In the midst of planning a re-launch of a school-based social network, Youth Voices, we happened upon a paper that clearly and fairly described the problems many of us face when we blog with students in our classrooms. In her paper in the June 2008 Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT Vol. 4, No. 2), Sarah Hurlburt discusses some of "frustrations and puzzlements" that many of us have had in using classroom blogs over the past several years.

Sarah articulates our reasons for wanting to set up a site like Youth Voices. Many of us have felt the gap between the promise of blogging and the results in our classrooms.

The point at which the instructor feels [classroom blogging] to have failed in some way, is when these individual written elements fail to interconnect – when the social element, upon which instructors place high hopes for a subsequent critical element – fails to materialize.

Defining Tools for a New Learning Space: Writing and Reading Class Blogs

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited Sarah Hurlburt on to our webcast to continue the dialogue about blogging, and we were joined by elementary school teachers, Lisa Parisi and Linda Nitsche.

Enjoy the podcast, and read Sarah Hurlburt's paper.

Also, we invite you to help us re-launch http://youthvoices.net on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Join us, right here at EdTechTalk at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.

For the Chat Log, click Read more, below.