Ken writes about what writing for Wikipedia involves:

1. Clarity, organization, accuracy — basic reporting skills.
2. Teamwork — collaboration skills.
3. Analysis — intellectual skills and the drive to use them at a high level.

He’s decided to collaborate on a post about the poet Donald Justice. And he’s hoping that wiki-writing will push his own writing in some productive ways.

I’m thinking about my “Teacher’s Toolbox” workshop coming up in a few weeks, of challenging the teachers who take it to create a post for Wikipedia. Since it’s 10 hours over a couple of weeks, I may start with Wikis and have them create the post by the end of class. Maybe I could even get them to collaborate with each other. I mean, isn’t this what teachers should be doing anyway? Sharing their knowledge and expertise in writing? The more I think about it, the more a Wikipedia entry might be the best way to start them writing for publication online.

Of course, this means that I’ll be modeling the task…let’s see…how about an extended entry on…Ernie Banks? (Please…no comments on the haircut.)

(via David Davies)

The University of Warwick is giving every new student the opportunity to start a weblog hosted on their home-grown BlogBuilder system. It’ll be interesting to see what the take-up is once the new university term gets underway. I spoke to Steven Carpenter at the ALT-C conference and he told me that Warwick will probably let the system run for 12 months then they’ll tie it in more closely with their PDP e-portfolios. Perhaps Warwick might even decide that the student weblogs will actually be the e-portfolios, a bit like they’re doing over at the Maricopa Community Colleges.

Cool…but here’s what I really want to know. How did they come to the decision that blogs would be a valuable learning tool for students? What were the questions they asked, and the answers they got? Where did they do their reserach? (BTW, Kaye Trammell is on to that angle…) What are their benchmarks for success? How will they evaluate the tool?

And most importantly, did they blog their process???

It’s weird but in two different conversations I had today the question came up about what it takes to get teachers to use blogs over the long term. I mean I’ve trained a lot of people on how to use Weblogs, and everyone thinks it’s really neat, but very few actually stick with it. I know that blogging takes more time at the outset, but the learning curve is definitely not steep, and it would seem a great way to organize materials and archive lesson plans at the very least.

Seems like the teachers that stick with it just get into the habit, somehow. It works for them on a level that allows them to do it 10 or 20 or 100 times until it just becomes a part of their practice. I would hate to go back to teaching without blogs…but then again, I’ve got way too much of a blogging habit to even think about doing something as silly as that…

I’ve always said one of the best parts of all of this is having had the chance to meet so many really smart and motivated educators, and now it looks like I’ll get that chance again. I just noticed that Helen Barrett and I are both presenting next month at the NJ Edge Conference. I’m doing my blogging shtick and she’s talking about e-portfolios. We’re even in the same track! Cool!
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(via Michael Feldstein) Well, maybe not quite 745, but I am finding more and more of these out there. And this one by Cole Campalese (and others) at Penn State plays it pretty close to the Barbara Ganley model of teacher engagement. I don’t think the homepage will eventually be taken over by his students, but I do like the way he uses his posts to synthesize the discussion from earlier posts, frame the discussion for that particular post, and link/quote relevant content from other sites. This is a teacher modeling what he wants from his students. And, he offers up a rubric to assess their posts as well. Note that the instuctors do some commenting on the commenting too, prodding…encouraging…pointing.

Teachers who use blogs need to blog. They need to model it and show how the critical reading, thinking and writing skills that real blogging demands can push their own thinking and their own learning. Blogging isn’t just a tool to enhance student learning, you know…
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So I took Tom‘s suggestion and downloaded Firefox so I could play with it’s integrated RSS features. First of all, let me say that for someone who has been a loyal IE user for God knows how long, it’s a little strange using something else. But the interface is cool, the easy subscribe to RSS is interesting (though I’m not sure why I might use it over Bloglines) and the fact that it remembers the last login and password you used has already made editing through the Website sites a lot faster.

