One thing I seem to be noticing more and more of is teachers who are blogging about their working lives. And it seems like there is a burgeoning support network out there that is pretty cool. Hipteacher has been on my blogroll for awhile. But all of a sudden I’ve run accross Mz. Smlph, First Year Teacher, Catherine Grimm, The Flaming Cheeto…

Sheesh…maybe there really are “a few hundred thousand” educators blogging out there.

And if you haven’t already done so, join the Educational Bloggers group at Flickr.

So much to see, read, write, share, hear, experience together these days, huh?

Wow. Peggy Noonan is pumping up blogs (from a journalism sense) like I don’t know what. And at the Wall Street Journal no less:

But when I read blogs, when I wake up in the morning and go to About Last Night and Lucianne and Lileks, I remember what the late great Christopher Reeve said on “The Tonight Show” 20 years ago. He was the second guest, after Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield did his act and he was hot as a pistol. Then after Reeve sat down Dangerfield continued to be riotous. Reeve looked at him, gestured toward him, looked at the audience and said with grace and delight, “Do you believe this is free?” The audience cheered. That’s how I feel on their best days when I read blogs.

That you get it free doesn’t mean commerce isn’t involved, for it is. It is intellectual commerce. Bloggers give you information and point of view. In return you give them your attention and intellectual energy. They gain influence by drawing your eyes; you gain information by lending your eyes. They become well-known and influential; you become entertained or informed. They get something from it and so do you.

It’s a great read, one that I think is pretty level headed and “spot on” about a lot of what’s happening right now. But we still have such a loooooonnnngggg way to go before we’ll see just what the long term effects are.

But this is why I believe that the technologies will change education. If the Fourth Estate is reeling a bit by the rise of citizen editors and the creation (in progress) of a new definition of journalism, I just feel like the same can happen to education. Like newspapers, we just don’t hold the keys to the content anymore. And I think we all better start waking up to that fact…
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Jim Wenzloff has put together a nice primer on how to get the most out of Furl. I have to say it’s definitely one of my favorite tools on the Web, and more and more I’m finding it to be an invaluable, focused resource for me to mine. Of course it’s taken a while to build up the content, but rarely a day goes by that I don’t go to my archive to find something that I need. And the best part is just sharing a link to my topics when people ask for resources…
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An addendum to my story from yesterday:

My colleague’s brother is a high school principal in a major East Coast city, and during a phone call they had yesterday, the conversation turned to the Internet.

“My teachers are complaining that the quality of their student papers is just getting worse and worse,” the principal said. “And it’s because they’re getting such bad information from the Internet. Are there any lists of ‘reputable’ sites out there that we can get our kids to use?”

My colleague, who has had the misfortune of sitting through many of my information literacy harangues, and who is a very smart person himself, said “Why don’t you do some professional development for your teachers and show them how to teach kids to find good sources?”

“Oh, no,” the principal said. “They won’t want to do that. They don’t have the time for it.”

“Well, don’t you think the kids need to learn how to use the Internet effectively as a research tool?” my friend said.

“I think it’s better for everyone if we just give them a list of sites they can use when they do their papers,” the principal said, “and tell them they have to have a certain number of those resources in the final product.”

Now, this is a loose transcript of the conversation, but the point is clear. Instead of teaching effective use of the tool, the easy way is to limit the reach of the tool, rein it in and limit its effect. If that is or will become the prevailing view, we are all in serious, serious trouble…

…and Stephen Downes seems to think that might already be the case:

But the thing is, this is not a new insight. So why do we keep getting pulled back from anything like real learner centered learning?…It doesn’t take a course in dialectical materialism to see it being shut down. Today’s theme? Take back the web.

A call to arms, perhaps?

So once again, Barbara Ganley is teaching me as she teaches her students. And that is without question, as I’ve said ad nauseum, what I love best about blogs and the people that write them: I learn.

Barbara did a first podcast for her students and posted it on the class Weblog. It’s not long, but it’s such a great early example of what I think is good blog teaching moving to another medium. As she does so well in her course blogs, on her Podcast Barbara plays the role of connector and annotator as she highlights a particularly perceptive post by one of her students and blends it very effectively with a reading from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. She situated the audio right next to the relevant links, so I was able to read the students post while Barbara read it and annotated it, and I have to say it was a totally different experience, listening and reading at the same time. That’s the kind of small step that I find so interesting here, the combining of ways to read text. I hope she blogs about the experience her students had with it.

