Barbara posts about the discomfort that the transparency of student blogs create, and if she’s thinking about it on the college level, imagine what it must be like down here in K-12 land. The days of emphasizing process over product seem to be a distant memory what with the specter of one-correct-answer standardized tests hanging over all of our heads. And now that we’re asking students to publish to an audience that might actually be engaged in what they are writing, errors become even more accentuated. God firbid they mispell something…

And this is teacher angst more than student angst. Let’s face it, most kids aren’t especially concerned if their work isn’t totally correct. But I can’t count the number of teachers who ask something along the lines of “But what if you put up something that’s got misspellings or errors in it?” during the presentations or workshops I’ve given. It’s one thing when kids make mistakes that only the teacher sees…it’s the students’ problem. But put them online…it’s the teacher’s. (Especially when district budget approvals can be won or lost with just a couple of votes.)

Barbara sees it correctly, I think:

Of course, detractors think that blogging embraces the messiness, the anything-goes-mentality, the very worst of the writing-process; and on first view, student blogging can be extremely undisciplined and informal, dynamically unruly in its humor and irreverence, its disregard for rules and conventions. Yup, this work unsettles just about everyone–still–teachers, administrators, parents and even the students themselves. We hand over the reins of our courses in large part to the students themselves. At least, this is my approach. And sometimes our students write downright incoherent entries due to a lack of simple copyediting , (take this recent one on my artswriting blog, for example). What do we do? Do we jump in and correct the mistakes, clean it up before the world sees and judges? Or do we wait to see what the class will say or do? Will anyone notice? Will anyone care? And if they don’t?

The conundrum is we hope someone notices and says something because that’s how they’ll learn; we just hope it’s not a member of the board. And, it’s helping people understand how this read/write Web changes things, not just teachers, but students and parents and administrators. We have the opportunity to make writing (and school work) real, I mean really real. I mean constructivist in the true sense of the ideal. And that “real” writing and working will inherently push our students to be more correct. As Barbara says:

Publishing raises the stakes; they want to move their readers, to entertain them, to educate them–they are writing for a real rather than a manufactured or nonexistent audience. They are writing with purpose and so begin to ask me questions in those f2f conferences about flow and style, about voice and humor, about the hows and the whys. And then I make them read and emulate, and tear apart what they read from a writer’s perspective.

So I don’t use blogs in my classes for my students’ personal rants or diaries, but as a public space in which we must try to reach our readers and move them; we don’t want to contribute to needless fill in the blogosphere. We should want our writing to count, to matter, to move something or someone–every time–if we get favorable responses that strike us as honest and authentic, then we’ll know we’ve written well or at least not badly, and that writing matters, our writing matters.

Amen to that…and isn’t that what we as bloggers try to do every day? I think that’s why this all resonates so intensely with me, because I finally feel like my writing has purpose (real or perceived.) I want other teachers and students to feel it as well, to feel that the work matters beyond the assessment and that it can have purpose and viability long after the course has ended.

A few weeks ago, Jenny Levine at the Shifted Librarian pointed to a new service from Google that allows you to search via text message on your phone. She linked to it again yesterday, and I finally tried it out. Very, very cool. Text in “08822 pizza” and in a couple seconds I get a call listing the two pizza places downtown.

Text in “define egalitarian” and the definition comes to me. Oy…the possibilities. As Jenny says:

This is huge. It’s one of my new themes I’ve been highlighting over the past few months in my presentations. Libraries are ignoring instant messaging at our peril, and our vendors don’t understand the power of IM and SMS as interfaces to services. That’s why when I visited with vendors on the ILA exhibit floor last week, my handout for them included screenshots of Leland Johnson’s AIM catalog search.

Here’s the important quote that really brings home why this is so important (bolded for extra emphasis): “Google’s SMS service is interesting for a couple of reasons. Texting is the world’s most popular computer user interface. It’s how most of the world communicates, too.”

So is your library ready to communicate with your users this way?

How long until I get to be a digital native???

Oh and by the way…CNet reports “In a sign texting has gone mass market, in June 2004, there were 2.8 billion messages sent from U.S. cell phones, compared with the 2.8 million sent in June 2003.” Sheesh…
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It’s taken me a while, but I think I’m finally starting to “get” the hype about flickr. Tim and Alan have been pushing my brain already, doing some neat stuff with creating learning objects with photos. And Steve Burt (who really needs to get blogging) is a phone to flickr to Weblog expert. But up until now, I haven’t really gotten the social aspect of the tool…I mean who wants to scroll through random pictures of random people doing random things randomly? Sure, I guess you could make family flickr pages and so on, but I can do that in a blog.

Today, however, Brian Lamb posted this really beautiful picture of the eclipse over Vancouver, and when I clicked on it, it took me to 214 other pictures of the eclipse that random people had posted. I clicked on the slide show link, and sat back, fascinated, catching some great views of an event I had missed.

