Like I said, the blogs were not a factor in me learning anything really. The textbook and the classroom activities were but the blogs were not. (Anonymous focus group participant)In the digital age of Facebook, Twitter, Wikis, and blogging, it seems only natural to integrate digital literacies in preservice teacher education programs. We chose blogs as a pedagogical tool in our content-area literacy classes for preservice teachers, hoping to help them engage in discussions that were closely aligned with the course content while building classroom communities.The blogging project was borne from a Quality Enhancement Program (QEP) with funding received by the first two authors. As part of the project, a longitudinal study (two and a half years) was carried out on the effectiveness of integrating blogs into our content literacy classrooms. Though we have rarely read published studies on projects that were deemed "failures," this is what our project appeared to be.As we studied the quantitative results semester after semester, the blogs statistically had no measurable impact on students' perceptions of the course or content literacy. Granted, students were generally pleased with the content of the course, but there was no statistical significance found in relation to the blogging itself, no matter what was done to try and make the blogs more useful to students. In fact, students typically cited the blogs as the least important tool in their learning the course content.As teachers, however, we had absorbed the discourses (Fairclough, 2001;Gee, 1999) surrounding technology and the classroom, and we were curious about why students did not respond well to the blogs. We assumed that this generation of tech-savvy students would enjoy this particular medium for discussing their reading. After all, weren't these the students who were supposed to love any sort of technological intervention? Weren't these supposed to be the students who were anticipating the myriad ways that they could incorporate technology into their future content classrooms?
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.