Jay Rosen has been ruminating on the positives and negatives of a recent trend among some Webloggers to “adopt” a particular journalist and deconstruct that person’s reporting on a regular basis. Most of the ones I’ve seen so far have been motivated by politics (not necessarily politically motivated,) and I think it’s potentially an interesting idea to bring into my classroom on some level. Since my journalism II class starts in a couple of weeks, I’m trying to figure out a few different topics for them to blog about, and this deep reading and thinking exercise might fit. As Jay says

Observation is a discipline. It takes care. It improves with practice. It brings your mind down to the sensuous details of the case. (For example, a journalist’s tone.) Tracking reportage will, I think, be an education for those who do it– in fact, it is journalism education, in which all enrolled are to be self-taught by November. I am strongly in favor of that.

I know I have said this before, but I love watching the way all of this is evolving. I’m not sure we’re going to get to the point where every reporter has a widely read blogger fact checking his or her behind, but just the mere fact that “ordinary” citizens who feel so compelled can now find an outlet for their motivation to add to the record on a potentially meaningful scale is a significant change. Is there potential for abuse here? Sure, and Jay correctly worries about what those motivations may be. But I think that the more opportunities we can provide for people to exercise their freedoms of speech (whatever remain) to a wider audience is a good thing. And besides, the knuckleheads who do try to abuse it won’t sustain much of an audience anyway.
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(via Doc Searles) A little off topic, but I think it’s a trend that will continue, and one that will more and more include some type of blogging.

Internet news sources posted the largest relative gain, as 13 percent of those surveyed said they regularly went online for campaign news and another 20 percent saying they did so occasionally. In 2000, only 9 percent said they regularly turned to the Internet. Younger Americans said they relied less on traditional news sources, turning instead to cable news, the Internet and comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live for campaign news.

Not great news about the last part, but I can’t help but think this trend will continue.

More important is this essay: News Is A Conversation. I absolutely love this part:

It is this power and influence that drives mainstream journalists to look at new media types, especially bloggers, and describe them pejoratively as the “vanity press,” “self-important,” or worse. The question, of course, is if bloggers derive their sense of importance from themselves, then from whom does the mainstream press derive theirs? You see, there exists within journalism today a belief that this power and influence of theirs is a right, a guarantee given to them by some higher authority, and therein lies the rub. This belief is further enhanced now that certain, very well paid journalists find themselves on the same societal and cultural levels as those about whom they report. This is treasonous, for the roots of journalism are fed by the blood of those who gave their lives for the free flow of information.

This is not only why the mainstream media doesn’t get it yet, it’s why they don’t want to get it. If Howard Dean is successful in his presidential bid, it will really shake things up.
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It’s taken a little while, but the collaboration between our students and students in Kracow, Poland has finally started to gather steam. Right now, they’re talking in some depth about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and life in the respective countries. The hope is that it will continue through the end of the school year with a number of different classes involved. I know that most of what they are doing could have been accomplished with a regular discussion board or maybe even e-mail, but the students and the teachers are all liking the Weblog because of its ability to share photos and archive the discussions in an easily accessible form. They are also making use of Manila’s notification function to let them know when stuff has been posted. It reminds me of the project Anne and I did last year, and I think it will lead to some other such projects in the future.
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An article from the University of California probing the use of Weblogs in education. Not much new here, but it is interesting how many of these there seem to be lately…

In education, weblogs are being used in a variety of ways, including providing students an avenue for expressing themselves and for reflecting on what they have learned. They are also used to create collaborative communities for students and instructors as they progress through a course or work on shared projects. They act as a kind of knowledge management system that keeps track of who’s doing what as well as tasks yet to be accomplished. In addition, several faculty publish weblogs to provide commentary and links to resources in their areas of expertise. The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is using weblogs extensively, not only to facilitate courses and provide students a publishing medium, but also as a subject of scholarly inquiry.

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For some odd reason, Nancy thought her Weblogs workshop was going to go smoothly. HA! Murphy is always lurking, especially for the first timers taking the blogvangelism plunge (and for the more experienced as well…) Her Biblical account of her workshop is truly a testament to faith, goodwill, and the support of understanding teachers (who unbeknownst to them are being led like sheep to the edge of the cliff…) Hang in there, Nancy…

Another blog story link:

“Welcome to Weblogs at Harvard Law, an experimental community where more than 350 students, faculty and staff members, and alumni have signed up to publicly express their thoughts about everything from social issues to software, from literature to love. Based at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the initiative is free and available to anyone with a Harvard.edu e-mail address. And except for a few private blogs limited to specific classes, all Harvard-hosted blogs can be read by anybody on the Web.”