Just like I had missed the point of the flickr tags that put all of those pictures together. Alan had written about it a month ago:

I’ve only explored a bit with flickr’s tags, but it is promising a great example of taking a large pool of assets from combines sources (everyone who published public photos on flickr) and then provide a way to easily mix and recombine them into new “super” collections based on the keyword “tags” people apply to their photos- like mine should end up in the grandcanyon collection, or my desert flower photos in the flower collection. Or now, I have the sole image in the flinstones tag set. Woohoo!

It would be cool to be able to combine tags?? Anyhow, can you see it is not a far stretch to exchange “photos” for “learning objects”, and have a simple way to pull up everything tagged as for “mid level organic chemistry”? Maybe not feasible, but an interesting model for Rip Mix and _________.

Doh! I get it. Have kids upload pictures they take to flickr, tag them, add titles, descriptions and hot spots with mouseovers, look at other similarly tagged photos from classmates or students far and abroad, comment back to the creators…and then blog about the whole experience. Construct. Collaborate. Communicate.

So, you can find out all sorts of interesting things about my office by clicking on the photo above. And, if you’re so inclined, you can also see 637 other pictures of random offices from random people…

From the T+L2 Weblog today…this IS what ed tech is all about:

A team comprised of the elementary, middle, and highschool MovieFest winners ran around the convention center with three digital video cameras, interviewing some who’s who of ed. tech. Then, it was back to the hotel for an into-the-night editing session. Today they are putting on the finishing touches of the short video, which includes original music via Garage Band, to be shown at Friday’s General Session.
These kids, who had never met before, worked exceptionally well as team, especially considering the age range from elementary to highschool. I think they were amazed to see throngs of educators so enthusiasticallly advocating ed.Tech. (Todd Mattox, Bear Valley Middle School, Escondido, CA)

I mean, how cool is that? And they’re blogging too! This is my new mantra: Collaborate, Communicate, Construct. We’re going to be amazed by the changes these technologies are going to demand in education…
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Always good to see Bloglines getting some good ink in big media, such as “All The News You Choose — On One Page” in Business Week. While I’m not sure the story gets it quite right about RSS, there are a couple of choice quotes that resonated:

“We believe the world is moving from mass media to ‘my media,”‘ says Daniel L. Rosensweig, chief operating officer at Yahoo Inc., which last month began testing feeds to the 20 million subscribers of its My Yahoo service.

I like that way of putting it…I still can’t believe the effects that RSS has had on my personal consumption of information. It is truly amazing.

The biggies claim their brands will insulate them against upstarts. Says Catherine Levene, vice-president for product, business development, and strategy at New York Times Digital: “We think people will still come to [our site] for our editorial judgment.”

Um…why? The only reason I go to the New York Times site these days is if something in my feed piques my interest.

So is surfing dead? Not quite. While RSS is good for getting updates, it can’t do research or comparison shopping. And although it’s simpler to use than earlier technology, it remains more complicated than a browser.

More complicated than a browser? Maybe just a little. But the time you save makes the really, really tiny learning bump absolutely worth it. And I mean blogs are cool, but RSS is, well, cooler than cool.
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Here’s the bad news about today’s Journal article…the title: “Classroom Use of Web Logs Raises Concerns”

Here’s the good news…the article paints a much better picture of classroom blogging than the title suggests.

The WSJ is subscription only, so here are some snippets that I found interesting and relevant:

But the school’s experience highlights some of the issues that educators and parents face as blogs — simple Web sites that follow a diary-like format — gain entry into the nation’s classrooms. While most agree on blogs’ value for promoting student expression, critical thinking and exchange, there’s no consensus on the amount of control over access and content that educators should exercise. As blogging spreads, it could revive debates over student expression similar to those that have cropped up around school newspapers.

No doubt about this. And I don’t think it’s going to be an easy or necessarily smooth road. But I also don’t think there is any stopping this read/write Web into the classroom train. This is more about expression; this is about enhancing student learning in ways that we could not do in the past. While I may at times bemoan the slow pace of adoption of these tools, it’s actually probably a good thing in this respect…we need to prove that the constructivist, collaborative potential of the read/write Web is all it’s cracked up to be.

The use of blogs in schools remains limited but is growing, as scattered programs piloted by tech-savvy educators generate buzz and followers. Teachers are attracted to blogging for some of the same reasons blog use has exploded among techies, political commentators and would-be pundits.

The buzz is growing for blogs in general, and there are more teachers in the fold. That hopefully means that we’re going to push out in even more creative directions.

“What we want to see is a Web log where a teacher has final control, acts as a filter for any postings or comments,” says Janey Mayo, technology coordinator for Harford County Public Schools. “We’re trying to be very cautious with this because we’re working with kids.” School administrators also want to see further research on whether blogging has educational value at the elementary-school level, but so far haven’t found any.