I think it does, however, start to stretch the definition of Podcast. I mean, Barbara is not really posting this recording for wide distribution. It’s for a narrow-audience. Narrowcasting as it were. Just my humble opinion, but at some point, I think the whole podcast meme is going to be replaced by a bit more generic…like blogcast, perhaps? (Ugh.)

Ironically, I’ve been playing with a similar idea on my Tablet PC, the inclusion of audio notes into the text for feedback. I’m really liking the idea of being able to combine the two, and would love at some point for students to start using reflective audio notes to annotate their writing. Now if we could make that all happen easily in a Web interface…actually, I guess we can…
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I was having a converstaion with a colleague yesterday about the excrutiatingly slow pace of change that we see in education. I find it disconcerting to think that despite some new bells and whistles, what we do in the classroom really hasn’t changed all that much in the last 50 (or more) years. Our main curriculum delivery tool is a text book. The focal point is the teacher. There is little real individualized instruction. Students move through they system at the same, chronological rate, and when they enter our classrooms we know them only by the grades they’ve earned from teachers before us.

I mentioned a passage from The Red Pencil where Ted Sizer writes about all the order that schools require and how inane it really is:

There is plenty of noise these days about the necessity of order in schools and a frightening silence about what it takes to help shape orderly minds. The hard, familiar reality is that learning is both idiosyncratic (you and I do not learn everything is quite the same way and pace) and messy. Most serious learning is not nicely sequential; rather, it often spirals, with each of us circling back–if we have the opportunity–again to where we thought we were but, ideally, now better informed and thereby finding ourselves at a deeper place. It is situational, depending on immediate conditions for each of us as individuals and the appropriateness of our surroundings. The order that we seek to find in a school is a means to the end of order in each student’s mind.

I said to my colleague that it seems like we’ve not really evolved that much at all in terms of our thinking about learning, but that I thought that might be changing, primarily due to the effects of the increasing transparency the Web seems to be bringing to many areas of life…journalism and politics, for instance. Two places where traditional ideas are being seriously challenged by our new ability to particpate and by the demand, of some, for a more open accounting of process and methodology. And so, I said, I felt like in time, education would be affected by that as well, in potentially very positive ways. By demanding that we not just be accountable by what we deliver in terms of curriculum, for instance, but that we be accountable for what a student can do with that information. That the Read/Write Web creates many more opportunities for students and teachers to circle back, as Sizer says, to re-examine and reapply knowledge in constructivist, meaningful ways. And that at some point, the ability that the technology gives us to do that will force a reexamination of traditional beliefs about education.

I’m a dreamer, I know.

“You have to read some Marx,” my friend said. “Don’t you know that those in power will let the masses convince themselves that are in control until they become a bit too powerful, at which point they’ll step in and shut it down?” (Or something along those lines.)

“So what are you saying?” I asked. “You think if the Web gets too disruptive to education ‘they’ll’ try to censor it?”

His answer was, for all intents, yes, that if things ever got to the point where the status quo was seriously challenged, there would be serious attempts to limit the technology. That people in charge would start saying that education was going in a direction that wasn’t healthy for our kids, and that we have to take steps to rein it in.

“Yeah,” I said. “But this is different.” (Great comeback, I know.)

“But things were ‘different’ in the 40s and the 60s and the 80s…all these things that were supposed to change education and never did,” he said. “How is this different?”

And that is the question, isn’t it? And that’s what’s been on my brain ever since…how do we articulate how this change, this technology, is different? Because it’s easier? Cheaper? More global? Democratizing? More connecting and collaborative? All of those?

Brain…hurts. But in a good way.

The latest issue of Education Update from ASCD has the above titled article as a feature. It takes somewhat of a different tact in that it presents blogs as a teacher support tool, which, of course, it can be.

Blogs, or Web logs, are increasingly popular among teachers seeking support and advice on managing their classrooms more effectively. Topics discussed in blogs range from perspectives on education policy and curriculum issues to effective classroom management tips and personal survival strategies.

