeavors that I hope he’ll have some acceptably grade-level-transcending words of wisdom for me.)

Besides that, I’ve worked out a basic outline and started kicking around introductory paragraphs. (I have a great deal of trouble being satisfied with these, so I figured I’d start now, and maybe I’ll have one I like by the time this paper is actually due.) Everything seems to be going fine so far, although if anyone has any suggestions about negative articles I would love to see them!