Anne responds to my “Will Emily be blogging?” question from yesterday with “Will Emily be writing?” And Aaron says “It’s not the blogging or the writing, it’s the feeling.” And James summarizes all of this with “blogging isn’t the point… it’s the writing stupid” (with a nod to Greg.)

Oy.

I’m stubborn. To me it is the blogging. The verb. Not the noun. And I’m not being snarky. Really.

Of course it’s the writing, and no one celebrates that more or better than Anne. She’s downright inspiring when it comes to ecouraging and nurturing young writers, and I have a feeling she was just as encouraging and nurturing before she stumbled across Weblogs. Writing comes first, and unless we work to develop writers we’ll never develop bloggers. No doubt about it.

And it is the feeling. We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t feel the joy of expression through writing, the flutter that audience provokes. And I can’t tell you how many students I’ve had who have no passion or feeling for writing because they’ve been beaten down time and time again by teachers demanding correctness before creativity and form before feeling. (And with what I’m reading about those poor third graders out there stressing over the high stakes tests they’re taking, I doubt this is going to get better.)

And no, we don’t need blogs to teach writing.

But we need blogs to teach blogging. I think that’s where this whole discussion has been heading for me, and I find myself more and more needing to distinguish between the noun and the verb. (And forgive me if this is all sounding redundant, but it’s the way my feeble brain processes stuff…moving molecules.) Now I know people have been “blogging” (reading and synthesizing and writing) before blogs. (The NPR piece referenced in an earlier post says Plato blogged…) But Weblogs and the power of personal publishing change the act of blogging into an even more important genre than when we were doing it with paper. And it’s the audience that makes it different.

I guess what I’m saying is that blogging is still just a form of writing, but it’s an exciting new form (to me at least) that changes the equation and may be a way to engage kids in writing more effectively than what we’ve done in the past. So for me, I hope Emily is blogging when she’s in high school, because it’s obviously a form of writing that inspires her. Maybe she’ll be giving blog readings and participating in blog slams or posting contests. Or, maybe not. But there is something in this genre to teach and nurture nonetheless.

Gregory Nunberg read this essay on NPR yesterday and I found myself listening hard to his observations on blogging as genre. Some snippets:

That interconnectedness is what leads enthusiasts to talk about the blogosphere, as if this were all a single vast conversation — at some point in these discussions, somebody’s likely to trot out the phrase “collective mind.” But if there’s a new public sphere assembling itself out there, you couldn’t tell from the way bloggers address their readers — not as anonymous citizens, the way print columnists do, but as co-conspirators who are in on the joke. Taken as a whole, in fact, the blogging world sounds a lot less like a public meeting than the lunchtime chatter in a high-school cafeteria, complete with snarky comments about the kids at the tables across the room.

And:

The fact is that this is a genuinely new language of public discourse — and a paradoxical one. On the one hand, blogs are clearly a more democratic form of expression than anything the world of print has produced. But in some ways they’re also more exclusionary, and not just because they only reach about a tenth of the people who use the Web. The high, formal style of the newspaper op-ed page may be nobody’s native language, but at least it’s a neutral voice that doesn’t privilege the speech of any particular group or class. Whereas blogspeak is basically an adaptation of the table talk of the urban middle class — it isn’t a language that everybody in the cafeteria is equally adept at speaking. Not that there’s anything wrong with chewing over the events of the day with the other folks at the lunch table, but you hope that everybody in the room is at least reading the same newspapers at breakfast.

Hmmm… An adaptation of the table talk of the urban middle class??? And isn’t one of the great appeals of blogging the fact that we DON’T all read the same newspapers (or Webistes) at breakfast? My “filters” send me in all sorts of directions that I would never travel to if I didn’t read blogs. I think he’s missing the point (or is that too snarky?)

Hey, why can’t we have our students contribute what they learn/know to Wikipedia and put it up for scrutiny?

Wikipedia has also served a valuable teaching tool at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. We have used it in undergraduate and graduate journalism classes to teach the skill of writing dispassionately for an international audience. By collaborating online with others, students not only interact with each other when writing, but get advice and corrections from complete strangers around the world within minutes of making contributions to the Wikipedia.

