I’ve been doing some offline writing (what a concept) about Weblogs
lately and, in the process, have been spending a good chunk of time
mining my three years worth of posts in here for publishable nuggets.
It’s been a great reminder of how much thinking and learning I’ve
accomplished here.

So in that spirit, a couple of posts that I’m reading this morning have
been getting my brain out of some post Thanksgiving lethargy (and I
don’t even eat turkey!) and merit some brainwork reflection, I think.
When I went to Middlebury a couple of summers ago, I met Hector Vila
who is a writing professor there. His blog isn’t
the most frequently updated, but it’s definitely worth the read when he
does post. What I really like about his post today is that he asks some
challenging questions about how technology in the age of the read/write
Web requires us to think differently about the classroom and the
disruption that’s causing. The class that he’s been teaching
has been steeped in the discussion of online learning and community,
and if you have the time to read through the posts, it’s well worth
attempting to grasp the scope of what he’s offering to his students.
They have been truly challenged to rethink what learning and education
is all about.

My purpose for having students take ownership of the class blog, work
through the Segue CMS site to solidify them in the f2f class world, and
then re-create themselves in their blogs is simple: I want the students
to remove me from the class/course. I want to be invisible. I want them
to realize that, through ownership, students can participate in the
world using the best available tools. I want them to command the
technology–not be neutral to it.

I’m
not sure the K-12 world is ready to have teachers remove themselves
from the process, but I do think that we need to start imagining a
different role for the teacher in the classroom. Courses need not be
defined by face to face meetings for defined periods of time. In fact,
the traditional classroom could be looked upon as the beginning of a
longer, larger conversation. Hector says it better than I can.

[The Weblog] is potentially the beginning of a conversation on the issues raised
by this course of study. This changes the nature of the classroom–and
any course. Where most courses are “blocks” residing within the
confining infrastructure of traditional education, the outdated
semester, this course begs us to consider what exists beyond the
semester: will the students–and the teacher–continue to add to this
site? will others, from outside this community, begin contributing?
will the students continue to feed this site from their own blogs, as
they’re doing now? These questions arise because of technology–how
it’s been used; how it’s been deployed; how it’s enabling the
construction of an imagination that can reach beyond the elite walls of
a high-grade liberal arts education. Physically, the students are now
working outside the college walls; however, metaphorically, their blogs
are doing the same.

Good
stuff that I’m sure will be mulling in my brain during our long flight
home from snowy Wisconsin today. Definitely time to get my brain back
in gear.
—–

(via CyberJournalist.net)
Aggregation is having and will continue to have some major effects on
the Web, and one of them I’ve been thinking about lately is the decline
of the homepage. I mean I can probably count on two hands that number
of sites I’ve actually visited in the last week, all because of they
way I can aggregate the content in Bloglines.

An article in Digital Web Magazine does a great job of deconstructing
the effects of aggregation from a user and content provider
standpoint.  For instance:

Aggregators are promoting a shift in the control of content. They’re
challenging the idea that we as designers control public access to
information in our domains, that users must view things in the way we
prescribe, and that our hierarchy is best to present our content. This
change is also suggesting that we need the help of others to market our
own ideas. It is plausible that another’s approach to our information
may be working better than our own.

 I
still see a lot of people talking about teachers creating their own
homepages to put up course information or homwork, and I wonder why
would they do that these days? Why wouldn’t they just start a blog with
an out of the box template that will satisfy the few people who might
actually visit the site but has the built-in RSS feed to push the
important content to the relevant audiences? These days, it’s the
information, stupid. I’m much more interested in how many people read
my feed than visit my page.

Weblogs are a tool that I think bridges the divide between Prensky’s digital natives and digital immigrants,
’cause the immigrants can put a blog to good use without a lot of
expertise. I think we’re at the point where teaching them HTML and FTP
and all those other acronyms doesn’t do much to add to the fluency they
need to put the read/write Web to work.

Jack McLeod is more than “moving molecules” as a friend of mine used to say. He’s moving mountains. Check out this post where he talks about how he’s hoping to implement blogs at his school.

Jeff [his principal] is ready to get the kids blogging. The global audience did it. Authentic publishing. Now that’s why we have the Internet. It’s not for surfing or replacing the library, it’s for sharing with the world. The upshot is that I’m going to apply for a leave to get the ball rolling…Jeff is a great leader that gets stuck dealing with discipline and attendance. Today was a chance to talk. I mentioned my rant about throwing away all of our current curriculum and starting to teach kids how to manage information. He’s there. That’s the read-write web isn’t it?

He’s adding Bloglines and Furl and Firefox to all of the classroom computers as well. How cool is that?

So the writing across the curriculum idea has been around for a lot of years now, and I think most people would agree that it’s a good one. Our writing lives are filled with all sorts of genres and purposes once we graduate into the “real world.” Why should English classes be the only place where good writing skills are taught? It used to be that teachers in other disciplines had some trepidation about assigning writing since they weren’t very comfortable as writers themselves. But I have to tell you, at my school just about every discipline, including physical education, asks kids to write, and I think the benefits are obvious.