Aye, but here’s the rub…first of all, this site looks like GARBAGE in Firefox. (And I am so done with tweaking templates for a while.) Second, for some reason, none of the formatting buttons come up when I use the HTML editor in Manila. That’s a deal breaker for me unless somebody can fix it, because I have always found Manila’s WYSIWYG editor to be too flaky to deal with. (Guess it’s another example, as Tom says, of how stuff doesn’t work on a basic level…)

Helen Barrett has been busy trying out various Weblog platforms to see how they fare as online portfolios. Interesting to see the variations, but I think most of the differences are primarily cosmetic.

Tom doesn’t think that blogs are the right medium for this experiment anyway:

Let’s cut to the chase, you can’t really make an e-portfolio with weblog software, they’re just not built for it, and wikis will only be useful if you neuter them. What you need is an open source, enterprise-class content management system. The main things Helen can borrow from blogs is the idea that people shouldn’t be screwing around with DreamWeaver to create web pages any more and e-portfolios should be using RSS, RDF, XML and web standards.

But really, how many decades is it going to take before more technical acumen is necessary to become an authority in educational technology? The lack thereof is really tiresome, and it is much more of a problem today than it would have been eight or ten years ago, because so much power is at our disposal, if we only have the capacity to reach out and grasp it.

His last point makes me wonder if he thinks only programmers can be experts at ed tech. I know he sees the landscape through very different eyes than Helen and I do, and his vision is pretty amazing. But authorities at ed tech also need the acumen to deal with educators who have very little energy or interest in the toys, and I think what Helen is trying to do is take a first step for a lot of those folks who have no clue what open-source is even about.

I noted to my superintendent the other day that another good thing about Weblogs is that they open a door to technology use for the timid and uninitiated. It’s a pretty low bar to jump over, and if they can hurdle this one, who knows what might be next. I think Helen’s work is giving some people a reason to try to make the jump.

I head up the Ed Tech Committee at my school, a group of about 15 or so parents, teachers and administrators who meet monthly to discuss and advise about technology issues in the classroom. We’re embarking on our new three year tech plan which basically asks individual departments to create a vision for classroom technology to replace the old “models” that just aren’t serving our needs any longer. The departments had 2 1/2 hour discussions during an in-service last week, and now it’s up to our committee to draft a document that gives and overview of the notes from those discussions. Let’s see…what might be a good way to manage a draft that will be written by half a dozen or so people in different places at different times…hmmm.

I know!

Lucas Carlson has developed a blog-wiki combo tool called Web Collaborator that teachers looking for a collaborative writing tool might want to consider. It has a variety of editorial functions, and you can invite groups to participate or keep it open. I haven’t had time to dive into it very far, but it looks pretty intruiging. If you get a chance and have some opinions, leave some impressions here.

Two kind of interesting conversations about blogs at my school, one last night at a mini board of ed meeting and another with the English supervisor this morning. Both of them have me thinking about where to go with all of this.

Last night I was invited to show a sub committee of the board of ed the stream from the NECC keynote in June along with the most excellent video on blogging that Intel did at our school. It sparked a pretty interesting discussion about the scope of our Weblog use here, the potential of the technology, and plans for the future. At one point, one of the board members said “Hey Will, what do you need to make this happen here?”

That’s definitely the type of question I wish he would have posed here on my blog, in asynchronous land. I mean, I’ve got the 2-minute elevator pitch on blogs down pat, but that question really took me by surprise to the point where I almost didn’t know what to say. And it’s not like I haven’t been trying to get to an answer to that question myself. I mean I’ve got the hardware, the software, the support, the professional development piece…what exactly do I need to make blogging happen on a wider scale? The first thing that came to my mind, and the answer I gave him, was “time.” Time for teachers to really be able to explore the potential, get comfortable with the technology, reframe their teaching practice and student expectations, understand the implications of the read/write web, drink the Kool-Aid…all those things it’s taken me years to do. It all takes time that most teachers just don’t have. Or it takes a lot of little pieces of time over a longer period. Either way, it’s a big hump to get over.

The other conversation this morning revolved around a series of summer reading Weblogs that we created for freshmen and sophomore honors students this year. In short, we hastily threw the project together just before summer, had some technical glitches with passwords (my fault) and didn’t really think it through nearly enough. Let’s just say it was not a major success. The teachers felt put upon, the kids felt aimless, and though it was a good idea, it really didn’t do what we wanted it to.

