Dateline: Dublin : Teaching Moments

I just finished doing a teaching session with the "First Years" here at DIT. It was fascinating. After an introduction to blogs and terminology, we did a "hands on" session with blogger. The presentation I gave included a set of screen grabs that show the steps to setting up a blog on blogger. In the past, I would have taught this the way I like to be taught. That means a thorough linear, text and talk based step by step explanation. Today, I prefaced the set of screens with a comment about how "digital natives" don't like the "show me, then I will do it" approach, and then I just kind of breezed through the explanation and step by step. Dang, those students had their blogs up and running faster than I remember any class doing so. With this "N" of 1, I can't overgeneralize, but I am going to begin to re-design my explanatory sessions with this in mind. These students use Bebo which our students in the U.S. don't use (ours use Facebook or MySpace.) What was really interesting to me, is that as soon as they created their blogs, they asked me how to find their friends blogs. You can't do that easily with blogger. It is set up to create individual blogs which are then picked up by search engines. The whole search focus in Blogger, is on content in the posts and comments -- not on the "who" of the blog creator. These young people are thinking of the social networking first and view it as odd, almost as if something is broken, when they can't orient themselves in a FOAF (friend of a friend) sort of network.