While the sample is miniscule, I noticed a tremendous difference in the amount of blogging among my students along gender lines. No matter how you cut it, the girls create more blogs, longer posts, and more comments than the boys. This was surprising because the majority of the blogs that I have encountered were written by males.
I wondered whether this was a quirk in my classroom, or did this reflect a larger trend. Searching the Internet I found a research paper: Effects of Age and Gender on Blogging. This little tidbit summarizes their findings:
We have assembled a large corpus of blogs labeled for a
variety of demographic attributes. This large sample
permits us insight into the demographic distribution of
bloggers. We have found that teenage bloggers are
predominantly female, while older bloggers are
predominantly male.
This is consistent with what I have observed in my fifth grade classroom. While they each have a blog, the girls’ participation is clearly greater. They are more likely to comment upon their life in and out of school. They clearly view it as an extension of their existing social network–a way to keep in touch with their friends beyond their face-to-face time. This is particularly important as we are very rural and many students have limited opportunity outside of school. The research also reflects some of my observations:
Male bloggers of all ages write more about politics,
technology and money than do their female cohorts.
Female bloggers discuss their personal lives – and use
more personal writing style – much more than males do.
While the boys are enthused about having blogs, many seem to view it more like graffiti. They enjoy making their mark and showing everyone they have been there and are capable of showing it. The challenge is to increase their meaningful participation.
I wonder if other educators whose students have blogs have noticed the same trends. If so, then what strategies facilitate greater participation among the males in the classroom.
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I think the gender blogging differences are the same differences we see in writing in general. I’ve taught gifted kids K-6 for 25 years and my girls always write more and more often than the boys. I will occasionally have “gifted” male writers but very seldom do I have a “gifted” male writer who actually loves to write.
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Yes, my experience is that girls as an aggregate are more willing writers than boys. However, I have had many boys very willing to write when they are allowed to write whatever they want which is the case with the blogs.
Funny though, I’ve had several boys in recent years who struggled with writing suddenly “get it,” and want to write all the time. Last year, one such boy spent his whole Christmas party churning out short essays.
Nonetheless, girls are more willing to write as a whole–I agree!
Now that I have introduced microblogging, I’ll be interested to see whether it gets a different response!
This work by Stephen J. O’Connor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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