And from the education corner:

“Some educators use blogs as teaching tools. John Palfrey, a lecturer at both HLS and the Extension School, posts syllabi, reading materials, and lectures on class blogs; he encourages, but doesn’t require, students to use them. He views the technology as a way to extend the classroom experience, and to provide a new forum for people who might be too shy to speak up in person. “This helps us explore how people express themselves,” says Palfrey, who also maintains an HLS blog on legal issues.”

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Article in the Washington Times today that takes a look at blogging from its effect on writing standpoint. Here’s the nut:

Blogging may not wash with wizened educators, or those who distrust modern advances, but a group of educational experts sees blogging as a way for students to hone their writing skills while discussing ideas they otherwise may never have encountered.

Kind of an interesting follow to yesterday’s Times piece.

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MR. RUSSERT: He now loves Iowa. One of the things that we will find out is just how truly effective is the Internet in this presidential race? Johns Hopkins University has already been studying it. Look at this: “The Use Of Blogs In The 2004 Presidential Election,” a study by Johns Hopkins University. And now for the computer illiterate crowd, this is a blog. This is Howard Dean’s blog. Here’s Wesley Clark’s blog. Here’s George W. Bush’s blog. And here to help us is Chuck Todd of National Journals Hotline.” What is a blog?

A pretty funny and not very astute discussion of Weblogs on Meet the Press today. You can’t help but watch this (or read the transcripts linked above) and not feel like the press still doesn’t get it. I think it’s that they just don’t want to.

David Broder had the best line in the discussion, however, when he said

“No, but I think it’s a tremendous tool, and it’s part of what is the healthiest trend in our politics, which is going back to personal communication, away from the mass media—forgive me, NBC. But I think the healthiest thing that’s going on now is people talking to people, either through the Internet or, as we’re seeing on the ground in Iowa, face-to-face communication.”

He, at least, is getting it.
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From the Sunday Times Magazine tomorrow, a lengthy first-person account of a reporter’s attempt to understand the personal journal/blogging “craze” among adolescents. Here’s the nut:

But his obsessive online habits are hardly exceptional; he is one of a generation of compulsive self-chroniclers, a fleet of juvenile Marcel Prousts gone wild. When he meets new friends in real life, M. offers them access to his online world. ”That’s how you introduce yourself,” he said. ”It’s like, here’s my cellphone number, my e-mail, my screen name, oh, and — here’s my LiveJournal. Personally, I’d go to that person’s LJ before I’d call them or e-mail them or contact them on AIM” — AOL Instant Messenger — ”because I would know them better that way.” …But for a significant number, they become a way of life, a daily record of a community’s private thoughts — a kind of invisible high school that floats above the daily life of teenagers.

The article, which focuses on the community journals like Xanga and Live Journal and Blurty, was actually pretty eye-opening for me as I really haven’t delved into that “world” very much. Here’s a bit of her description:

Blogging is a replication of real life: each pool of blogs is its own ecosystem, with only occasional links to other worlds. As I surfed from site to site, it became apparent that as much as journals can break stereotypes, some patterns are crushingly predictable: the cheerleaders post screen grabs of the Fox TV show ”The O.C.”; kids who identify with ”ghetto” culture use hip-hop slang; the geeks gush over Japanese anime. And while there are exceptions, many journal writers exhibit a surprising lack of curiosity about the journals of true strangers. They’re too busy writing posts to browse.

Ok, now I know there are a lot of kids out there who are blogging. But a genereation of Prousts? Either I’m really missing the boat, or the kids at my school are all blogging under the radar. I only know of a couple of kids who are keeping Live Journal sites, and for all of the blogs I’ve created for students, I rarely hear of anyone with their own personal sites. Guess I need to do a little more investigating, ’cause I would really, really like to talk to them in depth about their blogging experiences and feelings. And I’d be interested to hear what other teachers out there are experiencing in terms of students keeping personal journals.

I’ve been building some sites using the new theme that Bryan Bell created for me and I’m liking it more and more. Luckily, it seems, so do people at my school. I was concerned that just using one base theme for all the pages on the site would be too repetitive. But the flexibility that Bryan built into the banner has made it easy to personalize each site with just a little bit of elbow grease. Some examples are the library site, athletics, ed tech committee, Chinese Honor Society, and referendum. None of these sites are “live” yet, meaning if you didn’t have the link you wouldn’t find it from our site. If you take a look at want to leave me some feedback, I’d love to hear it.