After reading Barbara’s BlogTalk paper yesterday, however, I started thinking about why our project didn’t work, aside from the obvious mistakes. And I realized that the one thing that was really missing was the engagement of the teachers in the process. That and the pretty low expectations we had going in. Kids read. Kids post. Kids comment. Get grade. Not quite that bad, but there was absolutely no thought about how to use this as an opportunity to, as Barbara did, build community before the class. None.

I’m kicking myself.

Now even if we had, let me say that it still probably would have been difficult as these teachers were not being compensated and therefore not really expected to take the time to pull in links and synthesize ideas and build connections; all those cool things that Barbara does at the outset of the class. So I said to the department supervisor this morning that if we decide to try this again, which I hope we will, we need to a) start talking and planning NOW and, b) budget some money for the teachers. How cool would it be if a group of teachers actually DID have the time to focus on the use of blogs with their students?

Even though I’ve done a lot of blogvangelism at my school, little of it has really gotten into the pedagogy involved. I’m hoping I haven’t squandered a chance to do that by not jumping on the opportunity this summer. The idea of engaged teachers building community by modeling blogging before their classes even meet is a very appealing picture.

Barbara Ganley has posted her complete BlogTalk paper titled “Blogging as a Dynamic, Transformative Medium in an American Liberal Arts Classroom” which, not surprisingly, is an enthusiastic and articulate reflection on her successes using Weblogs in the classroom. It’s another great resource for teachers of all levels.

First, she says that Weblogs offer

“…educators a unique opportunity to engage their students in a dynamic learning environment in which they are at once the actor and the reflector, the commentator and the instigator.”

I like the way that describes the duality of blogging, the read/write relationship.

Arguing that “the world has changed; the classroom has not,” she notes that schools continue to ignore the social aspect of learning that Weblogs offer to a generation that is increasingly familiar with the digital commons, moreso than their teachers. She has a great quote from James Duderstadt:

“They expect–indeed, demand–interaction, approaching learning as a ‘plug-and-play’ experience; they are unaccustomed and unwilling to learn sequentially–to read the manual–and instead are inclined to plunge in and learn through participation and experimentation…They learn in a nonlinear fashion, skipping from beginning to end and then back again, and building peer groups of learners, developing sophisticated learning networks in cyberspace. In a very real sense, they build their own learning environments that enable interactive, collaborative learning, whether we recognize and accommodate this or not.”

She also writes about how for a classroom Weblog to be effective, everyone must own it. Barbara’s use of Weblogs has evolved from a tool for classroom management to individual student blogs to one what she calls “Motherblog” for the class which everyone is responsible for.

For the weblog to work as a facilitator of efficacious learning, it is essential that everyone has an authentic voice and an authentic role on it, that everyone has a hand in creating the medium as well as the message in an environment in which the reader becomes the writer, the student the teacher, the teacher the learner as we traverse boundaries of classroom and real world, our communities forming,shifting and reforming.

One aspect of all of this that Barbara has mastered, I think, is using her own posts to synthesize discussions and to probe and ask questions, all the while modeling the genre for her students.

…the blogger-teacher is using the unquenchable homepage as a place to synthesize the postings streaming in, to ask questions designed to push the thinking forward, to point to particular posts as models, challenging our assumption that learning experiences are essentially individual, private affairs conducted according to time-honored if unspoken rules about student-teacher interactions. It is a jarring and exhilarating, if for some, bewildering experience.

And she writes about the importance of linking in blogging:

In the learner-centered collaborative effort, students learn the value of linking to one another’s work, often taking a thread from a classmate’s assignment or online discussion, referencing it and building on the idea until it becomes something new all while engaging them in a call-and-response kind of conversation with their peers. In so doing, students learn lessons about citation and translating from the informal language and thinking of the online discussion to the more rigorous demands of formal academic discourse.

