blogs – Montessori Muddle

Interning at the Muddle

One of my students, Ms. Piper Ziebarth, had the audacity to agree with me, enthusiastically, when I mentioned that my writing could do with a little editing. She also had the temerity to call one of my more artistically designed paragraphs, “boring.”

So I offered her the chance to intern at the Muddle as an editor and reviewer.

This week, most of my students are off seeing a little of what it’s like to have a real job. Apart from getting them out of my hair for a week, the internships are intended to allow them to build some self-esteem by contributing to society (internships must be unpaid), practice speaking and acting in formal situations, and exercise the most interesting and challenging aspect of learning by applying their knowledge in new areas.

I offered Piper the chance to work with me because she’s a gifted writer, from whom I would do well to learn. Unlike my own, her writing is clear and concise, with strong emotional subtexts that draw the reader in. She’s also internalized the lesson that the revision process is essential, so her work benefits from a strong, critical eye.

Piper’s also one of my more prolific student bloggers.

I’ve not worked at a newspaper or magazine, so I’m only vaguely familiar with their traditional editing process. I have seen both sides of the scientific peer-review process, but there, the focus is more on making sure the end result is scientifically accurate. There, the use of scientific jargon is essential for clarity when communicating among scientists working in a specialized field. While I greatly enjoy the freedom of blogging, I often find myself being pulled into that careful style of scientific writing.

Hopefully, Ms. Ziebarth can help pull me out of it.

Over the next week, my challenge will be to not mention schoolwork, and all the other things we have going on in the classroom, and let Ms. Ziebarth focus on editing and revising.

Ultimately, what shows up on the blog is my responsibility, and I can be quite stubborn. But, hopefully, I’m old enough to learn how to use a good editor and reviewer well.

Boys, girls, and blogs

There’s a curious and clear gender difference when it comes to my student’s use of their blogs. All the girls have them and most are posting things right now, but the boys don’t.

This is in large part due to the way I rolled out the student blogs. I started with a couple students (girls) who were most interested, and since then I’ve been setting up blogs for students as they’ve been requested. The process has been slow because I’ve been trying the multi-user version of WordPress (WPMU), which is not nearly as easy to set up as a stand-alone WordPress installation (like the one used for the Muddle). I think, however, that I have the setup process worked out now, so I could accelerate the rollout if necessary.

Since the two students I started with were girls, it’s perhaps not too surprising that it’s the other girls who were most interested in getting their own. That’s the way the social connections are arranged in our class.

Brain_dev_Lenroot_2007 — Scattergram showing how girls' (red) brains mature differently than boys' (blue). Data from Lenroot, 2007.

Though there’s no real evidence for it, I do wonder, however, if there is a gender component to it too. Since girls tend to develop more quickly than boys at this age (see Sax, 2007 for a general description, and NIH, 2010 for a recent overview of adolescent brain development), so perhaps they’re more self-reflective. Girls also tend to emphasize interpersonal relationships more (e.g. Johnson, 2004), and are generally more communicative.

… females (1) develop more intimate friendships, (2) stress the importance of maintaining intimacy, and (3) expect more intimacy in their friendships than do males. — in Gender, grade, and relationship differences in emotional closeness within adolescent friendships by Johnson, (2004)

At any rate, I’m curious to see how this develops. I think I’m going to remind the whole class about the blogs though.

(Excel Spreadsheet used to create the brain volume scattergram: here.)

Sharing and privacy online

facebook-privacy — How your personal information, provided to Facebook, has become accessible to the rest of the web.

Image from Matt McKeon / CC BY-SA 3.0

People, kids and adults, are still adjusting to the privacy implications of sharing information online. Not only are we figuring out what to post for the public on social networking websites like Facebook or our blogs, but we’re also deciding what information we want to give to the websites themselves as companies try to tailor a unique online experience for each of us (as with targeted advertising). Laura Holson has an interesting article under the headline, “Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline” about how some young adults are scaling back their online sharing as they realize how potential colleges and employers can use that information, especially negative information.

… people ages 18 to 29 were more apt to monitor privacy settings than older adults are, and they more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified. Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing. – Holson, 2010.

Sharing is a way to increase transparency, which is often a good thing. Learning more about each other may help create a more peaceful world. But privacy can be equally important. We all make mistakes, say things we should not, do things we shouldn’t, especially when we’re young. When we recognize those mistakes and learn from them, there should come a time when they are not held against us.

The web needs a statue of limitations, say five years, so anything about us on the web that’s older than five years should not count. Or perhaps, just as minors can’t be held fully responsible for their actions under the law, non-adults should be held to a different standard on the web.

It is, however, notoriously difficult to erase anything from the web, and I tend to be quite conservative when it comes to sharing things online. Yet the greatest power of the internet, I believe, is that it is based a philosophy similar to the constructivist approach to education. In education the student is constructing their own learning, whereas on the internet, society is constructing and organizing information in ways that look a lot like learning.

So our class Wiki is private, as are our students’ blogs. They provide safer spaces for students to make mistakes, but gives them that essential experience of constructing the internet, not just taking away.