This is a great primer for the wiki uninitiated and one that I’m going to think about sharing with my faculty.
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Nancy Peralta has picked up on the student blogging thread and points to some of her own reasons for keeping a Weblog, the main one being audience. I love her enthusiasm:

To me, blogging is all about the audience – it’s about the fact that there IS an audience. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t get any response from readers. I know because I’ve tried journaling about a dozen times and never kept it up longer than a week or two. It’s the interaction between my readers and I, my reading other blogs, and my ideas being picked up on other blogs and commented about that keeps me blogging. It’s the audience and community, the reading/writing connection, that makes blogging so fantastic for me!

I’m sure most of us wouldn’t be doing this in any sustained fashion if we didn’t think anyone was reading. Just look at the voice that we use in our posts. We’re all definitely writing to someone, and that motivates us (most of us) to write clearly and thoughtfully and relevantly (is that a word?) Audience dictates our selection of topic (Is this too personal? Is it too silly? Will anyone else care?), it dictates our tone (Is this readable? Is it too pedantic?), and it begs us to revise (Are there mistakes? Is this confusing?) I know I’ve referred to this before, but that Donald Murray philosophy is always at the core: good writing is a conversation with the reader. Audience matters. (Yesterday, in fact, I decided to check the referrer logs for our library Weblog, and wouldn’t you know, as soon as I forwarded the results to our librarians, there were a bunch of new posts on the site.)

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t get any response from readers.”
–Nancy Peralta

Nancy also points out, as have others, that student blogging starts with little or no audience, and least none that is not constructed for a particular blogging environment. But Nancy talks about a simple yet potentially effective idea for solving that problem in creating what she calls “blog alliances.” Hook up with other teachers whose kids are blogging and have them read and respond back. She’s done this with her students and Anne‘s kids with good success. In fact, I’ve done it with Anne’s classes with great success. But I think Nancy wants to push this idea to a wider circle.

I think there is some potential for this as more and more teachers start using Weblogs. Maybe we need some type of clearinghouse for teachers looking for other teachers to work with. Another good idea to put into the mix.

And by the way, if you really want to see some GREAT fifth-grade blogging, check out Emily’s site from Anne’s group in Georgia. She was one of the students that my journalists worked with last year in an early blog alliance we set up, and she’s just doing amazing things. It’s really inspiring. Now the big question is, will Emily be blogging in high school???
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(Via PJNet) “Blogging in the Inland NW” is a list of links to local bloggers by Ken Sands of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane. He got 40 of ‘em listed, and as usual, some are more interesting than others. In interviews with PJNet, he said:

“Journalism traditionally has been reporters and editors performing the gatekeeping function. We decide what the news is. But with the Web, now everybody has the ability to become published…Rather than be afraid of it or work against it, we should be going with the flow. If this is where our communication is going as a society, we should try to figure out how to facilitate it…I don’t know of anyone else opening up their pages to community bloggers in this fashion. (One blogger, for example, is a profane 21-year-old goth devotee.)”

And PJNet is sponsoring an August conference in Toronto: “Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism”

Participatory journalism tools in the form of weblogs and other electronic communications are changing the face of mass media, but are complementary to public journalism. These are powerful tools as Howard Dean’s campaign proved by using weblogs and MeetUp to get 170,000 people nationwide to sign up for face-to-face meetings. The Daily Kos, a citizen run weblog, has 1.5 million unique visitors a month. These are just two of many impressive examples. Learn how we can borrow from or incorporate these tools to improve the state of journalism.

And I can’t remember if I mentioned it before, but Jeff Jarvis is setting up quite a network of local bloggers across the country. There are so many great ideas flying around that we could implement at my school…if only we had the time.
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Article about the Weblogging program set up by a student at Reed College in Oregon where any student who wants one can have one. He’s got 147 going right now. An interesting read that gets to both sides of college level use of blogs and points to a number of other heretofore unknown colleges that are starting to use them, one even for recruitment purposes!