This really does sum up where we are right now. Teachers see great academic potential, administrators see great risks, and we’re all in limbo waiting for the scholars to opine. The good news is, more and more of them are. The bad news is the results are mixed.

Other educators say, even pending such a fix, that blogging can be used responsibly in classrooms. They argue that kids surf the Web outside of school already, so teaching them to deal with inappropriate comments on blogs is important.

I’ve said this before, but the biggest challenge with all of this is that our kids are doing more than our teachers when it comes to mining and using the Internet, and we don’t have enough role models for them to teach the best ways to use it. That’s the scary part…the digital natives vs. digital immigrants issue.

“It’s worth taking that risk” of being exposed to inappropriate content on the Web, says Anne Davis, an information systems training specialist at Georgia State University and former elementary school teacher.

You go Anne!

All in all, I think the article is an accurate assessment of the current situation. There’s much left to be done…

In sticking with the Wiki theme, Wikinews looks like a project with some constructivist potential for classroom teachers. Not that they’ve set their goals very high or anything:

We seek to promote the idea of the citizen journalist, because we believe that everyone can make a useful contribution to painting the big picture of what is happening in the world around us. The time has come to create a free news source, by the people and for the people. We invite you to join us in this effort which has the potential to change the world forever.

Ok, so let’s think about this…a news feed that is created by communities of reporters each of whom can add sourced content to flesh out the story. There is a review process by which the information is vetted. You have published articles where corrections can be made for a period of time. And they are archived for future reference.

How cool would it be to create such a space in a school, where anyone could contribute what they know that can be verified, and where accuracy is pursued post publication? What would that teach about journalism…since reporters don’t really need to go to J-school anymore anyway?
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Just a quick update in case anyone is interested…I got the spam to stop by flipping off the Radio hosting switch in Manila (tip of the hat to Betsy Devine.) But…that means no comments for a while. I’ll see about putting them back in the near future, but I gotta tell you, deleting over 100 spam comments in the last 24 hours has made me kind of like this peace and quiet. I trust that Userland is working on a solution. Meantime, if there is something you want me to add to any posts, just e-mail me: will at weblogg-ed.com.
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Jim Rusconi was someone I met at Building Learning Communities this summer, and it looks like he’s one teacher that’s taken blogs and wikis to heart. He’s been keeping up in his own Weblog, has been trying out Moodle with his kids, and now looks like he’s set to use a wiki to construct his own Computer Graphics class text.

I’m going to be really interested to watch and see how that develops since I think I’m on the verge of dipping my toe into those waters as well. I’ve been working with one of the Media Lit teachers and talking about a wiki text for the class. Seedwiki, by the way, looks like a pretty powerful application. Each page has it’s own discussion list, you can get any changes via e-mail, update pages via e-mail, and password protect the pages. You get three wikis and up to 50 pages total for free…nice!

Oh, and by the way, I stumbled across this class wiki that is a great example of the potential of the tool and also a great resource for me in my Instructional Technology postition. I just love some of the ideas for collaborative recipe books and cross Atlantic video collaborations…
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Some of the usual suspects (and a few not so usual) are blogging the T+L2 conference in Denver this week. Should be a good source of information about what the hot topics are in ed tech. And, what’s a blog without a feed? Right now, go to Bloglines, do not pass go, paste that puppy in and start getting the timely updates.

Well, nothing save shutting this site down for a period has been able to stop the spammers from getting through…about 50 comments a day that I’ve been trying to stay ahead of. Not fun. For Manila users out there, I’ve tried closing the site to membership, shutting off comments, even blocking and deleting the offending “members” but as I said, nothing has worked. And I see I’m not the only one out there having this issue.

It’s not especially hard to delete the messages in Manila although it would be easier to have a check box of all messages that I could just run through and select. And I’m not going to shut down the site because of spam…yet. Since turning comments off doesn’t help, I’ll turn them back on. What the heck.

The problem, obviously, is what this might portend for my student sites, and that has me really worried. I mean, I have a feeling those sites probably aren’t on the spammers’ radar, but I shudder to think of the implications if I can’t find some way to shut them out other than shutting sites down. That would not be fun.

I’m getting a ton of spam comments and it’s taking too much time to delete them all. So, I’m gonna turn off comments and turn on discuss for awhile. You need to be a member to discuss. I’ll put the easier comments back up on Monday. I hate this…
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As far as I can tell, Google Alerts, has dropped its RSS feed option from the standing searches I used to be able to create. Now they just allow e-mail updates. The good news is that it now seems to be including Google News in its search which it didn’t before. More good news is that you can create more than five alerts.

So how am I still going to collect my alerts into my Bloglines account? Simple…I just changed the e-mail on my Google Alert account to one of the Bloglines throwaway e-mails that they provide. So, the e-mail messages with the news headlines from Google Alerts end up in my aggregator anyway.

On par, the addition of Google News to the service makes this a win, even if you have to hack your way into aggregating the results.
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