The Value of Xanga

    I’ve been wondering an awful lot about the educational uses of online journals.  This thinking has come from our recent foray into the blogging/journaling differences.
    It seems like online journals are getting a bad rap.    And perhaps while they don’t have a place within the content of my language arts classes, they may very well have an educational purpose or two.  Students, it seems, are willing to share an awful lot of themselves in their online journals, perhaps because the freedom of hiding behind an online "identity" is helpful.  Or maybe because sometimes it’s easier to "talk" to a keyboard than it is to talk to someone standing in the same room. 
    Such sharing, particularly from teenagers, has a great deal of value.  For multiple reasons. Nancy suggests that online journals, with their frightening posts, are worthy of study because: 

What I find disturbing is that the emphasis seems to be on limiting
students’ ability to read these "frightening" posts. I wonder what is
being done to try to get at the reason WHY
students are posting such things in the first place. Am I just out of
touch? Am I worrying about something that everyone else knows can’t be
solved?   If so, that is more frightening to me than the posts themselves.

Chris Lott mentions another reason when he writes:

If a student is just being exposed to the medium {of blogging}, they are like
students in their first creative writing class. I am less concerned
with what they are writing than with getting them to write, and to do so regularly.

Students new to blogging can use personal writing to familiarize themselves with the format.  That’s a good point.  But I think that there’s something more important that these journals can be useful for in schools.  But not all schools — only those schools that are interested in students   as human beings instead of products to be completed or vessels to be filled. 
    Can you imagine the power of a school counselor getting an update or status check on a hundred students via a single mouse click?  For those counselors willing to pay attention, and those students willing to share, online journals can be a valuable tool for assessing the well-being of students. 
    I’m thinking specifically here of a recent exchange between two of my blogging students in our weekly all-school meeting.  We have a section of that meeting devoted to sharing "I Appreciates" — moments of sharing positive things that that have occurred in the school community.  One student was thanking another because someone offered some reassuring words in a comment on his Xanga site.  Those words helped him get through the day — and they came from a student that he didn’t really know.   The community was strengthened via  Xanga.
    Of course, there are probably plenty of reasons why getting involved with the personal writing of students  is  problematic.  Here’s one.   I’m sure that you can think of more.
    Our students are making their writing public through these sites.  Instead of running from these journals and their "frightening" posts, let’s figure out how to work with them. 
    Right?