October 2005 — Features

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The New Student-Teacher Channel

If self-disclosure between teacher and student can boost learning outcomes, blogging may be its most effective mode.


BY VERNON B. HARPER JR.

The Web is no longer a novel ingredient in the learning experience; it is intrinsic and constant. In fact, a host of new technologies has sparked an age of inexpensive, effortless, and universal Web access in the classroom, while wireless devices and protocols have steadily moved downstream and down the soci'economic ladder.With this incredible availability, educators and learners are brought together in common effective, intellectual, and pedagogical planes that have never existed before.

Blogging, of course, is one of the Web’s more recent developments. In The State of Blogging (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2005, www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_blogging_data.pdf), Lee Rainie explains that over 32 million Web users now read blogs regularly, a 58 percent jump from early 2004. Extremely popular with journalists and media watchers, blogging can be thought of as an unfiltered perspective on countless topics. Consisting largely of personal commentary, blogs are available to anyone with Internet access.Once posted online, practically anyone is free to “post” a response to the “blogger.” And although blogs are often confused with listservs, threads, and bulletin boards, blogging software offers more control over the path of the Internet dialog, and it is this distinction that has exponentially driven blog popularity.

So, it should come as no surprise that educators have begun to consider blogging for classroom purposes.Some believe that the blogs open an avenue of student self-disclosure that was previously inaccessible, and many argue that self-disclosure is an underutilized tool in the repertoire of most modern educators.

Self-Disclosure in the Classroom
Self-disclosure can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, but one of the most comprehensive is offered by Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor in their work Social Penetration: The Development of Interpersonal Relationships (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973). The authors paint a clear picture of interpersonal interaction, and they consider selfdisclosure to be the exchange of information pertaining to oneself that serves to enhance intimacy. One outcome of selfdisclosure is the norm reciprocity,which is a feeling of obligation “to reciprocate with our own disclosure when another person reveals himself.…”

Yet, although using disclosure to forge a bond with students ech'es common sense, educators often avoid personal revelations in the classroom because they can be quite unpredictable. For example, Valerie Downs,Mitch Javidi, and Jon Nussbaum, in “An Analysis of Teachers’ Verbal Communication Within the College Classroom:Use of Humor,Self-Disclosure, and Narratives,” (Communication Education, 1988),explain that instructors often use humorous disclosures to gain favor with a class; however, such disclosures often sacrifice classroom productivity.