I feel the momentum starting to grow. Yesterday I met with the teacher who directs the marching band and music program, and he brought with him a list of things he wanted on the Website. Audio and video files, music files of other types, ability to have is own e-mail group, student creation of content…you get the idea. It was like that old commercial where the guy kept saying “We can do that.” He kept saying, “Cool” or “Wow” or “Really?” And the thing is that he’s one of those “key communicators” who will get up there in front of the staff at the unveiling later this year and talk about how cool his part of the site is. Next week I’ll post a link to his banner…

Nancy Peralta is about to start blogvangelism:

In just two days (well, really 42 hours and 2 minutes) I’ll teach my first professional development course on blogging–The Reading-Writing Connection: Internet Publishing made SIMPLE with Weblogs. I teach in the second largest district in the nation, and as far as I know this will be the first blogging course offered. I wonder what will happen.

Nancy has been doing great things with Weblogs, so I’m sure she’ll be an inspiration to her class. She’s got a great outline for her class posted, and it looks like we’ll be able to follow along here.

It’s pretty cool to see more and more teachers teaching Weblogs. I have to say I got a chuckle out of this one, though.

Elizabeth Fullerton left a comment a couple of days ago that brings up once again the many difficulties that teachers are experiencing as they start to try to implement Weblogs into their schools.

I’ve just begun my first attempt with exposing students to blogging and I spent the entire first semester running in circles with our school board technology policies…[the culture of blogging] is evolving faster than many of our system policies are. My school system just isn’t equipped policywise and technologywise to handle my foray into the blogosphere.

No doubt there are many others in her situation. Pat has been saying for a long time that the hurdles most teachers have to jump over to get seriously into Weblogs are still too high. Policies, hardware, time, lack of technical support…we’ve got a long way to go.

A nice metaphor for RSS:

Levine prefers the latter because RSS makes it easy for readers to keep up with news on various Web sites. It works like a clipping service, where people who subscribe to RSS-enabled Web sites through so-called news aggregators can get free headlines or items of interest collected in one place automatically. A subscriber could receive notices of her children’s soccer games, park district events, school announcements and newspaper headlines, all of which can help alleviate data overload. “This is the future,” Levine said. “Instead of having to visit a dozen Web sites, the stories on those sites come to you.”

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My brain is still lodged in “how to bring blogging as genre to the classroom in a meaningful, writing-centered way” mode. As I’ve said before, I think there are many characteristics of Weblog writing that potentially make it a valuable addition to the curriculum in a number of subjects.

The most obvious to me is in the area of research. The ability to use hypertext to link to sources is a huge advantage to student and teacher alike in that it makes it pretty easy to check on a student’s understanding of citation, quote or paraphrase, among other things. I think the ease with which linked sources can be accessed also inherently makes for a more careful use of those sources by the student.

Now I know blogging is more first-person, more casual by nature than formal research writing. But one essential skill that consistent bloggers develop is the ability to read critically in preparation to write critically. I’m hearing Jay Rosen yet again: readers becoming writers, completing the transaction of ideas and extending the conversation. Certainly, the best essayists are those that can draw from a variety of sources and bring them together into some coherent, more complete understanding of the subject. Ditto the best bloggers, like Doc Searles, whose post today on the media and politics is a great example. He has obviously taken the time to read a variety of authors, done some meaningful thinking about what he has read, and used it to fashion his own interpretation and ideas. Isn’t that what we want our students to do?

It ties in with another area that really interests me: media literacy. I think Weblogs could be an outstanding tool for teaching kids to observe, think about and then deconstruct the media they are exposed to. And as this pretty interesting article in Technology Review notes, “Media literacy education must be integrated into our curriculum from kindergarten through college. But to succeed, educators need to update and rethink the assumptions shaping many existing media literacy programs.” I think there’s a need for blogging in there somewhere. More thinking on this later, I’m sure, but I see a proposal coming into view…

There are some stirrings at UserLand which I’m hoping will translate into a productive year for Manila developers. For a limited time, they are offering a 14-day free trial which I would highly recommend to anyone considering using the package. I’ve posted the user’s manual that I give to my teachers at my school for anyone who wants to get up and running fairly quickly. Just remember it has some references and instructions unique to my school. At $299 a year for an educational license that can run thousands of sites, I still highly recommend Manila despite it’s lack of development of late. But like I said, things look to be changing…

Interestingly, the ‘new’ Manila site features a number of ed blogs as sample sites. Hopefully that means they’re considering implementing some of the changes they previewed last year. I made another plea on the dev group today for:

1. A way to make some posts public and keep some posts private to just members or editors.

2. A way to review comments before allowing them to be posted for everyone to see.

These are really the two issues that I’m most bumping into at this point. Fingers are crossed that they might be resolved in short order.
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