…but not as much as many others. I only scored 134 on the MSNBC Geek Test. I’ve seen some scores over 190. Still, about five years ago I bet I would have scored about a 50 on a similar test for the times. Amazing how much I’ve learned in a short period of time.
—–

I think more than a few of my students are getting the hang of this, but Suzan in particular is doing a great job. All politics aside, I love the way she set up this post and ended it with a good deal of research that basically lets you know how she feels. That’s the kind of thing I’ve been hoping for, and I’m starting to be pleasantly surprised at the number of real blogging posts I’m starting to see.

Despite the really positive feelings that EdBlogger left in most of us, it also left me with a feeling that there was more work left to do here than maybe it seemed. Maybe it’s natural that a gathering of that type tends to push our thinking in ways that we haven’t done in the past. As I think I’ve noted here before, while all of this asynchronous conversation is well and good, there’s no substitute to some f2f time to get people thinking. Not just me. Pat has been writing about some challenges to his thinking about Web logs. And I think at some level we’re all a bit frustrated with the glacial pace of the change we see in our schools. I know I am.

I spent a lot of the quiet moments of this holiday thinking about the state of edBlogging. My enthusiasm hasn’t waned a bit, but I am starting to see this a bit more realistically, I think. The potential here is so clear to me that sometimes I think I just take for granted that others will see it too. Not that easy, obviously. There are a number of barriers that are going to take us some time to overcome. And truth is, we may never overcome them because of the inequities in our technology infrastructure and support. I’m able to do more than most, so if it’s hard for me… But we share some issues too.

Time is the biggest problem. Teachers see this as more to do, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise. I can tell them that it will help organize their teaching lives in ways that will eventually save them time, but ultimately, to do this well, it will require an investment that many will not be willing to give.

Fear of the technology is another. What if it breaks? What if I can’t do it? What if I lose all of the work that I have done? These are legitimate questions, especially at this early stage of the game.

Lack of real proof that this in anyway improves student learning is another issue. There are some stirrings in this area, but it’s going to take quite a bit of time before anything really becomes clear.

Finally, there are the concerns with privacy and safety and appropriateness, etc. We still have some work to do to create the “perfect” tool for schools.

Maybe, as Pat says, it is time to stop pushing and to see how this all naturally evolves. But on the other hand, I feel like I need to keep on evangelizing all the great things that Web logs bring to the classroom.
—–

I’ve been playing with the template in Manila and I must say between CSS and GoLive, I think I’m starting to figure it out. The long promised school newspaper site has gone through another iteration, but this is going to be it. Not exactly the way I wanted to do it, but the design works, I think, and the kids can update it. I might take a similar look for a newsmag idea I’m toying with for my class. The thing I most like about this new site is the soon to be growing list of student blogging links in the nav bar. (Here’s one example.) We still have some kinks to work out, but by next week we should be ready to start generating audiences for their work. It won’t be perfect, but nothing rarely is the first time around, especially with this stuff. Unfortunately (?) I’m more of a “let’s throw it up there and see what happens” type…I just can’t sit down and plan it all out beforehand. But this gives me some incentive to really dive into the larger project… the school site. That’s going to require more planning, ya’ think?

Tess, Tucker, Wendy, my home, good friends, Hunterdon County, food in the fridge, soy, a great job, cars that work, clothes in the closet, family, college buddies, the Cubs, sunrises, Anna Quindlen, a fireplace, heat, recycling, an Internet connection that works, Web logs and edbloggers, writing, Bill Moyers, 6-year old art, Amazon.com, the Delaware River, Hatteras, books, my students, online bill pay, nine years of not smoking, third straight Turkey Trot, Unitarian Universalism, clean air, well water, old photos, the loft, and the lingering hope that the many ills of the world will get better. Peace and good health.
—–

(Via OL Daily)

