I still love to read about the emerging influence of bloggers in the political sphere. (Wonder when that will happen in the education world…) An article titled “Bloggers Become Weapon in US Presidential Election” from Agence France-Presse says that bloggers

have become a vital source of information and commentary, and an alternative to traditional newspapers and television.

And yesterday as I was listening to a discussion on NPR about how most people don’t really tune into the news any more, the host mentioned blogs as a viable alternative that the younger generation might make good use of. (By the way, did you know that the median age of people watching network news is 60!!! Wow.)

But the one quote I liked best from the article was from Howard Finberg at the Poynter Institute, who said bloggers “…are, in a sense, an editor on your behalf.” I absolutely love that metaphor; blogger as editor. And that’s why I think every student should have a blog and be blogging. Because they all need to be editors, every single one of them. Because there is soooo much information out there and because most schools aren’t doing much to teach them how to be smart consumers of that information. (Only a fairly small percentage take the media literacy course we started here.) I’ll say this again, they may not end up being bloggers, but they need to end up thinking like bloggers regardless.

Bernie Dodge just finished a workshop with K-12 teachers called “Motivating Student Writing with Weblogs” and from the looks of it, there are a few new edubloggers to add to the list. There are also a wealth of resources that you can dig out of the class and participant blogs:

One of “Anne“‘s colleagues who had gotten a whole bunch of elementary school teachers blogging has had his district shut all of the sites down because they don’t allow student messaging in their telecommunications policy. Apparently, they want to be able to filter everything that goes up on any of the sites on their servers.

Oy.

I think that I’ve chronicled the fine line that I’ve had to walk with similar issues at my school. In my perfect world, student weblogs would be as free and open as a teacher (and parent) feels comfortable with because one of the best parts of blogging is having an audience that can become a part of the process. But I totally understand the concerns of districts and boards of education who are trying to figure out exactly what to do with this new read/write Web that we’re exploring with our kids. (I mean really, blogging as student messaging???) On the K-12 level, the first priority is to keep them safe. But there is also a very strong desire to control what goes up on these sites, to make sure that nothing casts a less than positive light on the experience. Of course, we all know that that’s not the way Weblogs work. (Did I mention I’m on my third piece of wood to knock on?)

So, the call is up for research that will attest to the educational benefits of using blogs. And, of course, aside from the anecdotal evidence provided by teachers who blog, there isn’t much. We just kind of know it in our gut. Anne says it well:

We know weblogs can be a wonderful tool that has countless possibilities for great academic use. Our kids are in the middle of all this technology and we could be at the forefront teaching wise and appropriate use to kids. We can get them to think about how writing can be a tool for them to effect change and make things better. All this usually just scares schools though. They seldom give educators credit for having the ability to responsibly oversee projects like this. I think a lot of fear exists among administrators to take a risk when “taking a responsible risk” is exactly what is needed to push learning forward.

The thing is, Anne is still one of the few teachers I’ve seen who actually gets her kids to blog, as in the verb. And as I’ve said before, I really think that’s where the value of Weblogs is. What most schools (and to some extent, teachers) are afraid of, I think, is the simple transparency of Weblogs. Our kids work, out there for everyone to see? The messy, sometimes unsightly learning process exposed? Students wrestling in public with incomplete thoughts and ideas? Let’s just stick with test scores, ok?

This is a disruptive technology. And the disruptions will become more frequent as more teachers push the envelope. But there is a big discomfort hump we’re going to have to get over for this to really have a chance.

This post is primarily for the attendees at the blogging session yesterday at the New England Library Association conference in beautiful downtown Manchester, NH. The link to the presentation is here, but beware it may take some time to load (1.9 mb). And, please refer to the RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators that I mentioned for more on how to use RSS in your libraries and classrooms.

As I was driving back home last night I realized that I may have skipped over one important part in our RSS discussion that you really need to know, and that’s locating the feeds themselves. On some blogs, you can find a link that says “Syndicate this site.” or something similar. But in most cases, just look for the XML button (shown here.)

Just click on the button, take the URL from the page of gobbledygook that appears, post it into your aggregator, and start collecting news.

Thanks for all of your enthusiasm and great questions, and please let me know if I can help in your Weblogging adventures.

