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Understanding Millennials: Captain's Blog, Stardate 2007-2008

By Julianne Scibetta, Albany College of Pharmacy

Maybe the last time (or first time) you heard about blogs was during the last Presidential election. Bloggers on the east coast allegedly reported information about exit polls publicly on the internet, allowing west coasters to either counter-vote or decide to stay home. This was replayed on The West Wing's most recent election, just in case you didn't hear this accusation.

Blogs are public diaries, semi-editorials, ventings, rants, raves, etc. Anyone can start or be a blogger. "Blog" comes from the amalgamation of "web log" as in a web diary. Based on a website, the blog is generally utilitarian and text-intensive. And who has the time to read them, much less search them out?
Our students certainly have time to read, write, and comment on blogs - and blogs are moving very quickly into the mainstream. Ever been to MySpace.com? Blogs can be (and have been) used in court as public confessions or evidence of motive. You can't watch a tv show without being told there's an attached blog by a character or creator.

Professors and teachers already have websites for their courses, as much as I'm sure many of you have websites for your learning centers. They might even have blogs or open forums. Isn't it time the rest of education caught up with the trend?

Some teachers are using blogs as a way to maintain quality and inspire competition in their students. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this year, Rate My Students will soon be coming to a computer screen near you. College presidents are even getting into the act with educational blogs.
An advantage to a blog is its ability to be continuous and fresh. Whereas websites have an experience of permanence (in that a viewer is mostly unable to see previous versions of a site and text), blogs can be recorded and archived for future viewers to explore. Think of it as your own small version of the LCE, with topics that you can search and easily find and view later, at your leisure. Intrinsically, adding blogs to your website might impress students with your acceptance and understanding of their culture and communication, making you, your program, and your center more approachable.

How do you make your blog one to bookmark? There a few cosmetic things you can add to a blog that will connect you with your audience in simple ways.

Blogs make the reading experience hyperreal. Have instant "references" available to your readers by using hypertext (aka: links). You've probably noticed this in any news articles you've read online recently. Maybe you'll want to have a link for a larger word to its definition on dictionary.com. Maybe in describing school resources you'll want to include links to the school's library website or other services. A "related links" on the bottom of a page is a thing of the past; instantly linking words to other resources will improve the experience (albeit superficially), making it all at once colorful, easy, interactive, and exciting.

Part the allure of the blog to your program should be its inherent fight against social norms and perceptions. Consider the usual information about alcohol consumption, almost on any given college campus: students think/perceive that more alcohol is being drunk than really is, and think/perceive more people are drinking than actually do. Learning centers in their many forms may also have a misconception concerning their role in school, and it's often a negative, stigmatized one. Blogs may be a way to help fight that. Think of the different things you might be tempted to publicize: how many students you served today; the average student-to-tutor ratio for the day; countdown to tutoring week. These are not difficult things to post or automate. And with a blog, you could display pointers about the necessity of outlining a paper… much like we do here.

Some advice for organizing your blog:

1. Pick a topic and stick to it. Maybe you'll want to focus on discussing study strategies for a semester, then switch to time management. Remember you can archive a blog so students in the future can access it if they're interested. Take advantage of the summer to plan out your year and start sketching your topics so you're not twiddling your thumbs at the very last minute.
2. Make an appointment to update your blog often. If you can, try to do it at least biweekly rather than monthly. Students will be used to daily blogs, so the more often you can attend to your blog the better. As CorporateBlogging.info points out, popular search engines are more likely to highlight your site the more regularly it's updated.
3. Don't miss your appointments! People who are likely to read your blog are also likely to remember when it's updated, and will remember to check back when it is.
4. Determine who will update it. Are you tech-saavy? Can you have a student helper or IT department set it up for you? Can you trust a student to cut and paste your work? Maybe as a learning assignment you assign a class or cohort to come up with their own short topic of relevance; that way you can edit, approve, and get their permission, plus share in the experience of being a web-published author. (Now think of the positive exposure you'll get… "Hey mom! Check out this website; I'm published!")
5. Keep it simple. Unless it's an internal or protected website, your audience can pretty much be anybody.

Good luck! Let us know how it turns out for you on the forum!

Have a safe and very sunny summer!

Questions or comments? Contact the author at j.scibet@usip.edu.

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