In today’s Wall Street Journal, reporter Kevin Delaney asks the question and answers it with blogs, wikis, RSS and the like.

Pioneering teachers are getting their classes to post writing assignments online so other students can easily read and critique them. They’re letting kids practice foreign languages in electronic forums instead of pen-and-paper journals. They’re passing out PDAs to use in scientific experiments and infrared gadgets that let students answer questions in class with the touch of a button. And in the process, the educators are beginning to interact with students, parents and each other in ways they never have before.

Very cool, especially since many in our community including Tim Wilson, Tim Lauer and yours truly are featured, as well as a nice mix of other teachers using other interesting technologies. Wish I could post the whole thing here, but you know how copyright is. Time to fire up the ProQuest account, if you have access to one.

A few other excerpts of note:

Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Ore., also uses Web-based publishing technology to open up new possibilities in communication. Fifth-graders send classwork, and essays and articles for their monthly newspaper, to a wiki over the school’s network. Teacher Kathy Gould goes to the Web page and writes corrections and comments directly into the text — instead of posting a note in a separate “comments” section, as with a blog. Students can then access the wiki to read and respond to her comments.

How neat is that?

Some school administrators caution that much of the new technologies’ educational value has yet to be proved by any academic research. Some schools have slowed teachers’ efforts to introduce blogging in particular because of concern about what students might write, and be exposed to, online.

Technology presents other problems. Teachers have to learn it themselves and then figure out how it can serve the ultimate goal of teaching the curriculum. And, of course, students sometimes use computers to cheat, harass other kids or just waste time.

But grass-roots tech advocates say that they see improved learning already, even if formal studies to support that don’t yet exist. And others say that as kids get more tech-sophisticated, they have no choice but to experiment with new ways of teaching their curriculum.

Ok, have I broken the law yet?

I’m not sure I could do the following from Dave Pollard justice, at least not without thinking about it for a few days (weeks?) But it seems worth noting nonetheless:

Last, but certainly not least, is this remarkable statement from blogger Rob Paterson on the utility of blogging: “The utility of blogging to me is that it is recreating the lost world of a humanity that is connected to itself and hence to everything.” Rob and I and a group of bloggers have been working on a compendium of our best and most important work, and we’ve been exchanging ideas on a theme or shared vision for the book. I suggested that, if it’s going to sell, the book needs to have utility to the reader, especially the reader who barely knows what a blog (or online journalism) is. Rob identified three ‘values’ of blogging to him personally: Finding one’s voice; Noticing what gives and what drains one’s energy; Redefining the meaning of work as a function of community and fellowship instead of wage slavery. So he’s saying, and I agree with him, that blogging (the participation in the conversation as both a journal reader and writer) re-centres you, frees you from being like, and seeing the world like, everyone else, and allows you to see the world and yourself differently, more profoundly (for better and for worse), and hence to liberate yourself and take charge of your own life. Self-awareness, self-reliance, and the personal liberation that comes from deep knowledge. Could there possibly be a higher utility for anything?

Whoa.
—–

I think about the evolution of blogs as serious news sources probably way more than I should, but as an educator and journalism junkie, I can’t help but try to figure out what effect bloggers are going to have in terms of media literacy and consumption. I’m in the camp that says traditional journalism has some serious problems ahead, that more and more, forms of participatory journalism are going to cover the news that people consume. I think by and large that people who do any thinking at all about their sources of news have lost faith in the accuracy and trustworthiness of what’s being reported. It’s just becoming way too hard to separate fact from opinion and story from advertising. Trouble is, of course, is that there are too many people who don’t give what they read or hear a second thought.

William Safire opines about the usefulness of bloggers in a journalistic sense today at the New York Times. He suggests that as advertising grows, bloggers will come in from the “meanstream to the mainstream” to eventually deliver “serious analysis and fresh information.” But then he says this:

On national or global events, however, the news consumer needs trained reporters on the scene to transmit facts and trustworthy editors to judge significance. In crises, large media gathering-places are needed to respond to a need for national community.

That just strikes me as so typical of what we expect from Americans as citizens of the world. Study after study shows that we have no real pulse on the rest of the world to begin with. Ask what Gaza is and most people will probably tell you it’s a big band aid. We can’t keep track of what happens in Kansas much less in Kiev. So, Safire says that yes, we can use our brains to sift through American news, but on that oh so foreign international front, we should just sit back and get the regular spoon feed of ideas and information.

Bunk, I say.

Look, we have an opportunity here to really teach ourselves and our kids to be active consumers of news, and in doing so, to be better informed and better prepared for the troubles that certainly lie ahead. And there is a new formula evolving for doing just that. It’s built on the idea that lots of amateur reader/editors can do just as good if not better job than a few professional ones who are beholden to some company or some stock. It says that this isn’t just an American thing, that it works the same way around the world. And it says that the “The Daily Me” really is now the responsibility of all of us; we need to find and construct our own newspapers, aggregated from RSS feeds and the like.

I know that it’s much, much more complicated than that. And I also know that most people aren’t going to want to put in the time. But I’m also hoping that we can use the vast amounts of information and news that we now have at our fingertips to show students how interesting the world really is.