Pat Delaney was the first ed blogger that I came across 2 1/2 years ago when I first stumbled on Web logs. At that time, the whole concept was pretty much under the radar, and even with some serious digging, nothing turned up anyone who was doing more thinking and writing about blogs in schools than Pat. He was and continues to be an inspiration.

So when Pat, in response to a post on Ken Tompkins site, writes “I’ve begun to wonder if there is any value to blogging beyond ‘hype,’” I can’t help but take notice. And on his own site today, Pat says

“…the bloom is off the blog. Which is to say that if I’ve discovered anything this year about writing online it’s that “online” is NOT the best place for writing that aims at anything other than pointing.”

To give Pat’s observations some context, he’s been playing with Tinderbox of late (which unfortunately has no Windows version.) His early reviews seem to be leading his ratcheting down of Weblog worth, so much so that a couple of days ago he quipped “blogging, schmlogging.” I’d be less than honest if I said his words haven’t given me some pause.

I know I’ve been coming to the point where I’m needing some real results as to the power and usefulness of Weblogs. Now that enough teachers have kicked the tires so to speak, many are wondering about the engine and whether or not it can take us to where we want to go. For the English teacher, right-brained folks like Pat and Terry and I, these questions focus directly on writing process. I know that when I first started using blogs with my students, the biggest pull was the publishing aspect, that part of the process that I always felt lagging. The freewriting, the muddled and messy drafting, the peer response…all of those pieces felt pretty well addressed in my classes. But the work and time that went into finding non-manufactured audiences for my students’ writing was almost always too intensive to make it work. With Weblogs, it was almost too easy.

I haven’t been convinced that Weblogs are great for process. The tool I use, Manila, needs some more switches to flip in terms of private and public posting that I think would make it more effective with the pre-publication stuff. We’ve been posting for over a year on the difficulties of all public space. There’s just a lot of messy stuff that writers do that needs to be done in private, and I think that’s what Pat refers to in the excerpt above about writing offline. Weblogs, and Manila in particular, weren’t created for the creative or expository writing teacher in mind. We’ve been working with a less than perfect tool, and maybe Pat’s just come to the conclusion that from a writing perspective, blogs aren’t going to cut it. In their current form, he may be right.

But I still think Weblogs, and in particular Weblogs in schools, are more than just hype. From my experience, they are a heckuva lot better than folders, they facilitate communication between peers, mentors, parents, and teachers, they provide discussion space for thinking and writing not done in class, and they provide an easily accessed (for the most part) archived and searchable record of all sorts of work and knowledge. And those potentials as a communication and collaboration tool I don’t think have come close to being realized yet.

And I think there’s something to be said for blogging as a genre, as a way of writing that doesn’t fit into our traditional definitions of composition but has some inherent value nonetheless. The blogging process isn’t as messy as other forms of writing, but the product can bring about some meaningful learning for students in terms of critical thinking and media literacy. There is much yet to explore here.

Toward the end of his post today, Pat says

In less than a week using only its basic applications, it’s [Tinderbox] become my primary writing space. A little testing of it as a note and bibliographic organizer shows it’ll be my primary researching and informational reading tool as well. It’s led to less blogging and more researching, reading, thinking and writing. Uh oh, sounds like a resolution…

I hope I’m not reading that right, ’cause it sounds as if Pat’s moving toward taking his forward thinking ideas offline, leaving us with an occasional well-processed no doubt excellent piece of writing. I’ll be looking forward to reading it, but I hope he’ll continue to share his struggles too because that’s really where I think the power of of many of the Weblogs I read is, the immediacy of ideas in their sometimes inchoate, un-thought-through form. I’ve learned a lot from him and others through their messy spaces. I hope that continues in 2004.

Happy New Year, everyone…

Just want to take a couple minutes to recap my 2003 from a blogging sense. A lot has changed, I think. More teachers and students blogging. More good writing to read. More great thinking about how best to employ this technology. Even though we may not yet be as close to the “tipping point” for ed blogging as I once thought, one look at my aggregator shows just how much innovative thinking there is going on out there. So here, in no particular order, and with very little in the way of explanation, are some ed bloggers of note and some others thrown in from the past year.

