From Anne:

My vision for classroom blogging is simple. Use it as a tool in the classroom to ensure that the students and the teacher are talking, reading, and writing frequently about how and what they are learning and thinking. Get them to explore their thinking and the teacher can do the same. Get them to interact with others through comments. Encourage others outside the classroom to join in on the conversations. Value the students’ ideas by making them feel safe to share real thoughts and feelings so discussions can be meaningful. The teacher sets parameters to lead students toward building a community of learners who respect and encourage each other. They can learn to disagree agreeably. They can develop a good standard for learning on the web. They will be writing about the content they are learning. They will be thinking about it. Best of all, they will be writing about it. Writing to learn!

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At this moment, Technorati claims to be tracking 1,019,611,610 links, an amazing number by anyone’s standards. Collin Brooke referred to this fact with some amazement:

One. Billion. Essays.

That is nothing short of incredible, and it’s only secondarily about technology. Primarily, it’s about writing, all this writing that’s taking place in the world, and challenging all of these static, stolid institutions. They’re rewriting the world around us, and the people in our field “don’t have time” to investigate it? That’s more than a little sad.

Now I’m not sure they’re all essays. But I’d be amazed with even 100 million essays out there on the Internet, being crafted in varying degrees by everyday people, students and teachers included. If you read Collin’s whole post, you’ll see that he’s despairing over the fact that more educators, specifically rhetoric and composition types, haven’t gotten it yet. I know the exposition teachers at my school are just starting to see what this means.

But c’mon…One. Billion. Pieces of Writing. You can’t deny the power of that.

Douglas Rushkoff calls it the “Society of Authorship” this new era that we are entering, and I like that phrase a lot. But I also like Sun Microsystems’ CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s description too: “The Participation Age.”

The Participation Age, in which an open and competitive network fuels growing opportunities for everyone - not simply to draw data or shift work around the world, but to participate, to create value and independence. If the Information Age was passive, the Participation Age is active.

Sometimes I’m astounded, literally, by the threads that seem to keep popping up, the idea here, for instance, of independent participation to create value. It feels like a very radical idea to education. Can we get to the point where we believe our students can add value, can participate in meaningful ways even while they’re still in high school (or middle school, or elementary school)? Better yet, can the mere opportunity to add value to a larger, broader body of knowledge motivate students to work with more passion and interest?

I know this harkens back to the discussion from a few days ago when Ken raised the question of just how many people would actually end up participating as opposed to staying on their keisters glued to “Survivor” or “CSI.” (110 million people watch that show. Oy.) The difference is, those boob tubers never had the chance to participate. These kids do.