Our Students Will Be Writing on Medium

Reflection, knowledge generation, and public sharing on a simple, social blogging platform.

My colleague Amanda Foster and I teach a class at Wake Forest University that’s primarily focused on how to learn about the world through research. This summer, we’re teaching the course online for the first time, and Medium will play a big role. Here’s why.

Although students know our course as “Library Science,” what we teach involves a lot more than just the library. Thanks to the ever-rapid pace of technological change, using information is getting more complicated by the minute. It’s more important than ever that our students practice habits of what our field calls “information literacy.”

“Ultimately, information literate people are those who have learned how to learn. They know how to learn because they know how knowledge is organized, how to find information, and how to use information in such a way that others can learn from them. They are people prepared for lifelong learning, because they can always find the information needed for any task or decision at hand.” (via)

A few things stand out from that description and form the basis for our justification for having our students blog.

Learning how to learn

“…information literate people are those who have learned how to learn.”

In our class, students explore ways to generate interesting questions to help them learn more about the world around them. We want to instill in our students the idea that learning is rarely linear — that one question leads to another, and that their first question often leads to ten more. Rather than some artificial process required for the perennially inauthentic genre of the “research paper,” we want our students to see research as a tool for learning and understanding — that going from curiosity to knowledge requires work. We’re blogging in this class, in part, to document our experiences with using research as a tool for learning.

How information is organized

“…they know how knowledge is organized, how to find information…”

For better or for worse, the web has made it easier than ever to find information. Knowing how information is organized online, how links add value to the information we produce online, and how search engines and our social media feeds work to organize our online lives in ways that are obscure to us, are all things we can begin to better understand by actively producing content on the web.

How to use information

“…and how to use information in such a way that others can learn from them.”

Perhaps most importantly, blogging allows us to better understand how to create new knowledge with a public audience in mind. When students write research papers, they’re usually writing them for an audience of one: their professor. When students write blog posts, they’re writing for an audience of the entire web. Blogging allows us to better understand how to consider such a broad audience and present ourselves as accessible, trustworthy, and authoritative. Blogging also gives us practice in relating our ideas to others’ ideas, as we link to (and are linked to by) other blog posts.

Why Medium?

Well, a few reasons. First, it’s easy, once you get the hang of it. Medium is, in my opinion, the nicest web writing experience there is. It’s not overly technical — if you know how to highlight text and click a mouse, you can use Medium. The importance of choosing simple, effective tools for our students to use cannot be overstated. (We’re giving you the side-eye, Sakai.)

Another reason is that Medium is public in ways that other blogging platforms are not. Rather than having to find an audience to follow your posts, Medium comes with a built-in audience. Posts are public by default (like Twitter), and subscribing to other Medium bloggers is a snap.

Medium also lets us create a class publication on which our students can be contributing writers. This helps us build a little bit of community in an online class where community is such a valuable commodity.

Finally, since this is the first time we’ve ever taught this course online, and will likely be the first online course any of our students have ever taken, we figured that we might as well do something that makes us all a bit uncomfortable and requires us all to take risks. Because that’s where learning happens.