Most Enthusiastic Ed Bloggger–Anne Davis
Best Over My Head Ed Blogger–Tom Hoffman
Ed Blogger Rookie of the Year–Nancy Peralta
My Favorite Blogger in a Non-Educational Role–Jay Rosen, Josh Marshall (tie)
Ed Blogger I’d Most Like to Write Like–Terry Elliot
Ed Blogger Site Redesign of the Year–Pam Pritchard
Most Relevant (to me at least) Classroom User of Blogs–Kaye Trammell
Environmental Blogger of the Year–Dave Pollard
Student Blogger of the Year–Suzan S.
Most Missed Ed Bloggers–Sarah Lohnes, Sebatian Fiedler (tie)
Ed Blogging Principal of the Year–Tim Lauer
Best Use of Metaphor to Explain Consistently Important Ed Blogger Thinking–Pat Delaney
Higher Ed Blogger Who Best Translates to K-12–Dan Mitchell, Mike Arnzen, Ken Smith (tie)
K-12 Ed Blogger Site of the Year–EdBlogger Praxis
Ed Blogger App of the Year–Bloglines

Some major ed blogging questions I’d like to get answers to in 2004:

Do Weblogs improve a student’s ability to write? (Terry?)
Can you build an online community with a Weblog based school Website?
Is the skill of blogging important enough to teach as a separate genre?
Will Manila development lead it to greater heights, or will it slide further into obscurity?
Who is going to provide access to blogging for the thousands (if not millions) of kids out there who currently don’t have it?
Will Weblogs allow for more participation in the political process for students and teachers?
Where will Ed Blogger II be and when? (New Orleans in June???)
Can I keep up a personal and professional Weblog at the same time?

There are many more people and many more questions to note, I’m sure. This has been a wonderful year for me thanks in large part to the new friends that I’ve made in the Ed Blogger community, the opportunities for blogvangelism that have come along, and the very cool work that my students and teachers at my school are doing with Weblogs. It’s one of the many things I’m looking forward to in 2004. To all of you who have contributed to this journey, my heartfelt thanks, and my sincerest wishes for a peaceful and prosperous new year.

OJR looks back at 2003 and asks “What do you think were the most important developments related to online journalism (media, video, blogging, etc.) in the past year?” The most cited is the use of Weblogs in reporting. Jeff Jarvis says:

“Watch Weblogs and citizens’ media bring freedom of expression and democracy to other lands next year. Whether in a small town in Iran or Iraq or America, citizens’ media means that anyone can now own a printing press and has the power that goes with it. That will revolutionize news, media, politics, government, and marketing.”

2004 is going to be such an interesting year in this field. It’s still so cool to be out in front of it, to have at least some functional understanding of what this all means. I really think that with the crush of the election coming near, we’re going to see the Weblog envelope pushed in ways we haven’t yet seen, and that we’ll be in much different company by the end of the year.

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Via Doc Searles, a pretty good rant from the Head Lemur about where journalism should be headed in terms of linking to source material. I continue to think that the use of hypertext in writing will keep growing and growing until it becomes a requirement for readers consumption of news and information. Obviously Weblogs can facilitate that in classrooms right now.

In Journalism and reporting the ‘view source’ meme can be used by linking to the material used to create stories is the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of information and communication. Fact checking is supposed to be the fundamental foundation of reportage in news organizations. The internet is changing the way things get reported. The ability of publishing from a single computer by a single person to collaborative efforts by dozens of individuals, to news organizations that are trying to use the web to bolster circulation and continue the parasitic relationship of the modern news organization, the ability to link to other online sources of information, allowing readers to fact check stories to determine the veracity and neutrality in the case of all those ‘fair and balanced’ folks, is unparalled in the history of communication.

Spent a good chunk of yesterday at the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen with my wife and father-in-law helping to dish up over 400 meals to some very less fortunate on a cold New Jersey day. It’s amazing to me that in my state capitol, the illiteracy and poverty rates are both around 40%, and that’s literally less than 25 miles from my community where I would be surprised if either of those rates broke 2-3%. It was depressingly obvious how bleak the prospects are for the children who came through the doors. For me, their faces make it very difficult not to wonder why we can spend billions on the reconstruction of countries that we really have no business destroying in the first place but we can’t find enough money to provide the basic necessities for our own people…
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All the best to friends new and old and others just wandering through; may all of your celebrations be warm, peaceful, and memorable. –Will

Tim’s influence remains at Buckman Elementary where Helen Nolan the principal is pushing the envelope with Web logs as communication tools. I love this: “And, all teachers are expected to add at least one page of content to the school weblog.