Blogging is a relatively small but quickly growing phenomenon in the world of Internet users, and, like other online technologies, it is slowly invading college life. Professors are using blogs to teach and publish. College administrators use the diaries to recruit. Students use them to learn, to opine (and whine), and to network. In the Reed case, blogging has led to a student community beyond the borders of the campus, a community that Reed administrators can’t control but can peek at.

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Well this is a bummer. My Google News search feeds from XML Mania stopped working and it appears the search has been “discontinued as a order of Google Inc.” Hmmm… Luckily the service from Voidstar seems to be working.
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Makes you think about the migration to Canada. Thanks for the update on weblogs Canadien. Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Will.
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Tim is moving further down the Weblog road with the creation of community Weblog for the discussion of what’s happening in the classrooms at his school. It’s really a nice way of letting the community know what’s going on with students and teachers. And while you’re at it, check out how he’s using RSS feeds from other sites at the school to pull content into the side columns. It looks great, reads easily, and I’m sure has done a lot to help parents feel more informed about the process.

Tim’s making me inspired… Tomorrow, I start cranking on our Website some more.
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The Times coverage of the event focuses on the business aspect of blogging a la “Many Started Web Logs for Fun, but Bloggers Need Money, Too.”

Here’s the upside:

Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds, a service that provides classified advertising for Web logs, is even more confident. He predicted that blogs that are making $5,000 a month will be making five or six times that a year from now. Soon, advertisers will be able to say “I want to buy ads on 25 different Web logs in Southern California written by women who drive humvees,” and have the perfect audience at their fingertips, he said.

And the downside:

But talk of money leaves a bad taste in the mouth of some bloggers. Some participants were far more interested in talking about the role of blogging in politics and religion. A heated discussion arose over whether blogging is journalism. And many wondered if there is room for little-known blogs ever to make the ‘A’ list.

The author had just started asking me some questions when the journalism session
started…and I never saw her again. Sniff.
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(via Sebastian Paquet) Blogs as cyberportfolios in the K-12 arena in Canada are nothing new thanks to Mario Asselin at the Institut St-Joseph in Quebec. But now thanks to Sebastian and friends, the meme is expanding. Check out these pages of cyberportfolios for students at le Centre d’@pprentissage du Haut-Madawaska. Sebastian’s description of the energy behind the project is inspiring:

Some classes have already started blogging in full force and others will follow. Roberto Gauvin, the principal (and school webmaster), is behind this like you wouldn’t believe. He has turned the home page for the school into a weblog. He’s jazzing up the teachers, evangelizing, fiddling with templates. He’s pushing out post after post explaining what’s happening inside (and sometimes outside) his school. It’s nice to build something and see it get used like this!

Amen! Now if only he could send some of that energy down south.
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Hit a few of other sessions yesterday, one on Presidential Blogging led by Dan Gilmor, one on Blogging in Academia with Michael Watkins, and Blogging in Business with Jeff Jarvis. The latter was SRO and without a doubt the most energetic…a bunch of bloggers trying to figure out how to make money on what they’re doing…no wonder! It was pretty interesting, actually, and as Jeff put it, the real motivation is trying to find a way for “us” to do this thing that we love as a full-time, paying exercise. The fruits of our labor are posted on a wiki Jeff put up, and it’s worth a look I think if for no other reason that some of those ideas will certainly drive a lot of blogging down the road.

The academia session was also interesting, but much more serious. It was good to see Barabara Ganley from Middlebury College who I had met a couple of summers ago on a visit. She’s still doing some great work, but she spoke of the relative lack of interest in the the use of blogs at her school despite the great things that she and the Center for Educational Technology are doing. And there was some interesting discussion of the reluctance of educators to blog on the record about their institutions. I think everyone in the room acknowledged the power in the use of the blog as a tool, but blogging as a verb is a much more difficult translation.

