Got this e-mail today from one of the teachers at my school who has been sipping the blog Kool-Aid:

Hey Will. I’ve been doing all this reading about weblogs and journalism for a research paper that’s due Friday (for a graduate class I’m taking). As you know much of it goes into the value of transparency and news as a conversation. I began thinking about how I could use this with the Lamp and Journalism classes and things kind of went in a different direction. Bear with me here….

I was reading an article from the Neiman reports by Paul Grabowicz that said, “Weblogs also can give readers insight into the reporting process itself. This helps strip away the mystique-and misunderstanding-that surrounds so much of what we do as reporters.”

And it hit me, what if I did this as a teacher? What if I (or perhaps my student teacher) set up a weblog which demonstrates the lesson and unit planning process and invited feedback from students and parents? How many times have we listened to kids complain about a project we’ve handed out or called work stupid or a waste of their time? If we invited them into the planning process would they take more interest and ownership in their own learning? What if we posted the objectives and the content that needed to be covered and then let them see how we try to get them to reach those objectives and evaluate their learning. And of course during all of this feedback would be welcome.

As Dan Gilmour says, “Our readers collectively know more than we do.” I believe my students and parents collectively know more about US history in the 60’s and The Catcher in the Rye (for American studies) than I do, or perhaps the topics being covered in Journalism 2.

Alright. I’m done now. I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this, but the possibilities are exciting. I don’t know if my kids would even care to participate or if the administration would be comfortable with this, but I’d like to give it a try.
So, what do you think?

Any feedback?

I know when it comes to the more technical stuff that I’m a little slower on the uptake than many. So when Tim Wilson posted on ETI about using RSS enclosures with all sorts of files (not just audio for podcasts) it took me a couple of days to get it.

RSS enclosures would make it really easy for teachers to distribute files to their students. A teacher could post lecture notes, multimedia content, or any other kind of electronic document and let each student’s RSS reader take care of the rest. Similarly, school principals could use RSS to distribute newsletters or other materials to parents who are subscribed to a school’s news feed.

Um, yeah…ok. I get it. Now not only can I post all of my handouts to the class weblog for easy retrieveal, I can add them to the feed so my students can auto download all the class materials to their computers while they’re sleeping peacefully at night. Maybe it’s a worksheet (.doc) for tomorrow’s class. Or the audio recording of a poem read by the author (.mp3) that I want to discuss. Or a series of pictures (.jpgs) that I took after class today. Or the Powerpoint (.ppt) of today’s lesson. Or…

So if, like at Tim’s school, we go with a 1-1 laptop program (which we’re looking at) and we set them up with a RSS reader that can handle enclosures, I can literally push my content to their individual computers. And, technically, they could push it right back to me or to whomever else might be subscribed to their feed. Of course, they could create feeds for each teacher so we all got the right stuff.

Drill this all down a bit and you could see the potential in terms of individualizing content through individualized feeds. James is running down that path too.

Little doubt where my brain will be wandering off to today…

This post by Robert Patterson comes via Stephen Downes who calls it, rightfully, “brave, brilliant, breathless stuff.”

I was in a meeting this week with a group of “educators”. We were talking about Communities of Practice. I mentioned blogging several times in the meeting. At the meeting’s end, one of the participants approached me and said, “Every time you mention blogging I get annoyed. It is only a fad and will never affect education.”

I believe that it is not a fad. I believe that Blogging, and its wider family of Social Software tools, will not only affect education but will shake our entire society to the core. I believe that our descendants will look back at its arrival the same way that we now look back at the advent of the printing press.

I hope so.

Last night my wife and I were talking about the future of our kids, 5 and 7. I said I was pretty pessimistic about what their lives would be like, even though we live in the “right” zip code for potential success. That I was, in general, pessimistic about this country, about the educational system, about the environment, about much that sustains us. It’s not a pessimism that is easily put aside, because I see much of what Patterson sees; a hubris that breeds a potentially disastrous complacency, a definition of “success” that embraces little that is not monetary, a sense that we’re simply blind to the realities of a changing world because we are America and thus greatness is assured.

Now we take it for granted that education is a linear process that leads to a credential. Now we expect that healthcare is an intervention by special people who deliver drugs and procedures. We take it for granted in business that we can have an economy or a healthy biosphere but not both. We take it for granted that work, family and education are separate processes that compete for our time. We think that it is normal to have a job and a manager. We believe that having more things will make us happy. We accept that we have no real say in the governance of our work place. Bombarded by millions of messages telling us what to buy, to eat to wear and to do, we have no confidence in our own innate judgment about what is good for us.

Working on the premise that we’re at a point where government and business and healthcare and education and the rest no longer serve us but only themselves, a point where control is success, Patterson argues that these times are much like the times preceding Gutenberg’s printing press which, for all intents, blew the lock off the church’s control of knowledge. The blogs have arrived to do much the same. Conversation is the new gold standard.

We are just starting to understand that the explicit information located in a document is only a small part of the value. It is tacit information that emerges from conversation that is where the gold is found. It is in conversation, in the context of a legitimate relationship, that learning and the best value occurs.

Knowledge is not an object.

The idea that knowledge is an object is an industrial artifact. Knowledge is more than facts; it is about understanding and participation. Google enables you to find the best person and the best conversation. This is what is behind the marketing revolution. This is what is behind the impending revolution in education and health. Conversation is also the force behind the generation of a new community.

The vision is creative and far reaching. It feels plausible, though I’m not sure how much of that is wishful and how much is logical. Maybe it’s because I feel the potential power of all of this in the same way Patterson does, though I doubt I could articulate it as powerfully. I’m sure many will dismiss it as unrealistic dreaming, but I look at journalism, once again, and I can’t help but think that we are on the precipice of taking many things back, of “Going Home.” It will not be easy or necessarily enjoyable. But it will be interesting.

The Australian Governement has posted some guidelines for keeping kids safe when blogging. Mostly common sense, but a good starting point if you are thinking about how to employ blogs with your students or your own children.
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