Good article that points to a problem with RSS and makes a pitch for some sanity. The problem is this: “If your feed works, if you are successful in attracting subscriptions on a global scale, if you do it right, you are doomed [because] everyone subscribes to a small file on your site. The critical word there is ‘everyone’.” Now of course, content syndication doesn’t work if nobody syndicates the content! The way RSS is supposed to work is that a website is accessed by a small number of harvesters; these harvesters, in turn, feed to people who have a specialized interest in a topic. But if people subscribe to individual feeds, rather than aggregated (and syndicated) feeds, then “it is like having a permanent listing on the front page of SlashDot.” Such a situation should never happen. You should not need to hit an individual feed once an hour. “In fact, you may not need my feed at all if this aggregator buddy’s feed has collected my posts with other opensource hippie sites and can provide you with a composite feed where the news is hourly different instead of my lazy two-days-maybe publishing cycle.” Via Seb (who had a good day today). By Gary Lawrence Murphy, Teledyn, November 24, 2003

One thing to add to this interesting and scary(?) scenario. Mark Fletcher at Bloglines comments that server-based aggregators hit sites only once no matter how many subscribers there are. That obviously keeps bandwith use down. More growing pains…

So I decided to get some feedback from my kids today about their “blogging” exploits to date. Specifically, I asked them to just try to sum up what they’ve noticed and how they’ve felt about the coverage of beat topics they’ve been doing. I got some interesting responses, some of which I’ll share here. I’ll stay away from the “I liked it (or not)” stuff and try to pull out excerpts more relevant to my recent struggles:

Just inside the front doors of Meriwether Lewis Elementary, a wall-sized mural offers a clue: This is a school that celebrates creativity. The same message echoes from the music room where students learn to play recorders and band instruments. When Principal Tim Lauer shows a visitor around, he makes note of the colorful banners, totem pole, mosaic bird bath, and other art installations that students have made since the school was built half a century ago in this southeast Portland neighborhood.

“I’d like to have students use digital cameras to catalog this artwork,” Lauer says, “and research some of the history behind it.” Then, he envisions sharing historical information with the school community via the new school weblog.

Boy, Tim sure has gotten that mean principal pose down pretty fast, huh?
—–

Jay Cross who got way too close with his camera; Nancy Peralta, who gets my vote for “EdBlogger Rookie of the Year,” and Dan Mitchell, who has probably had the most success getting a school set up with Manila.
—–

Ed Blogger was a great chance to meet some really good people. I am consistently struck by the quality of the edblogging community. They are genuinely concerned with how to make education better, and their ultimate concern for students is always apparent. People who are new to this seem genuinely amazed at the level of collaboration and willingness to share ideas, but that seems to be the best part of it all. Pat did a superb job in getting this whole thing to come together, and I’m already looking forward to the next one.

Having said that, however, I feel like I’m leaving San Francisco with more questions than answers. During our conversations yesterday, it became clearer to me that I need to start differentiating between using a Web log and “blogging.” (Dan Mitchell noticed something similar.) This thought isn’t really a new one, but it just sort of crystallized itself here as I noticed a lot of what was being said about the art of blogging, the physical act of writing in a Web log, was really irrelevant to our discussion of education. I don’t think there was anyone in the room yesterday whose students were truly blogging. There are many who have students using Web logs, but, for instance, when I asked Pat‘s student Nathan Edelman what he used his school sponsored space for, he said it was basically to post assignments. (And he drew a chuckle when he said that he likes this ability because it allows his classmates to use his work if they need to.) When Nathan wanted to start really blogging (i.e complaining about some of his grades,) Pat set him up with a site on Weblogger. And Nathan is going to town.

This is an important distinction for a couple of reasons. One, I’ve really come to believe that the act of blogging can be a valuable way to learn to write more effectively. I know there have been a lot of definitions of what Web logs are, but I’m not sure that is the case with the act of blogging. To me, the process of blogging is, most of the time, an ongoing series of steps: 1. Find and read material that is relevant to your life. 2. Capture the essence of this relevant reading, give credit to its source, and synthesize those ideas into a piece of writing that advances a personal, perhaps greater understanding of that topic 3. Publish that writing for response and for perhaps pushing someone else’s thinking on the subject. 4.Read some more. It’s a process that I think teaches and practices a great deal of critical thinking, information literacy, research, collaboration and composition skills that on one level I think may be difficult to replicate with any other writing instruction. I know traditional expository writing instruction comes close, but rarely is there the personal interest in the writing that blogging provides. And it is that personal interest that I think helps writers really own the process and make it real, which in turn leads to some real learning.