Here’s the shocker, though…at least to me:

Of the 10 million to 15 million people who blog daily, technical experts estimate that only a few hundred thousand are educators. “Most [of them] are younger teachers coming out of teacher-ed programs,” says Nussbaum-Beach. “They’re the ones who are comfortable with virtual-type tools.”

A few hundred thousand edu-bloggers!?! OMG! My 150 (now 167) feed limit is about to get blown out of the water…

No disrespect, but there’s no way there are that many teachers out there “blogging daily.” I’m guessing a thousand, maybe, and that’s given a lot of leash to the “daily” part. Using blogs? Maybe four or five times that many. It’s hard to tell.

But if we get to the day that a few hundred thousand educators are blogging daily, I will GUARANTEE you schools as we know them will be long, long gone.

Turns out the reason Bloglines wasn’t fetching my feed was that my server host was blocking their IP. Seems to be fixed now, but I’m not sure. If you’re reading this in Bloglines, there’s about a week’s worth of posts on my actual blog that you might want to check out. (Actually going to a blog? What a concept!)
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Bloglines is acquired by Ask Jeeves and my feed goes down for three days (and counting.) Coincidence?

I don’t think so.

Well, actually, it probably is. But what’s bugging me is that the Read/Write Web service that I love THE MOST is giving me the “uh-ohs” lately. I posted about this recently, but now that for some reason my feed isn’t being processed, I’m really starting to get a bit antsy. And the quick response customer service just ain’t what it used to be. No response to my troubles yet.

Here’s your monthly reminder…back up your OPML.
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So what happens when someone in a presentation you’re doing blogs it as it happens and you find it later through your standing search on Technorati which you set up for the very reason that you can find out what people are writing about you and your ideas?

Speaker insists that the “founding fathers” would love it if they could see a world in which everyone participated and contributed. He may know his blogs but he don’t know history. The founding fathers were upper-class elitists who didn’t even envision universal manhood suffrage. The democratization of American democracy wouldn’t come along until the Jacksonian period in the early nineteenth century. So I sure hope he’s not telling these high school kids that the founding fathers would have loved a system in which everyone gets to participate and contribute because he’s just feeding them historical hogwash that was already being questioned by historians as early as the 1950s.

Ouch.

Even worse (or better?), the author goes on to list

“Some sites I wandered across when the speaker got repetitive (or boring) and when I wasn’t doing other things (shopping for guitars).

Golly. And here I thought I did pretty well, actually. I had a couple of people come up afterwards and say they really got a lot out of it. (I wonder if they blogged it…) But this is the fine line of blogvangelism, especially with a higher ed audience: 66% still need the Blogs 101 talk, 20% want the Blogs Pedagogy talk, and 12% want the RSS-from-Furl-and-Flickr-Into-My Blog talk. (I’m not sure what the other 2% want…time to shop for guitars, maybe? Sorry…I take it back.) Tough to make everyone happy.

But I’d rather know than not know as it adds to my own learning about all of this. Actually, I do think it’s pretty cool that I was able to find that post and get that feedback even if the author wasn’t inclined to give it to me personally. And the best part? It turns out these were his personal notes that he was encouraged to post (in edited form) to a new blog that sprang out of my presentation.

Go figure.

So this is cool…one of the health and physical edcuation teachers here at my school got a “Best Practice” award from PE Central for his class Weblog. He’s been doing some pretty good thinking with his students at the site, and I think it’s great that he’s getting some outside recognition for it.

Go Blogs. Go!
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In light of recent events, Tom has given me the job of beginning the “teacher blogging at work” guidelines discussion, and I have to say I’m not sure I relish the assignment. It’s a much needed discussion, no doubt. But by its very nature, it’s a sensitive issue that I’m not sure there are any absolute rules to successfully navigate through. On the K-12 public school level, at least, it depends on your board, your superintendent, your community, your personality.. too many variables to set something in stone.

I’ve been very lucky in the support I’ve been given to pursue my ideas for the Read/Write Web at my school. Not unsurprisingly, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. And there will be headwinds with the technology and the policy in the future, I’m sure. But by and large, my particular district has a reputation for forward thinking when it comes to technology, and that has been my good fortune.

