It is rather simple to respond to a blog post with "That's superb" or "I had never thought of that before" but when a question is posed it elicits a deeper sort of responses and creates a *gasp* discussion.
I went through all my Delicious bookmarks reading all I could about blogging and looking through all the blogging rubrics - like this one which I particularly enjoy (due to the Bloom's Taxonomy tie in), but I couldn't find anything on including questioning in the blog posts. Should we include questioning in our blogging rubrics or rules?
Until I was re-reading the article I linked to in an earlier post, where I came across two statements that made me think:
"When we publish on our blog, people from the entire world can respond by using the comments link. This way, they can ask questions or simply tell us what they like. We can then know if people like what we write and this indicate[s to] us what to do better."and:
"But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read—reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting."Questioning, in my opinion, is a great tool to elicit conversation, allow readers to think more deeply about an issue or information presented, and can create the larger amount of responses that I am looking for.
Then, I was also thinking about using questions as a blog commenter. Is it rude to ask questions in a blog response? Does it create more work for a blogger? Or does it encourage more dialog, creating an online community of learners? Or perhaps something I had not thought of?
I would love to hear your responses - and please - feel free to shoot some questions my way...
I always remember a formative moment in my youth - I was probably about 9 years old. I was on a tour of a museum with children and adults. The tour guide was an older man who was very enthusiastic about sharing the information he knew about the facility. At each stop he would ask if there were any questions - and was typically met with silence. At a point he seemed to be discouraged by the lack of discourse or challenge, perhaps. He explained that the best way to express that you understand or are interested in something is to ask questions. To my young ears that seemed counter-intuitive - don't people only ask questions when they don't understand something? As a teacher I think about this frequently. If you have a class with absolutely no questions - you can be quite sure you've lost half the class.
ReplyDeleteHi Sean,
ReplyDeleteI love your post. Questioning is so critical, isn't it? I think that is the wonder of blogging - the give and take, the interaction with the people who read your words and your interaction with their words. Will Richardson always talks about the cycle of blog writing. He posits that blogging is only part writing. That reading and interacting is just as important. In fact, it is what inspires you to write!