But what about blogging across the curriculum? The last few days I’ve had a couple of people ask me whether or not I think blogging (not blogs) has a place in math or science. Obviously, the digital paper aspect of blogs lends itself so easily to English classes, but I think there’s potential for other disciplines as well. Why would pieces written for health class benefit any less from an audience than something written in English class? And wouldn’t the self-publishing power of Weblogs foster a more constructivist approach? More authentic reasons for more authentic writing. Same with math and science. I mean, why couldn’t students blog about their own processes or tricks when solving math problems. Or why shouldn’t reflective blogging in science become an integral part of doing the experiment? I mean imagine if Einstein had the benefit of instantly sharing his observations with millions of interested readers. Oh, the feedback. (Ok, maybe not Einstein, and maybe not millions…but you get the idea.) I’ve been trying, but I can’t seem to think of a discipline where blogging couldn’t be put to good use.

And imagine a student blog/portfolio where all of that blogging across the curriculum comes together as a place to do some of that real meta-cognitive work. Learning in high school takes place in such a vacuum already that students seldome make any connections between one curriculum to another. That’s always struck me as completely antithetical to the way we learn when we leave school. A blog might help make some of those connections. I know all that transparency scares people, and that it’s a pretty big shift in the way we currently view the goals of the curriculum (read: standardized tests). But what a learning tool that could be.

I look at my daughter’s blogging of late and I imagine what it might look like 10 years from now when she graduates from high school. What a learning log she might have. (And, what an audience!)

Wisconsin, that is. Where it’s going to be 14 degrees on Wednesday night. Fun! Wonder if there’s any chance of putting together an Eau Claire bloggers get together for the weekend…

I’m still playing around with the standing search idea to see if Feedster or Blogdigger or some other tool stands out in terms of the results I get via the RSS feed. The main requirement right now is not getting duplicates, followed by a greater level of relevance. If there’s one thing that I’ve been disappointed by it’s that relatively few of the hits I’ve been getting back are of any use, and try as I might to tweak the terms, it’s not getting much better.

PubSub has come out with a new iteration, however, that might be the better answer. I’ve been tracking two searches for the past week, and even though the number of results has been relatively small, the relevance is way up. I added a couple more today that I am also tracking in Blogdigger to serve up a comparison.

What’s good about the PubSub search is the many ways you can use boolean syntax to narrow your search. I need to do a bit more digging, but on first blush, I don’t think the other two do. And, PubSub gives you the option of just searching a certain percentage of the 3 million or so blogs in their database, based on how popular a site seems to be on any given day. That’s another great way of limiting the results. All in all, more choices, and choices are good, right?

I’ve been feeling less than satisfied with my writing/blogging here of late. Even though I’ve stayed pretty consistent in terms of posting on a regular basis, I just don’t feel like the quality of the posts has been as good or as meaningful as in the past. And maybe that’s just it; it feels like posting, not blogging.

It’s a big difference for me, because I’m learning when I blog whereas I’m just collecting when I post. I’ve been over this turf before, I know, but to me, blogging is work. Not work in a job sense but work in a thinking/writing sense. Blogging requires effort in ways that make it a valuable use of my time. I need to read and think and write, all the while testing my assumptions and editing what comes in and what goes out. In the three-plus years that I’ve been keeping this blog, I’ve read tens of thousands pieces of writing from thousands of other bloggers, and with each one I’m mining it for something to use in my practice or to write about. Ironically, it’s one of the biggest changes in my process since I started blogging, this reading for ideas that I do. I never used to read to write. Now that’s almost all I do. And the writing identifies and clarifies the learning. That’s really what the good blogging is here, a learning log.

What’s cool, and also overwhelming, is that there’s so much good blogging going on these days. It’s exposition in the purest sense; there’s thesis and support via links. In many cases, it’s the type of exposition that I used to teach my students, characterized by well-developed, organized ideas, vibrant writing and clear focus. But most of the time, what makes blogging different is the length; it’s shorter, punchier, and it’s characterized by the clear voice of the author. As a writing teacher, the great appeal of blogs to me is the obvious sense of audience that bloggers develop. They have to. In fact, I think I could argue that blogs can provide better models of personal essay than more traditional sources simply because the sense of audience is so acute. It is, as I’ve said before, that conversation with your audience that Donald Murray talks so much about come to life. (In fact, I wish Murray had a blog.)

So when I go through a period where I don’t feel like what I’m writing is characterized by the thinking and engagement of the reader that good blogging is, I actually start missing it somehow. It’s like not getting to the gym when I’m paying the monthly membership whether I show up or not. Or something like that. I miss the workout that blogging provides. Which, of course, is why I think every student should be blogging (not just posting) at an early age…imagine the essays they would write in high school.

