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Every now and then I have an experience totally irrelevant to blogs and schools that I just feel the need to share here anyway. I had one yesterday…

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Micah Sifry extends the BloggerCon-verstation about journalism with this post at his Iraq War Reader site. It’s a great essay that articulates a lot of what I believe in terms of information and the need for media and info literacy…and how blogs can contribute to that. While he makes some great points on his own, I particularly liked this quote from his editor:

Newspapers have abdicated their duties in getting to the “truth” of a story. [I'd add TV even more so.] Instead, in the name of objectivity, they simply report the he-said, she said on how much some new initiative will cost, as if there were no way to empirically determine the answer. Bloggers rarely link to this kind of story. The most widely-read ones seek out some piece of writing on the web where a person has actually determined the real answer, or gotten an on the record quote, or put forth an question no else has asked, and then they link to it, saying, in effect, ‘If you believe me, then you can believe this.’

It’s an interesting aspect of writing that we rarely ask of students, that gaining the trust of your reader part. Have we ever asked students to do sustained writing over time about a consistent topic for an audience? Should we?
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Well, here’s a first. One of our English teachers who has been using Weblogs behind closed doors for his creative writing classes told me that one of his PIPs (Personal Improvement Program) for next year is to incorporate blogging (noun AND verb) into his Media Literacy classes! He really wants to explore the use of Weblogs as a research tool, but he’s also interested in seeing what happens when students read, think, synthesize, write, respond and read some more in terms of pushing their understanding of the topic. We talked briefly today about how regular blogging and responding to other’s blogging might just serve to help students make learning more relevant and therefore more meaningful. (Don’t tease me…) And we talked about how with this particular class, at least, there is an opportunity to write about an area in which they are interested, maybe even passionate about like gender issues, violence, politics…whatever. This might be a great opportunity to do some action research. We’re going to get together over the summer to formalize it a bit more, but I’m really psyched that he took the initiative to make this a part of his professional development plan.

Key is, as Robert Scoble says, is that passion part.

Lately people have been asking me “how or when does weblogging and/or syndication go mainstream?” It goes mainstream when everyone in society gets passionate about something. If someone isn’t passionate about SOMETHING they won’t get weblogs. Hence, the numbers of weblog authors and readers will remain small, when compared to overall society. (Via Dave Winer)

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