I haven’t done much of this in the past, but I’m not getting the time to write about a lot of the stuff I read. (And since this is Mother’s Day, as soon as my wife wakes up the computer gets put away for the day.) So here are some snippets of interesting stuff with links all in one big post.
From Auricle, writing about the need to make institutional weblog software relvant to our students:
The community urgently needs the open source equivalents of MySpace.com if there’s not going to be a slow bleed away from institutional provision which, currently, appears more focused on how well a product integrates with central information systems than pedagogical flexibility, community building and providing users - yes, even students - with tools and functionality they feel they control.
Ken Smith on the ways in which blogs work:
Ideas are moving at a different speed, through different channels, and winning approval by different means. The best blogs are not merely, as he says, “highly professional, reliable and informative,” — though they are that. The best blogs are workplaces, places of exchange and risk; they are nodes of community life where people think together; they are places where communities and ideas create each other. Bloggers do not aim directly for authority, though they may acquire authority in time. For this reason, visitors who are interested primarily in authority will probably not see what is actually happening.
That is really good stuff and deserving a post of its own, by the way…
From Aiken (SC) online:
Ms. Kaplan has her students sign on to Web logs, where they hold discussions with other French-speaking high school students in Virginia and Germany.
The blogging exercise is followed by practice quizzes, links to tutorials and surveys that are all designed to hone her students’ French skills.
Throughout the Aiken County school district, a growing number of schools are adding interactive features to their Web sites as more students gain access to the Internet at home.
And, last but certainly not least, from Barbara Ganley:
I’ve come to a place with blogging that I, like Bud, never want to blog just because the “anxiety of the link”(Bernstein) makes me rush to write, rush to connect, even if we don’t really have anything to say. It’s like Samuel Johnson’s sensible declaration: “I hate to read a writer who has written more than he has read.” Of course I know that many bloggers contend that the whole point of blogging is to remain connected, moving about the community, checking in, restlessly, with commitment.
Indeed, this brings up the question of feeding the blog–when does a blog die? Why? How long dormant is too long? What happens to the collaborative blog if only one person posts after a while? A class blog after the course is over?
Here’s hoping she doesn’t let her blog die…
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