But I’m wondering today if that kind of writing is truly possible in schools, both for students and teachers. I’ve taken this space off my school server and now have it hosted independently. When a teacher came to me last week and asked that I set up a personal blog space for him on our server, I felt compelled to turn him down when he told me he wanted a space to air his personal opinions. The big question for me right now is how can I replicate this important writing process in a way that students can truly experience the power of it under the mostly understandable limitations imposed by schools. I’m trying in my journalism class. My kids are trying to really blog about a topic that interests them, but it’s still pretty contrived. And to be honest, I need to spend more time on the process with them anyway to make sure they are getting the benefits I described above.

Now I’m not saying that Web logs aren’t very valuable teaching tools. They certainly are, for all the reasons that we have modeled and discussed many times. I think from a classroom management and electronic portfolio standpoint (and many others,) the benefits and the potentials are many. But on some level, I’ve kept hoping that this was going to be more than a tool. I still think it is, but it’s not as easily recognized as I was hoping.

Terry Elliot (who should do more writing in his Web log) and I talked yesterday about the need for some real research into what happens to student learning when kids use blogs. Do they become better writers? Do they learn to be more reflective? Does the organizational aspect of Web logs in some way impact what they are able to achieve? Terry wants to start doing some research, but it’s a hard question to pose and to measure results for. Marion’s WIDE initiative may be a valuable piece of research as well. Sure, we can do many things with Web logs, many good things. But what real effect are they having on student learning? Maybe we’re at the point where we’re ready to tackle some of this, because it would go a long way to overcoming some of the barriers of entry that many teachers face with this right now. (That’s Part II of this post.) And now that we’ve had a more or less official “convention,” could research be far behind???

More as this settles in, I’m sure.

—–

Mark Bernstein, Phil Wolff, Nathan Edelman and Pat are a part of a panel on the importance of Web logs with writing, and it’s spurring some pretty good threads dealing with the issues of implementation, privacy, plagiarism, etc. One obvious issue that I’m noticing is the difference between personal blogging and educational blogging, especially on the K-12 level. A lot of us use Web logs with our students, but how many of us really have students that are “blogging” in the essential sense? In fact, the question may even be can our students really “blog” at all given the limitations imposed by school districts and the fears of teachers and administrators? I’m not discounting the worth of using Web logs to teach writing (and other things), but I guess the distinction to remember is that we’re really not teaching blogging. My issue is that I’d love to teach blogging…

Mark Bernstein thinks that blogging is going to evolve in to something very different from what it is now: “This is the way we did it for a couple of years when we didn’t have a clue.”
—–

John Dvorak of PC Magazine skewers Web logs, and I mean skewers.

Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers. This is compounded by a lack of feedback, positive or otherwise. Perseus thinks that most blogs have an audience of about 12 readers. Leaflets posted on the corkboard at Albertsons attract a larger readership than many blogs. Some people must feel the futility. The problem is further compounded by professional writers who promote blogging, with the thought that they are increasing their own readership. It’s no coincidence that the most-read blogs are created by professional writers. They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome, albeit insincere.

Sheesh…it couldn’t be that he’s worried about his boring old print job, could it?

People are starting to arrive to the Sunday conversations, and I’m really psyched. Last night at Fort Mason was great…good food, some live guitar playing in the background, and a lot of great conversation. (For some great pics, go to the unofficial NCTE EdWeblogs site.) My highlights were meeting some people who can count me as a fan: Karen McComas, Tom Hoffman, Terry Elliot, Jake Savin, Al Delgado, Cathie English, Josh Allen and others. We had some pretty serious (yet fun) early conversations on things like the creation of a tool just for teachers and schools, barriers to entry for teachers, what the future holds and more. I’m looking forward to today as I think it’s going to generate a whole slate of other conversations we need to start having if we’re going to make this happen. Unfortunately, the connection is a bit spotty, so post during the sessions may not be happening. But I’m sure there will be much to say later today.
—–

—–