Teachers and other staff members are using the weblog in different ways. The librarian, for example, has posted a suggested reading list and book reviews for students. A first-grade teacher showcases student writing with an “authors’ corner.” Another teacher has students perform daily journal writing on the weblog, while in a science class, students post mealworm observations and photos. Student artwork also appears in a colorful online gallery.

All cool ideas, and all making me really psyched to start implementing pages for people.

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“Commons-blog is an American Library Association-sponsored site collecting news, discussion, and commentary related to the information commons in theory and practice.” At first blush, this looks like a great resource for media literacy and information type issues. This post on the revisionist history of the White House Website is definitely a jumping off point for a discussion of the impermanence of information on the Internet. Lots of other good links to libraries that I’m going to be checking out as I build my school’s library site, too. Add another to my Bloglines account…
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Ok, now this is pretty cool. I set up an e-mail account at Bloglines and it automatically gets added to my list of subscriptions. Then I use that address when I create my Manila sites and voila, my notifications get sent to Bloglines and come out in feed form. That’s pretty cool considering a)it would clear out my e-mail inbox of all the posting notices I currently get, and b)I wouldn’t have to click through 300 different feeds from 300 different sites at my school to see what’s been posted. I could have it all in one easy to read feed! At least that’s the concept. The only downside I can see is that I wouldn’t be able to see which blogs have been posted to at a glance. I’d have to scan through all the e-mails to see what was up. Still, one feed vs. a few hundred? On the surface, that’s pretty tempting. And, of course, I could also make feeds for those rss-less e-mail subscriptions full of left wing propaganda that I subscribe to (assuming they don’t need a response-from-e-mail to validate it, though, what’s this? They’re working on that too??? I love Bloglines. Have I mentioned that lately? I do. Really. I’m downright giddy.)

Time to start experimenting…

I was thinking more about my journalism class and blogging last night. While many of my students are getting the hang of this, just as many aren’t. I’m sure it’s that some are simply more motivated than others, some feel more comfortable writing for an audience, others are more passionate about their topics, and some are just more confident in their abilities in general. But what those of us using Web logs are trying to articulate now are the strategies that will help students make the most of their blogging efforts while at the same time envision the ways in which they might be included in the curriculum. Here are a few that I’ve collected but not committed to blogemory…nothing earth-shattering I’m sure:

Kaye Trammell is thinking about how to tweak her students blogging experience for next term, and once again our brains are in the same neighborhood.

I’m still thinking through exactly how I want my students to use their blogs. Of course, it has to be meaningful & add to the overall goals of the course. But they are blogging - it has to be fun. I want them to fall in love with it as I have.

I’ve been really impressed by the Web logging efforts of a couple of my students as I’ve noted before. Suzan and Susan are getting it and building an impressive space for their topics. I don’t know that they have fallen in love with blogging like Kaye and I have, but I do know that they are learning to have the audience in mind when they are writing. I can see it in their posts. Here’s an example from Susan:

I think music plays a definite role in the media because, in a way, the media is telling you who to be or how to act. By means of music is how kids and teenagers begin to identify themselves, and it follows them into old age. For instance, there are the hip hop kids and gangsters, the pop kids that listen to whatever’s in, the punk kids that are confused about everything. Music taste defines peoples’ friends and changes their personalities. The media can play on this so easily. A lot of art in the “Pop Rocks” exhibit rearranges song lyrics and titles to show how the media is controlling you. It’s sort of interesting. A little scary. I’d definitely hit the link above to check out descriptions of the work.

You know what stands out about this post more than anything? She’s not writing for me. She’s writing for a group of her peers, and her use of fragments and and short simple sentences shows that, I think. She wants to be read. Now like I said, whether or not that translates into a love of blogging, I don’t know. But I do know that she’s having fun with this. She’s thinking and learning and teaching, and that’s what the Web log gives her that is so important.