Heading off to beautiful New Hampshire this weekend to take in the fall foliage and present with Linda Braun on Weblogs in libraries at the New England Library Conferece. Sounds like the weather will be beautiful and the colors should be great. And, of course, any opportunity to blogvangelize is always a treat.
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Amy Gahran at Contentious is doing a series on different types of blog posts, and she’s broken it down into seven basic categories:

I’m not sure why, but Anne‘s feed in my Bloglines account never seems to update, so every now and then I have to remind myself to check her site. (RSS has really spoiled me.) As usual, I’ve been missing some good stuff. For instance, the Internet Public Library is categorizing blogs and it looks like a good starting point for anyone just trying to get the feel for this. (In other words, it’s still a manageable list.) One pretty interesting find from that list is the list of History News Network blogs, a list I’m going to share with the Social Studies teachers.

And just as a side note, this is what I miss most when I don’t read Anne’s blog…her enthusiasm:

Let’s get our students writing – and what better avenue than weblogs! Let’s hear it for a weblog writing revolution!

I’ll second that.
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Barbara Ganley’s blog is down due to structural issues, and she’s reflecting on the impact:

And so, my missing the blog isn’t about an addict finding withdrawal a torture. It’s about being denied a powerful tool in my teaching set, and if I don’t get it back by the end of the week, I don’t know what I’m gonna do…

I know I would have felt the same way had it happened to me. I don’t think I would want to ever go back to xeroxing papers and handouts and evaluating my students just on their ability to discuss each other’s work in a synchronous way. Not to mention carrying stacks of paper around. And the good news is I think there are actually a couple of other teachers around here who feel the same way.

So anyone know how to get five columns with feeds from five different blogs on the same page???
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(via Cutting Through) Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion adds a bit of a twist for getting RSS feeds from news sources that don’t already have them. Basically, you do a site limited search at Google News and then use the Gnews2RSS hack to create the feed. So now, if I wanted, I could start getting a feed about the Cubs from the Chicago Tribune, especially cool because a) the Trib doesn’t have RSS feeds that I know of, and b) the online version is behind one of those stupid unpaid subscription logins. (I hate those.) It’s not hard to think about ways that students could implement searches like these, not necessarily from newspaper sites but from more focused news sources like, say Solar Access.com News or Medical News Today. (Yep, they are both searchable like this.) I’ll have to add this to the Quick Start Guide.

Now, all we need is a list of the 4,500 news sources that Google News uses…and for the Cubs to get into the playoffs…
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Steven Krauss from Eastern Michigan University has an article in Kairos that goes into some depth about his attempt to use Weblogs as tools to teach writing on the higher ed level. Has some trickle down to K-12 classrooms though.

His premise is pretty straightforward:

I have begun to wonder if it is advisable or even possible to see blogs as a collaborative or especially “interactive” writing environment. (2) Or, more accurately, I’ve come to believe we shouldn’t substitute blogs for other electronic writing tools that foster discussion and interactive writing, particularly email lists, commonly known as “listservs.”

What I find most informative about this article is his dissection of what he didn’t do with his blogging experiment that he feels contributed to its demise. In short, he chose the wrong software for his needs (Blogger,) he didn’t create specific requirements for blog usage, and he had no other place for online discussion. He does some great analysis that really should be must reading for anyone thinking of using Weblogs in this context.

Students (or anyone else) don’t just want to write, and certainly not in a blog space. As Walker puts it in her “Talk at Brown” notes, “How empowering is it to be forced to blog?” And yet, that is ultimately the power and even charm of web logs: it is very easy to master technology and interface in which just about anyone who wants to can post their writings and thoughts about anything. However, like the paper diaries and journals that web logs are so often compared, the writer has to have a reason– and generally, a personal reason– to write in the first place.

Yes, but…here is where the distinction between blogging and using blogs crops up again. It isn’t enough just to provide the digital paper; we have to teach kids how to use it well (blogging.) The writer does have to have a reason, a passion, in order to get the most from blogging. But what I think we have to accept is that the subjects they want to blog about may have little to do with our subject matter. But we can still teach the genre and the cr
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So I wake up about 7:30 yesterday to the sound of helicopters flying low over the river, think not too much about it since it’s not that unusual occurrence, and go about the usual business of getting through an early morning with a five and a seven year-old (read: chaos.) It’s a beautiful day. Sun is shining. Birds chirping. All is well. Pull out of my driveway at about 10 o’clock and notice two port-o-potties sitting in the entrance to the boat launch about 100 yards down the street from my house. Strange. Take a cursory glance down toward the launch and, without thinking, say “Holy #$*@!” My kids start giving me that “Daddy said a bad word” stuff but before they can get more than two syllables into it they lapse into an eerie silence. (Believe me, any silence with these kids is eerie.) I roll the car to a quick stop and we sit, me, my wife and my two quiet kids, mouths agape, watching this brown, wavy water lapping up against the potties, water that’s supposed to be running about 75 yards to the west in the main channel of the Delaware. The whole roadway is gone, trees up to their first branches in this whirling mass of water. Way in the distance, blue garbage cans, tree stumps, a white propane gas can and a orange and yellow kids plastic playhouse go flying down the center of the river, 20-25 mph at least. Amazing. It hardly rained on here on Saturday.

