A year ago I sat with my Journalism students and watched in disbelief as our world and our lives changed forever. It was a news event of the grandest proportions, but any journalistic spark that I felt initially was quickly snuffed out by the magnitude of what we were seeing. We just sat, and watched, and tried to comprehend.

A year later, what has changed? Everything. Nothing. Personally, I’m more scared, more cynical, more hope-less about the world. I ache when I look at my daughter and my son, wondering if they will make it to middle age, wondering what it will be like to live their whole lives under an uncertain cloud. I hear an airplane jetting through the pink, early morning sky and wonder if it will make it to where it’s going. I cringe at wives of heroes making a buck on their husbands’ unselfish acts. I watch my leaders declare orange alerts, beat their chests for war yet run to “secure, undisclosed” locations, instill fears of even worse nightmares, and wonder if it’s not a convenient way to make us forget about all of the truly grevious ills in our society in time for the fall elections.

The signboard in front of my school, usually filled with car wash announcements and the current temperature, today reads simply “Never Forget, 9/11″. As I drove by it, the white lights of the words glimmering in a drape of pre-dawn darkness made for a mournful sight, and brought a tightness in my chest. But I wonder, exactly what is it that we should never forget? The event? The people that died? The effect on our collective psyche? Those are obvious. But there are other things even more important that we should always remember: that we are not the great benefactor of the world that we like to think we are; that all humans, American or not, deserve freedom and respect and civil rights; that the poorest of our citizens are rich to a vast majority of the world; that we know little about the global community; that we aren’t always given the straight scoop; that life is precious.

Yet, how can we forget what we have never truly known?

I hold no copyright on these thoughts. The fact that I share my fears, my frustrations, my lack of hope with so many others makes them a bit easier to live with. And I know they will abate, as 9/11 becomes more distant from today, until the next one occurs.

I will remember this: “The survivors will not be defined by the lives they have led until now but by the lives that they will lead from now on.” –Michael Berenbaum

And this: Let peace begin with me.
—–

My journalism kids’ weblogs are now linked at the class home page… still having some issues with kids understanding the process (it is a bit more complex than Blogger). But I’m being patient, telling them that by the end of the week everyone should be comfortable. We’ll see.

Today, for the first time, I did feel compelled to articulate the Why Weblogs? case to them. What I realized is that it’s a different “argument” from the one we educators keep debating and creating. They don’t much care about the collaborative nature of the weblog; they can do that without it. Nor does the concept of audience REALLY have meaning to them (at least not until some “audience” starts giving some real response). And Pat’s eloquent “digital paper” analogy would fly equally high over their heads, I think. So what did I resort to? I gave them the standard “Because you’re going to need to know how to do this in the real world” speech. After spending a year clarifying my own pedagogical philosophy about this stuff, it felt a little bit like I was copping out. I mean really, that’s the speech we always give when we don’t have any other, right?

And it’s not that I don’t think I can justify it anyway. KM and collaboration and communication over the Internet is the way of the future…I don’t doubt that for a second. I guess I just wish I could have made more of my own meaning clear to them without thinking it would be lost on them. Sigh.

So as the huge first week avalanche begins to ebb, I’m hoping to get back to more careful reading of all the weblogs I’ve been missing lately. Vague memories of blogventions and newspaper templates need more of my attention, I think.
—–

Spending a lot of my time now thinking about the best ways to use this beast I’ve unleashed on my kids. The real unknown here is how best to use the discussion feature (and as always, advice is welcomed). Now that it appears the author will be joining our book discussion in my lit class, I need to figure out the best way to use her input, and to get my students talking online too. I’ve spent some time this morning on Barbara’s and Karen’s sites, and I think I have some ideas. But I’m not quite clear…

Should I start conversations? If I do, should I do as Karen did and label them “Current Discussions”? (Still trying to figure out how she connects her discussion topics to the threaded discussion pages.) Should I ask the author to post her comments as news items on the home page? Or should I just have her check out these “current discussions” and respond. Then I could point to those responses from the home page. (And, as Barbara does so well, I should summarize the discussions going on throughout the site.)

I’ve posted some “model” content for my students, and I’m already worried that my plan to post everything as news and then sort it by departments may be a bit unruly…just too much to read. Perhaps I could link to those departments more prominently.

Still hard to see this all working without having seen how it works.

Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bees, the book that we’re teaching in our Modern American Lit classes, will be collaborating with my students in our class weblog. So very cool. Stay tuned next week for more details!

