Krause, Steven D. “When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussions and Interactions.” Kairos 9.1 (2009): 16 May 2009. (link)
“When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussions and Interactions” is an interesting contrast to the numerous success stories of blogs that are documented in scholarly publications. Sharing his own negative experience of using a blog in one of his graduate level courses, Steven Krause discusses why blogs may not work within a classroom setting. It was Krause’s hope that a blog would facilitate discussion and friendly debate, but he was disappointed to find that his students all but ignored the blog outside of posting a few obligatory entries that did not generate any discussion. The one heated interaction that took place electronically in the class that semester was, interestingly enough, through an exchange of emails on the class list serve and not the blog. Although in his article Krause does not voice a very high opinion of blogs and their use in academia, he admits that the problem may have been a result of his lack of preparation and definitive guidelines.
A professor in the English Language and Literature department at Eastern Michigan University, Steven Krause teaches about the connections of writing and technology on both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Krause’s article stands out to me among all the others, because he is the only one for whom blogging as a part of class curriculum turned out negatively. To be sure, not everyone who has attempted to use blogs as supplemental teaching/learning methods has achieved success, so Krause adds a much needed level of reality to my research. His remarks on what not to do are almost as important as other’s suggestions on what to do. An avid blogger himself, Krause merges both his personal and professional life on stevendkrause.com.
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