We drive about another 1/2 mile. A small village of houses right on the banks is under 15 feet of water. An elderly couple smoking cigarettes sit on the pack of their pickup truck staring glumly at what turns out to be their house. A crowd of people has converged to watch in awe, shake their heads, and feel helpless. We stop further up the road, at this point still open, and listen as a group shares the latest on when the river will crest and how high. The great flood of ’55 is mentioned in soft tones…32 feet…14 feet above the flood line. This one won’t be as bad…probably 26-27 feet. Only 10-11 feet over. Oy.

By the time try to get home at 4, the roads are closed. The only way home is a gravel road that snakes down from the big hill behind my house. A quarter mile on each side of my driveway, the road is flooded and impassable. Houses are under. Funny, I never really noticed the gentle incline in front of my own property.

The power goes out at 6 p.m. Still not back on as I write this about 24 hours later. Looks like another night with candles and pizza. But considering the alternative…

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My superintendent wanted an update on where we were with the instructional side of Weblogs and the numbers in the title are what I sent him. More are probably on the way as it’s still early. I also gave a brief description of how the teachers and students were using them. “Blogging” was not in there anywhere.

Later, I got back this e-mail:

You may want to develop some conservative projections on the increase in the use of web logs by our staff over the next three years. Knowing the BOE, I anticipate the BOE will ask this question as well as what measurable increase in student achievement we can expect from the increase in the use of web logs.

Aye, there’s the task. (Sorry…I forgot “Talk Like a Pirate Day” was yesterday.) M-E-A-S-U-R-A-B-L-E increase in student achievement. Well, let’s see. Not to be blunt, but from where I sit, no blogging, no increase.

Time to hone the message, I think.

Robin Good has probably dug into the uses of RSS more than just about anyone, and this post on his site from March has been making some rounds once again. While it’s a bit tough to follow at times, his points on the ways we need to think about RSS are relevant to educators taking a look at it’s possible uses.

One of the main benefits of RSS is:

The creation of dedicated information channels, originated by independent publishers and not by vested commercial interests or mainstream media conglomerates may create the opportunity for a true renaissance of culture, learning and to a multiplication of our abilities to manage large amounts of rapidly changing information.

Newsmastering is:

…the ability of a human being to concert, orchestrate, edit, and refine quality search formulas that tap into the whole Internet content universe and beyond, and that filter out relevant information through selected keywords, source selection, ranking, heuristics, and many other possible criteria

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There’s a great article in the new Kairos titled “New Literacies and Old: A Dialogue” which is a back and forth Q & A between Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan of the University of Baltimore. The gist of the discussion centers on the future of writing and the redefinition of literacy, and if you have a spare 20 minutes, the whole thing is definitely worth the read.

I especially find Moulthrop’s definition of the new literacy interesting, and it has a great deal of relevance when thinking about the read/write Web:

What’s the new literacy like? For one thing, it understands any text or writing practice as at least potentially connected to a hypertextual network: we would always teach “writing in the archive,” as the Danish theorist Rune Dalgaard has called it. And while cross-textual relations have certainly been a part of print culture, the new literacy would recognize that, as Pierre Lévy says, the “pragmatics” of communication have fundamentally changed. The Internet is not a system for filing sheets of paper, even if we do still talk about Web “pages.” In electronic writing, the technical foundations of the word itself have changed.

So a new literacy also needs to consider the extension of alphabetism into logical processing. This doesn’t mean letting graduate students count Visual Basic against their foreign language requirements; it means teaching them — and potentially, students from middle school up — how to design documents with markup languages. As we move closer toward Berners-Lee’s “semantic Web,” this will seem all the more necessary.

A new approach to literacy also means inviting our students to deploy writing in forms other than academic essays, book reports, and five-paragraph themes: in Web logs, serious IM dialogues, hypertexts, and my particular favorite, multi-user object-oriented spaces, or MOOs.

I find the whole idea of moving the instruction of writing toward the design of documents with markup languages to be really intriguing. But it’s not a big stretch to think that in 10 years or so, most all writing will include links that annotate the text. And certainly blogs facilitate that linking process. The thing is that when I do a quick mental survey of the English teachers here at my school, there are only a few who I think might even start to understand what’s on the horizon. Not that I fully get it either, of course. But that wouldn’t be any fun anyway.