Barbara Ganley’s recent post about how the tool is becoming indistinguishable from the course makes it clear just how far down the blog road she has travelled.

The deeper into this classroom blogging I get, the more I cannot disentangle the pedagogy from the blogging–to talk about blogs means to talk about student-centered learning, collaborative knowledge spaces, constructivist pedagogy FIRST. Teaching with blogs the way I do–which means not applying them piecemeal but integrating them fully in all their messy, flexible, fluid promise– means you have to let go of control of the classroom, give up the stage and create opportunities for learning magic to occur. The trick is to weave the learning and the tool so seamlessly together that the blog is the class and the class finds the blog indispensible.

That paragraph in itself is pretty amazing and heady, especially for us down here in K-12 land. But that seems to me where the technology is leading us. And I truly think that Barbara and others like her may lead us to a better understanding of what the messy, student centered, student authored curriculum looks like.

Aaron Campbell has a great response to this when he says

…when discussing the possiblity of using them with other educators, we should consider to what extent we are willing to have blogs play such a central role in the classroom learning we facilitate. If we see ourselves, the teachers, as central to the learning process, there is no way that blogs can live up to their potential as constructivist tools. They necessitate learner driven use to work well.

It’s interesting that I seem to be seeing this thread of thinking more and more, and I think it’s got to be because of the learning opportunities that the Read/Write Web offers. I love the idea that so many teachers are starting to think in these terms and that they are starting to rethink their roles in the classroom. We can’t keep telling kids what to say, we have to show them how they can say whatever is meaningful to them and then work hard, as Barbara does, to make connections and sift out whatever answers appear.

As both Aaron and Barbara ask, however, which comes first, the tools or the pedagogy? The easy answer is that the pedagogy should drive the decisions about tools. But these days, the tools offer ways to really transform the pedagogy in ways we haven’t even begun to think about yet. That’s what Barbara is immersed in. And that’s what we’ll need more of to realize whatever potential there is.
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Ok, so this is my new concept, podblogging in the sense of listening to podcasts and then capturing the best of what’s in there in a blog post. It’s the same filtering process that regular blogging entails, but with audio. If I could find someone to listen to all the great stuff that’s being produced and yank out just the good parts, well…let’s just say I’d be really happy.

This week, I listened to two great podcasts. The latest Gillmor Gang covered all sorts of interesting topics, but there were a few moments when Doc Searles and the rest were talking about the meaning of this media revolution that were not to be missed. Here’s a quote from Doc:

“[We're seeing the] podization of everything. You get whatever you want from whomever you want and there’s nothing stopping you from producing or consuming, from buying or selling, and that everyone gets to play.”

Here’s a four-minute snippet you can listen to if you like.

The other snippet I grabbed was from the Pop Tech presentation of Doug Rushkoff last fall. (Both of these are via the most excellent ITC Conversations site, btw.) He was speaking on a Next Renaissance, and one of his ideas was the “Society of Authorship” that we are now entering. A quote:

“Meaning is made through collaboration, by connecting with other people… The next Renaissance teaches us first that we are writing the human story, we are responsible for the human story. We are doing it, writing it in real time whether we know it or not. And most importantly, that we have the ability now to write it together.”

Here’s 3:30 of audio to give it more context.

I have to say I’m really liking being able to listen to quality content like this while I’m doing my 20-minute commute. These are a couple of what I would call “Big Ideas”. Making me think. Thinking is good…

In the never ending search for RSS search feeds, it appears MSN now allows you to subscribe to the results of your query. If you haven’t gotten your brain wrapped around this concept, you need to. Right now. You can be researching 24/7 if you have RSS feeds which are bringing search results to you (or your students). Enter your search once, create the feed, plop it in your aggregator and sit back and watch what happens.

I just love this stuff. Really. I do.

Actually, if you haven’t played with the fairly new MSN Search tool, you might want to check it out. The search builder tool makes it easy to focus your results by terms, location, domain, language and, even more importantly, by how recent and how popular the source of the result is. You can go and watch the build of your query, but if you don’t want to leave your aggregator, here’s what my search for “library and wiki” looks like:

wiki library loc:US language:en {mtch=100} {popl=84} {frsh=81}

Terms, location, language, 100% match, must be in the 84th percentile of popularity and 81st in freshness. The URL ends up looking like this:

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=wiki+library+loc%3AUS+language
%3Aen+%7Bmtch%3D100%7D+%7Bpopl%3D84%7D+%7Bfrsh%3D81%7D&FORM=QBRE

Now, if I want to subscribe to that search, I just add “&format=rss” to the URL, like so:

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=wiki+library+loc%3AUS+language
%3Aen+%7Bmtch%3D100%7D+%7Bpopl%3D84%7D+%7Bfrsh%3D81%7D&FORM
=QBRE&format=rss

Pop that in my Bloglines account and I’m a happy researcher. Whaddaya know? I’ll keep you posted on how relevant that search turns out…