An exceptional article by Stephen Downes in this month’s Educause Review should become, as others have said, must reading for any educator interested in using blogs in the classroom. Stephen does just a great job of giving context to Weblogs as classroom tools, providing an overview of the tools out there, and challenging some of the assumptions that have attached themselves to blogs as they become more and more mainstream.

The best part, however, is that Stephen really sets the stage for where our discussions need to go next.

And herein lies the dilemma for educators. What happens when a free-flowing medium such as blogging interacts with the more restrictive domains of the educational system? What happens when the necessary rules and boundaries of the system are imposed on students who are writing blogs, when grades are assigned in order to get students to write at all, and when posts are monitored to ensure that they don’t say the wrong things?

That gets to the essence of one of my most closely held beliefs about all of this, that the real power of the tool is in the type of writing it facilitates, namely, blogging. Which in turn leads to the larger question of how do we use Weblogs to nurture blogging? How do we create enough freedom within our curriculum to allow students to write about their passions? How do we find and develop audiences for our students to reach and interact with? How do we use Weblogs to develop lifelong learning skills instead of just making them storehouses of digital paper?

Jeff Rice speaks to this when he asks “What about Weblog pedagogy?”

What I tend to be seeing is a lot of usage of the tool for non-web practices: taking notes, journal writing, etc. Some folks seem surprised that students yawn at this approach. Course, these students were probably yawning when we did the same thing without a weblog, right (and I, too, have been guilty of asking students to use weblogs in such a way for group work or research)? Oh great. Another stupid journal assignment, but now I have to do it on the Web… Weblogs are being used all the time, all over the Web, but in ways which don’t mesh with many of these created assignments. Folks want to write. Many find this tool very helpful for writing. Academia is too far behind to understand how to integrate it into the classroom.

I think I’ve just decided to make that my question/quest for this school year…how do we integrate Weblogs into the classroom in ways that enhance learning instead of just manage practice? The only way to answer that is to focus on what makes a Weblog unique as a writing environment, because everything else could be just as well accomplished with paper and pen or Word or any of those other tools that we’ve been using.

Anyway, a great article, with another one about wikis in the same issue, and a third by Middlebury’s own Bryan Alexander. Good, good stuff…all by bloggers.
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For the first time in a long time I feel just totally overwhelmed with getting ready for school stuff and birthday parties and house repairs and…well, you get the picture. This is a major crunch week…day long training on our new student info system tomorrow, day long workshop on MovieMaker on Wednesday then tons of documentation to write for a full staff training next Wednesday. Oy. What’s been interesting to me, at least, is how strong the urge is to let all of that other stuff drop and just write/blog for a couple of hours. Partly because it’s become such a habit, and partly because there is so much good stuff out there to write about. (I have been managing to steal a few minutes here and there to scan what’s coming through the aggregator…I’ve got at least a dozen links to write about.)

Any full time ed blogging openings out there???