Blog Awareness

Something surprised me this week. My students at the college--mostly juniors and seniors this semester--didn't know what blogs were.

Well, not all of them were clueless, but doesn't it seem like blogs are pretty mainstream? I mean, I'd heard about them over a year ago, and I'm not particularly technologically hip.

A whole bunch of middle-school and high-school students at the dojang have blogs--they're a step ahead of my students!

But perhaps college students don't have a need for blogs. Most don't seem interested in sharing an on-line diary ("all about me and what I did today") with others, as many younger kids seem to have fun doing. And they don't have the kinds of Serious Interests that some adults (and some young people) do (TKD for me, language for The Language Guy, controversies in the news for Gadfly Professor). The college students I know who have blogs are ones who are doing something out of the ordinary--studying overseas, like Rob, who just started The Adventures of Rob blog. Or battling illness, the story in Jase's Journal, which Jase kept while going through cancer treatment last fall.

And that's probably it: most college students don't really have a subject. I don't think I would have started a blog without a subject, something I was going to write about besides "me" or "my day." I needed to be exploring something new, something that puzzled me, something that I didn't have all the answers about. Blogging has given focus to my education in Tae Kwon Do, and Tae Kwon Do has given me an excellent topic for writing, researching, and reflecting.

I don't know what (if anything) I could have written about when I was in college. Funny thought!

I'll be interested to see if any of the students in my writing class attempts a blog. I wonder what their topics might be.