There’s more to talk about here. Pat’s digging into the blogs and writing connections again, too:

Blog posting isn’t writing; it’s publishing. Writing happens before the ‘post’ button gets clicked. Good writing is more than news, more than pointers, but benefits from news and pointers. Good writing is re-writing.

He’s right for the most part. This is mostly publishing. But this goes back to the blogging as genre thread, that while it may not always look like the familiar prose we’re used to asking for, it’s good writing nonetheless. And good writing IS re-writing, though I would argue that there is a lot of good Web log writing that takes a short cut where revision is concerned. And in one way, consistent Web log writing incorporates a more immediate, built in revision process that will make traditionalists grimace but may be a skill just as important as the more thougthful, re-vision we teach our students.

We’re still a long way from figuring all of this out, obviously. But I gotta tell you, when I read Suzan and Susan, I get a tingle of the excitement that comes when something new is working. It’s pretty fun…
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Ran across this site and it’s offshoots from my referer logs, and there looks to be some very nice uses of Web logs in classrooms popping up all over the place. Crawford Kilian who teaches at Capilano College in Vancouver (and has written over 20 books) is reflecting on his efforts with blogs in his Legal Techand Outdoor Rec classes. He says:

As the fall semester winds up, I’m feeling a little more encouraged about education blogging. The two course blogs seem to have been useful to the students even though they didn’t often post to them…

He keeps a number of Web logs on different subjects, all of which look pretty interesting.

He’s also got a link to a Brit Lit Web log by Beth Fullerton. She says:

It is my hope that I will be assigning students to write three articles a nine weeks to be published on this site. I will let them write over topics that we are studying in class. I will also use this site to publish discussion questions over our class work. Students will be required to check the site and comment on the questions. I also will link from this site to the blogs of my students that they will be required to keep for the class. If a student doesn’t have internet access, I will allow them to use this site to post their own blog. I hope this site will stimulate discussion and writing in my classes. Communication should also improve. Parents, students, principals, and the community will be welcome to visit and comment on our site.

And a couple of more finds…Ben Harris’s “American Literature and its Discontents” looks to be a blog on the study of Gatsby. The post about F. Scott & Paris Hilton; Living The American Dream? is especially interesting. I met Ben at NECC this year and he’s another one of those “I wish he’d do more blogging” types (a la Terry.)

Also, here’s the Western Nebraska Community College site that’s using a Web log…

More and more and more interesting examples of classroom sites every day…

(via Tom)

The long and the short of it is that I think Desktop Dean is much more usable for a non-geek than any general purpose aggregator I’ve tried. If I were building RSS into a commercial school administration application, I’d send tier 9 partners some nickles to put together a “desktop link” mini-aggregator to bundle with my server app. That way, news, homework updates, etc., could be flowed straight to parents and teachers system tray, without even requiring a visit to a web portal.

That’s kind of what I’ve been working toward but not in a format like this. Very cool to think of using this on your own separate Intranet page…
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Now this is pretty cool. Michael S. Matassa Jr. is a math teacher using Web logs.

Get ready to join your classmates in a fun and exciting way to write in math class. Are you a little hesitant to write in math? Would you rather not write in math? Well, don’t worry, I have just the thing that will let you enjoy writing about math. All you need is blogs! That’s right blogs.

I love it! It seems to be a Webquest from Boulder Valley School Discrict, and I’m going to be really interested to see how this works out.

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Bryan Bell has used his Manila magic to whip up a new theme for me that I’m going to use for the school Web log as Website. (Pay no attention to the content as I’m just playing with this site…) I think it looks pretty great, and it has some unique features that Bryan was able to build in for more flexibility. The background banner image is easy to swap out, the right hand column is a module that is easily edited as are the two modules in the left hand column, and the footer. The main nav bar at the top is a universal image for all pages on the site so if I edit it, it updates on every page.

This comes pretty close to solving the personalization limits that Manila has…I know my students are all trying to find ways to make their own sites more their own. This ought to make that a lot easier. I’m very psyched to start some serious building of the site…FINALLY!
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