I have recently been reading many things on blogs, blogging and blogs in education. What has come out most strongly to me is that:
a) blogging *software* provides an easy way to make a website;
b) blogging *as a writing genre* requires that you have something to say;
c) mandated blogging is unlikely, of itself, to inspire people to write if they don’t have any intrinsic desire to express themselves in words, and is unlikely to promote a sense of community because the motivation for participation derives from a requirement to be involved rather than a personal choice.
Yesterday I discovered a writing community / writing genre that had previously entirely escaped my attention but was fascinating to me as a parent and an educator. I realise that not everything that’s new to me is necessarily new to other people (I am not immersed in gaming or popular culture …) but I have not seen “Fanfic” before, and maybe there are other edu-bloggers who haven’t either.
There are fanfic sites for all sorts of things such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek etc – in fact one of my colleagues assures me that “where there are geeks, there is fanfic”. I was directed to a Harry Potter fanfic site to read a story written by a teenager well-known to me. This teenager has consistently failed to submit any written assignments at school in 2 years. Here I found at least 3 chapters of a story amounting to over 3,000 well-crafted words … with reviewers comments to which the author had responded. So not only was this teenager reading extensively and immersing himself in the ideas from the story, but he was (and is) writing creatively himself and opening his work to interactive peer review. He is doing it because he wants to, not for any other purpose, and the main reason he showed his work to his parent(s) was in order to support his claim for a later bedtime because he was “working” rather than gaming.
The potential of these sort of sites to encourage literacy in teenagers is fairly obvious, as is the sense of community and the peer interaction (peer in the sense of shared interests / values rather than the age-group sense) that can happen purely online. I guess I see it as a bit like blogging, except that it is set in a creative framework rather than an “opinion piece”, “serious commentary”, personal monologue framework.
Then again, maybe I’m just impressed at what a teenager can do when they want to and when they do it for themselves rather than when they are told to “be creative” or to do things as “work”.
