Teenage "Blogging"

Will at Weblogg-ed just wrote about this MSNBC (Newsweek?) article on teenage blogging and online habits.

I think the tone of the article is a bit reactionary -- playing to a knee-jerk fear of any online interaction by teens and pre-teens. Only at the end of the article does someone finally say something postive: "(Students) are learning some basic programming skills. It's teaching them to be Internet savvy, how to make things, how to be creative."

However, the article is helpful to my thinking about our students' potential use of blogs (or even something more traditional -- like discussion boards in Blackboard) in our courses. This shows me that many students come to class already used to behaving in a certain way in online environments. If we ask them to use a similar tool for academic work, we need to keep these habits in mind and we should probably encourage faculty to set clear guidelines and expectations about appropriate behavior in an online academic environment.