A better day by a bit, but still the type of day where I had to thank my kids for their patience and for allowing me to use them to learn a lot about how to do all this. Their sites are up and running (I’ll provide links next week) but I will probably not do it the way I did it today ever again. (Comments always welcome on this process by the way…)

Twenty-four students making weblogs made our Frontier server very slooooooowwwwwww. Especially when I chose the route of giving them some creative control by not making a pre-configured template and instead let them choose their own and then taking them through the salient configs. Way too much to ask. Next time, the heck with choice. (It occurred to me much later that I probably could have done all the configs, saved it as a theme, then let them switch the themes to their own liking after…sometimes my brain doesn’t see the easiest route…especially during the first week of school.) Live and learn.

And that’s just what today was, a learning experience. On a student of weblogs level, I loved it…no way to do this without doing it. On another more teacherly level, I despised it. Nothing like dealing with the unknown when you’re standing in front of 24 kids. Humbling.

Pat felt my pain yesterday, and I really appreciate the words of support. I too wish for more of a local neighborhood, but it’s too early for most people to see the light here. My tech support is great, like Pat’s; more than willing to do whatever it takes, open to new ideas. But we’re taking something that wasn’t meant for the classroom and students and trying to tweak our way through it. I’m still hoping that someday soon someone will come to the classroom teachers among us and just help us build the real deal. Manila is great, don’t get me wrong. But it’s harder than it needs to be.

I’m really tired…the first week, even half week, is always the hardest…it’s like getting back into shape. And with doing all this new stuff, it’s even harder.
—–

Some days you just have to revert back to what got ya’ here, paper and pen, chalkboard and chalk, talk and more talk…phone was ringing as I walked into my Journalism class…I’m primed to give them their weblog baptism, to set off on our kewl technological adventure…BUT, on the phone is Ed, my tech guy…”No weblogs today!” he half-chuckles, and I say “Wha?”…see, we’ve been trying to fix this gems issue, and Sarah offers her tech guru (who fixed a similar problem) to help…he e-mails instructions…Ed goes through the steps, entire weblog system blows up, Ed calls me, I get pale…(gets it back an hour later after resetting the configs which he got from tape backup)…Plan B…set up their e-mail accounts…kids try to login to the e-mail client, only half are able to…other half get “access denied”…back on phone to other tech gurus; they’re stumped…Plan C…visit some other weblogs to get the idea of what’s up…you guessed it, connections die…turn off computers…Plan D…pull history of journalism lecture from deep recesses of brain and feel lucky that it didn’t happen in my other class where there was not even a Plan B…Ah, but tomorrow is another day!

“If journalism is the first draft of history, then blogging is sometimes the first draft of journalism…” I really like that.
—–

I’m amazed at how different I feel about bringing weblogs to my students this year, primarily because of the difference Manila brings in terms of layers and conversations. I’m really wondering what this is all going to look like nine weeks from now. Did I bite off more than I could chew? Did my students take as easily to Manila as to Blogger? Did I figure out how to get gems working? (I still haven’t, much to my chagrin.) Will the teachers begin to see the benefits? (The Bees site has them talking…) Did my collaborations with Barbara live up to our expecations? Did the parents of my students watch our portfolios grow? Did my ed tech group see the potential? (One member of the group actually posted today!) Did I get the newspaper template from Pat? (And if not, did “Plan B” work?) Did I get to start a weblog for my department? Will I get the teacher portfolio template finished? Will Tess make it through her first day of kindergarten tomorrow? (The most important question of all.)

Even though I feel like I got a grip, I also feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. That’s what makes it so fun.

I’ve started weblogs for my Journalism 1 class and for the Shared Decision Making Technology Committee at my school. I most interested to see what it’s going to take to get the other members of the committee to use the weblog. (One member admitted she didn’t even know how to create folders on the computer.) All of us have time issues, and that’s what I’m wondering about most: will the weblog save us time by allowing us to communicate about issues throughout the school year? OR will people perceive it just as another time consuming initiative? More and more I think the answer lies with how comfortable we all are with using the technology. (And, of course, how sincerely interested we are in the topic.) I’m going to push them a bit after the first week or so of school, and I’m going to really try watch their responses to it. KM experiment #1.

Trying to get focused…three days until kids…Decided to have journalism kids create their own weblogs, copy and paste in their own “editors” from a Word document that I’ll create, and then close membership…Still haven’t heard from Pat on the newspaper template, though it appears he’s still tweaking…if anyone knows how to set up separately updateable sections on one page, let me know…and haven’t made any headway on the call back scripts, so I’ll have to go with what I got…book author’s publicist loved the Bees site and is trying to get the author to participate…should be an intersting week.

(Via Pat.) Interesting process for inquiry that can easily be accomplished using Manila. Can use as a framework for research.
—–