I have encountered three examples in the past few weeks of using journals to learn. The first came from Ken Follett’s excellent novel, World Without End. One of the main characters is a woman who, going against the traditions of the day, becomes a doctor. As part of her own learning, she reads books of others but she also keeps her own journal where she makes notes about her patients and her methods for treating them. Since most of the books she has available to her are ancient treatises about things like humors and how sin causes disease, her notes become a practical manual for others with direct links between illness and treatment. I realize this is fictional but it is a great example of using writing to learn.

The second example came along with my cheesemaking kit. The instructions recommending keeping a cheesemaking journal to make notes about the experience.

The third example came from Southern Living magazine. In their most recent edition, they recommend that, in order to learn more about gardening, you should keep a journal with notes and diagrams.

So, there seems to be lots of agreement that journaling is a good way to learn. And, as I suggest in my title, I have a tool for that: a weblog. Now, I can hear some of you saying, so what, Karen? Are you just now figuring this out? Certainly using a blog as a personal learning journal is not a new idea amongst people like me. But, it might be a new idea for teachers. And, for those of us who work with teachers, the new idea might be how we approach them with this tool. Instead of starting with the tool, start with the instructional practice of having students reflect on their learning through writing. I think there are a fair number of teachers across the content areas who already do this. So, building on a practice they have already established, talk to them about the affordances of blogging technology to facilitate that learning.

We also owe it to them to help them figure out how they will implement this enhanced strategy using the computer resources available to them. When I was teaching language arts, my students kept reading journals. If I were doing it today, I would certainly want to use weblogs because their affordances greatly outweigh the paper/pencil journals in terms of commenting and building a community of readers. However, I would need to have pretty decent access to computers so students could write in their journals when they had something to say rather than when I got the computer lab scheduled. If getting access to computer technology made that impossible, I would probably go back to the paper/pencil journals, whose one major affordance is that they can be easily carried to class or kept in a box in the classroom. Schools continue to struggle with the access issue so it must be part of the conversation we have with teachers.

Just FYI: I am keeping my cheese journal online as part of my personal weblog in the hopes that my experiences might be useful for others who have begun to the journey to cheesemaker.