As we think about the types of writing we ask students to do in school, and whether or not they feel it is for a real audience and purpose, can it even come close to this?
Nick Barnowski is in multitask mode. His fingers dance around a keyboard, keeping up his end of the bargain in a back and forth two-way Instant Message conversation.
He stops momentarily, leans back in his office chair and trades glances between the flat panel monitor and his visiting afternoon appointment that sits across the desk from him.
A stack of business cards sits in a tray on the front of the desk, which takes up a portion of the home office where he spends much of his time. On the walls, his hockey-playing career is chronicled with framed team photos, sharing the same space with a larger photo of the Detroit Red Wings skating around the ice with the Stanley Cup in their possession.
Recently things have been hectic. There has been an online sports Web blog to update, television, radio and newspaper interviews to be done, e-mail correspondence to attend to, and of course, the sixth grade to complete.
That’s right. The owner of one of America Online’s most popular sports Web blogs is 12. As in four years shy of his driver’s license 12.
Lansing State Journal: Popular sports-blog writer is 6th-grader with a full schedule
The rest of the story is even more interesting, as it talks about Nicks experience as a writer and what his teacher, who subscribes to the blog, thinks about this, too. Earlier today, some ELA consultants were asking me how and why we might do workshops on blogging (and try to overcome the MySpace crisis), and I think that this is a good example of positive blogging that I will use in the future.