Obviously there is much more here, especially the part about the students basically taking over the course in the third week. Not sure that’s going to happen on the K-12 level, but it certainly could happen for various aspects of our classes. But what’s inspirational about this, at least to me, is the way in which she has used the Weblog to deepen and broaden the learning of her students. Her effort to make such good use of this tool is obviously enormous, and in some ways daunting. But even with a more narrowed focus and scale, the importance of the ability of Weblogs to help students construct and evolve their own meaning and understanding of course content is not to be underestimated. Barbara gives us a great framework for making that happen.
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Deleted my first comment this morning with Manila’s new tool and I have to tell you, it felt really good. After months of reading about Alan’s hard fought campaign against the “roaches,” I was wondering when it was going to start here, and sure enough, about two months ago they started trickling in. Of course, with Manila, one option is to have would-be commentors become members and login with a password in order to respond to a post. But I’m hoping it won’t get so bad that I have to do that.

Having said that, I’m hoping that the student sites we set up aren’t going to be effected by spammers. Since they fly pretty far under the radar, the odds are much slimmer I’m sure. But, unfortunately, it may be something we’re going to have to deal with eventually.
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I know I come back to this a lot, but I just find the whole reader as editor phenomenon to be so powerful and so important for the way we think about the Internet. I mean look at what’s happened over the last week with the “60 Minutes” controversy over documents they used in a report about the president’s military service. The amount of critical thinking and writing skills that bloggers have exhibited over the last week on this story alone is pretty impressive. Now I know it’s not all wonderful, and I know that it’s tough to translate all of this down to the classroom. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s proof of concept. CBS didn’t realize they had a whole Internet stable of editors out there who, as the Grand Forks Herald put it,

…worked the thing, with a stubbornness and tenacity that would have done credit to a pack of bulldogs or a turn of snapping turtles – or, yes, an army of investigative reporters.

These bloggers are obviously highly motivated by the current political climate. But the point is that whatever their motivation, they have become engaged in the debate. And I firmly believe that students have a lot to say about the various topics that they find engaging…they’ve just never had the opportunity to do it in a meaningful, public way.

I know, I know. The vast majority of students won’t end up being bloggers. But blogging starts with reading, something they all need to do. And blogging asks them to think about what they read, something they all need to do as well. If through the use of blogs we can teach them to do the important work it takes to be an editor, then maybe they’ll continue to use those skills even if they don’t continue blogging.
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Not sure why I hadn’t seen this before but FeedBurner has a cool Link Splicer feature where you can automatically insert your Furl or Bloglines Clip Blog posts into your main site RSS feed. I’m just thinking how cool that would be for a classroom.

Say you have your students (individually or in groups) using blogs to collect and annotate links for a project as well as track their time and thinking about the project. At the same time, you have them Furling pages to create their own mini-Webs about their topics. As a teacher, I could watch what they do in both places with just one feed. That would be a time saver, and it might get teachers to think about Furling as a part of the process. Now if we could combine all three into one…throw in e-mail…one feed for everything a student creates online…hmmm…

If anyone’s interested, here’s my blog/Furl feed.

The Online Journalism Review has an interview up with Dan Gillmor, author of “We the Media…” which if you haven’t read yet you should. The book is a great primer for the changes that we’re going to have to prepare our students for, changes that are becoming more profound each day.

Since I think a lot about how we teach our students to find and read good sources of information, I find it particularly interesting when Gillmor talks about blog reputation systems.

You learn what you can trust and what you can’t. I don’t think anyone picking up any publication or going to a site for the first time should automatically trust it. If I’m directed there by Doc Searls I will give it an automatic boost in trust before I start — not complete trust, but Doc has a lot of credibility with me. That’s part of what’s emerging as a sort of free-floating reputation system that will help us find the best sites to go to. It would be wonderful if journalism organizations would point to blogs and say, “Don’t make any crucial life decisions based on what you read here, check things out, but this looks pretty good.”

I think that this is already happening, that the more reputable sites are already being filtered and identified in a variety of ways. And those sites then nurture the reputations of others and so on. It’s definitely a different model from the past where I used to pretty much point to the New York Times, the Washington Post and a few others and say “this is probably as close to the truth as you’re going to get.” Now it’s more like use them as a starting point, but find other sources from other mediums and define truth for yourself.

And it’s back to readers needing to be editors.

But the burden is also on readers/listeners/viewers. They MUST start being more skeptical, and people of whatever political or social persuasion should constantly realize that people are trying to spin them.

It’s pretty amazing to me how little it seems schools are understanding the importance of this. (Maybe it’s just me.) But with the pace of change in education, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.
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