Regardless, I consider very carefully what I say in my public space about the workings at my professional space. (I’m considering very carefully right now, in fact…) And I try to maintain a very clear and fairly narrow scope in the topics I discuss here in general. In my mind, this Weblog has many purposes, not the least of which are to archive my own thinking and learning about these technologies, to archive research and information relevant to these topics, to reflect on my own practice and share as much as I feel comfortable about my own struggles and challenges in the hopes that others can learn from them, and to provide a forum for a community of educators with similar interests and ideas.

But this is not my public venting space. I have other, more anonymous spaces for that when the need occurs, which isn’t that often. I don’t infuse my politics in this space if I can possibly help it, though a close read of my blog will surely give you an indication of where I stand. I do this because while Weblogg-ed may be my domain, I cannot completely disassociate myself from my employer as I carry my school’s name and my job title with me when I blogvangelize in person and in print. My words here, even though they may be my own and in no way reflect the thinking of others at this institution, nevertheless represent the face of that institution whether I like it or not. But that is my choice.

I often wonder if any parents or community members read this space, and if so what image they form about my work and the initiatives at my school. I doubt many do. But when I post here, I am very conscious of that potential audience. When I do choose to include stories of my work life in this space, I do not embellish them to put a good face on the school. I do, however, choose carefully what to write about. There have been “bumps” that I think would be instructive to edu-readers of this site that I have nonetheless chosen not to write about.

There are other ethical questions as well regarding time spent on reading and researching and blogging, the equipment used to do so, and the time of day it all happens. Again, there are no black and white answers. I do spend time during the school day reading and researching and blogging. And I use school equipment to do so. I find justification, however, in the fact that my job revolves around finding and learning about and implementing educational technologies. Other teachers will not have the same role. And I try to accomplish personal tasks outside of my contracted day, which is 7:30 to 3:30. I get here at 6 a.m. most mornings.

Having said all of that, Tom is right in his prediction that at some point, if it hasn’t already happened, some teacher is going to drink the blog Kool-Aid and find herself with a huge problem about something she’s written about her students, her peers, or her administration. Bound to happen. Until you really understand that this is real live publishing for the masses, it’s hard to believe that anyone is reading. But they are…

So, here’s a short list. This is open-text, remember, so we can all play along.

1. Decide carefully if you want to create a public space for your ideas with your name on it. Maybe going anonymous would be better. There are a couple of great anonymous teacher blogs out there, Hipteacher among them.
2. When you write, assume it will be read by the very people you may not want to read it. Think about the consequences.
3. As much as possible, blog on your own time with your own equipment.
4. Tell the truth. If you can’t, don’t write.
5. Ask people’s permission before you write about them in your blog, especially if it revolves around some struggle that you might feel worth reflecting upon or sharing with your audience.
6. If you do use a blog for professional reflection or opinion, my personal wish is that you take the time to present those ideas well. I’m not perfect when it comes to misspellings or errors, but I try to read everything at least twice if not three times before publishing.
7. Start simple, and find your groove. If you just post about news and don’t add much in the way of commentary at the start, it will give you time to develop your voice.
8. Again, if you decide to blog openly, don’t try to hide that fact from peers or supervisors.
9. If you think people may have an issue with your blog, ask first, and make your decisions based on the feedback you get.
10. If you find yourself looking over your shoulder, don’t blog.

I really believe in the value of blogs and blogging for professional growth and reflection. But I can understand the reluctance of many teachers to want to try it. The transparency is scary. The concept of open-text for one’s ideas and experiences is very different from what most are used to. Each of us has to weigh the benefits against the risks, real or perceived.

…do not, I REPEAT, do not go here.

I mean it.
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The New York Times calls Wikinews “The Unassociated Press” in an article in the Circuits section today.

The system’s primary check is its transparency. Inspired, in part, by the success of open source software development, the writing process is completely public. Anyone at any time can compose a new Wikinews article, edit an existing one and see an inventory of all prior changes.

I’m really starting to get smitten with the concept of “open-text” which is obviously what Wikinews and Wikipedia are all about. It’s just such a perfect description of where we are heading…stories, essays, blog posts created and edited collaboratively, always with the potential for improvement, never finished. I know that’s more concept than reality right now, the idea that products aren’t final. It would require a whole new way of looking at assessment, wouldn’t it? More emphasis on the products relevance, its usability, its worth to the community rather than whether or not it’s “correct”.

Hmmm…
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