I’m not sure why the dearth lately. It may be because I’m finding this harder to do now that I’m not teaching. Or because there are more soccer and swim practices to get to. Or because at times the limited focus of this blog is, well, a bit limiting. (Oh the blogging I COULD be doing…) But at any rate, I’m hoping to get back to the good thinking and writing stuff more often.
—–

Google has just launched its “new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers” named Google Scholar. Hmmm… A quick search for “Weblogs education” brings up 255 hits.

Oy.

Can we split this up somehow? Anyone?
—–

From Oregon State University comes this article about Internet scholar Laura Gurak and her support of Weblogs in the classroom. Specifically she was speaking about the implications for writing instruction, and apparently the crowd got into a “spirited debate” over whether or not blogging was indeed a form of writing. Sorry I missed it.

Some good quotes from a relatively short article, among them this one:

“We (writing teachers) need to embrace what’s really going on,” Gurak said. “For teaching — there are a lot of possibilities the blog has standardized.”

Good to see the “experts” coming on board.

Btw, I found this through a new Manila blog at George Washington High School in Philadelphia, where it appears they’re working toward bringing Weblogs into the classroom. On! On!
—–

Don’t exactly know why, but all of a sudden there seems to be a bunch
o’ teachers and students blogging that I hadn’t seen before. I’m lovin’it! Here’s some more examples of how classrooms are putting the technology to good use:

I love it when people start using classroom Weblogs after getting some “blogvangelism.” Here’s a local school that set up a collaborative Weblog between students and Tony Abbot, the author of The Secrets of Doom series. The kids asked questions which he answered on the blog. I especially liked the 144 thank you comments after the author make an in person visit to the school.

Now they want to do another collaboration with Herman Parish, the author of the Amelia Bedelia series. (My kids love those books.) Can’t wait to see it.
—–

(Or…”Why I Want to be a College Professor so I Can Do REALLY Cool Things With Blogs.”)

Barbara came up with this. Not only do I want to be able to do
something similar (difficult in K-12 land…but not impossible) I want
to be a part of the project!

Just go and read it.

   The Tyee newspaper out of British Columbia has an interesting article about Wikipedia and it’s coverage of the Russian school hostage story a couple of months ago.

On the morning of September 1, 2004, a small armed force
captured a school in western Russian town of Beslan, taking hundreds of
students hostage.

One day later, a small article describing the event appeared on Wikipedia.org,
an open-source encyclopedia. Over the next 24 hours, Wikipedia users
compiled the information from other news reports together into one
article, revising and expanding it 46 times.

People coming to the article from Wikipedia’s “Current Events” page
could read a concise summary of the event, with links to the history of
the region and the ongoing war. This was old school, just-the-facts
reporting.

It reminds me a lot of what I wrote last March after the bombings in Spain. I was, and still am, in awe of the coverage.
I’m sure there are probably even more comprehensive sites out there for
research on that event, but I just found it so fascinating that dozens
if not hundreds of people were by their own volition adding to the
story as new information came out, tweaking it as they went. And that’s
still happening; I wish the current events page had an RSS feed.

But it would just be so neat to do this with students. And Ken Smith (who I wish would get back to blogging) had a great idea about just this over a year ago:

But it also makes me think about creating something like it — why not
ask the students in a class to create a current events page, updated
daily or weekly or monthly as the field requires, for the course topic
and the conversations that are going on in the field? At the end of one
semester the task might be picked up by students who enroll for the
next semester’s course.

We start a new quarter on Tuesday, and I’m going to see if we can’t make something like that happen.
Seedwiki allows me to create an account for each kid, so we can track
who adds what. I’ve been working with the Media Lit teacher to set this
up, and I think we’re ready to go. Stay tuned…

I think the larger point, however, is that Wikipedia is a metaphor for
the editor’s role we all need to accept when we enter the read/write
Web. This is a skill and a literacy that kids (and teachers) need to
learn. And I think wikis, moreso even than Weblogs, are a tool to teach
that. I like the way the article ends:

Using Wikipedia requires a major shift in the
way we view our sources of news and reference. Wikipedia shows that
information should be tested, as a way of getting better information,
but also that it should be shared. If you have knowledge, offer it to
the world. If you see something wrong with Wikipedia, fix it.

Nice.
—–

The Tyee newspaper out of British Columbia has an interesting article about Wikipedia and it’s coverage of the Russian school hostage story a couple of months ago.

On the morning of September 1, 2004, a small armed force captured a school in western Russian town of Beslan, taking hundreds of students hostage.

One day later, a small article describing the event appeared on Wikipedia.org, an open-source encyclopedia. Over the next 24 hours, Wikipedia users compiled the information from other news reports together into one article, revising and expanding it 46 times.

People coming to the article from Wikipedia’s “Current Events” page could read a concise summary of the event, with links to the history of the region and the ongoing war. This was old school, just-the-facts reporting.

It reminds me a lot of what I wrote last March after the bombings in Spain.
—–

Well, here’s another attempt at the Podcasting craze. Don’t try this at home…