All in all it was a great one-day event. For reference, here is a listing of most if not all of the blog coverage of the conference.
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The session just concluded on What is Journalism? has already made this worth the trip. A great discussion on what is happening to journalism, what the role of blogging is becoming, and the many effects that are occuring because of the meeting of the two.

A couple of relevant observations. If “objectivity was the devoicing of journalism,” it would follow that blogs are bringing back voice to the process. And what that means for educators, obviously, is that it’s going to be more important than ever to teach our students how to be participating consumers of news instead of just passive readers. I found it really interesting that many people talked about their experience with blogs as readers and how they used them as filters. But I wondered how many of them have conciously thought about the changes in how they consume information now as opposed to before their use of Weblogs. We who read Weblogs as a part of our news gathering process have all become editors in some form. And more and more, people will need to employ the editing function that is lost in the blogging process, which in some way makes all of us journalists of a kind. Not an earth shattering revelation, but huge in terms of how we teach our kids to be literate.

Kind of brings me back to the Phil Wolff post that I linked to a few days ago. He asked “Should we actively promote citizen journalism?” and suggested that we start a full blown track in CJ starting in eighth grade. It’s a question worth some serious consideration, especially when looking forward as Phil does. (For more on that, scan through some of the papers presented at the recent Conference on Innovation Journalism.)
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Notes from the Jay Rosen led BloggerCon session:

(See Jay’s post and Rebecca Blood’s for context.)

Rosen–In order for us to figure this out, we have to pull the terms apart, because if we don’t we won’t understand the relationship between them. What is connecting these two? Where are they touching? What are they adding to each other? Two tribes: the bloggers and the journalists. They’re camped near one another, and they’re eying some of the same territory. Possible they will march into the future together in some new way.

What’s happening to blogging as it moves toward journalism and vice versa.

About most of the room are bloggers. Half the room are journalists.

What is pushing blogging toward journalism? Chris Lydon: We can do it with impuntiy now that we have the tools. It makes it cheap and easy to connect with everyone. So much to say, so much inadequacy of coverage. We feel aggreived by journalism. There is good journalism and bad journalism. Clay Shirky is a journalist. Thomas Friedman has ceased being a journalist.

Quest for a voice. Henry Copeland–bloggers are finding they can be partisan and still find an audience.

Dave–I don’t know that blogging is going toward journalism. I don’t need a reporter to contact all the sources and put it into a story, I can go directly to the sources. By eliminating the middleman, we get a better answer.

Jeff Jarvis–It’s a relationship medium, and we haven’t even begun to explore that. This medium allows you to show off.

Dave W.–Writing is a way of caring about your world. Not all blogs are headed in that direction. The ones that are are doing so as a way of helping a world that we share and care about. Journalism is a way of making the world clear to people in ways they care about.

So much going on that is begging to be commented upon. Most bloggers don’t want to do legwork, and everyone has an opinion. Makes it easy to become an op ed columnist.

Blogging doesn’t challenge journalists as much as it challenges editors.

Used to be we could identify journalists by who owned the tools. Now the tools are being democratized, which makes it more difficult to identify what journalism is.

What happens to journalists when they blog? Drop the editor. You can cover what interests you. No longer have a seal of approval. What’s missing is the sensibiity of the editor.

Changes your relationship with the audience. Big increase in freedom and opinion. More risk, and they have to establish a relationship with their audience on a regular basis.

Dan Gillmor–Less than you think is changing, partly because I was a columnist before. Chief advantage was a conversation with readers.

A tremendous amount of lost speech is inherent in making the publishing miracle of daily print happen, but now that’s not necessary.

Rosen–Objecivity was the devoicing of journalism.

Micah Sifry–people are hungry for filters.

So what do we want? We’re not geniuses.

Rosen–Many of the things that used to define journalism don’t anymore. What is coming to define is much more complex: a desired to participate. An individual voice. Journalism is being stripped down to what is essential. Exciting for me…why do I blog? I don’t want to deal with editors, and I don’t think journalism is going to be the same. Teach people how to interacting citizens if they want to be journalists. Being reduced to its human elements. A major challenge to how we teach journalists.
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