Ran into this site through my referers and I liked what I saw, especially the tagline “one redheaded girl’s journey into the world of public education” and the following post:
I am supposed to be writing a paper about the results of my “study” using blogs to teach descriptive writing. I designed and taught the unit and now I have mountains of student essays and comments on their blogs and student feedback from the end of the unit. Deep inside my brain, I even have a semi-theory about how and why things worked.
But I can’t find decent theory about using blogs in stuffy academic journals. Plenty of teachers out there use blogs in the classroom. Have any of them published theory/results/other academic junk? Probably. So, where are you???
So far, the only articles I’ve found deal with using those crazy “word processors” and new-fangled, and potentially immoral, “electronic mail.”
I do not consider 1987 relevant to my study.
Sounds like the type of teacher I would have liked. I wonder if she ever wrote up her study. (And I can’t wait to tell Miss Higgins that she’s been blogrolled!)
A teacher who I have mentioned here often was picking my brain about wikis and how he might use them in class. We were talking specifically about the idea of having students write a collective text for the Media Literacy class that each subsequent class could build upon and update (a la the WikiBooks site.) It’s such a cool concept and constructivist learning at its best. And it’s made me start learning more about the best wiki sites and formatting and all the stuff we’ll need to figure out before we put our collective toe in the water. Oughta be interesting.
Great thing is that a number of sites have been pointing to the wiki that blogger J.D. Lasica has set up to assist with the editing of his upcoming book “Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television.”
Goal: In the spirit of open media and participatory journalism, I’d like to use this wiki to publish drafts of each chapter in the book. I hope you’ll participate in this effort by contributing feedback, edits, criticism, corrections, and additional anecdotes, either through the comments field below or by sending me email. Feel free to be as detailed as you like or to insert comments or questions. After all, you’re the editor. (And remember, this is for a book manuscript, not a finished online document.) If you make a couple of helpful edits, I’ll mention your name in the book’s Acknowledgments (and buy you a drink next time we meet up).
Request: This is an experiment in trust. Feel free to dive in and make all the changes you think are warranted. I’ve opened this up as a public wiki, rather than a private space. Feel free to link to this main page from your blog, though I’ll also ask at this early stage that people not excerpt material or dissect any of the material in detail because we’re not at the public discussion point yet.
And how easy is this:
How to proceed: It’s simple. Select a chapter there on the right. If you want to make an edit or insert a comment, hit the Edit This Page button.
I went into edit mode and started reading, and to be honest it felt really weird having the ability to CHANGE stuff that he had written. (I didn’t change anything, by the way.) I’m wondering how high school students will deal with this situation. But I mean, the possibilities are endless…a wiki newspaper that everyone contributes to. A wiki yearbook. In fact, our school is celebrating its 50th anniversary in a couple of years, and we’ve started preparing the archives. What about a wiki archive that anyone could contribute to? Hmmm…
The burning question I need to dive into right now is how to set up a wiki with peer review before publishing additions or changes…
Alan does a nice run through of the various RSS to JavaScript converters out there, a concept I haven’t really followed much due to being spoiled by Manila’s viewRssBox macro. I know MT has something similar, but it IS a good thing that we can pull in content in other ways as well. Things are getting easier and easier.