Comments on: Blogs as Research

By: Sanzio

Sanzio — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 16:53:06 +0000

The scientific process involves gathering information from a variety of sources and drawing conclusions based on a number of factors (plausibility, validity, precision, etc). Blogs should not be excluded from this analysis. Edicts should not be issued declaring sites “reliable” or “unreliable”, there is too much in between. Teach students the skills to become editors and eventually they will find mistakes in those “reliable” sites.

By: Nate Stearns

Nate Stearns — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:24:22 +0000

I’m a little surprised at the elevating of blogs to such a status. The signal to noise ratio on blogs is so high as to make their use for the classroom very difficult. A few years ago I had students accessing war blogs from soldiers, Iraqis, and media people and it worked…as long as I gave them a bunch of time to play with it. The information that they were able to get was ridiculously current, interesting, and powerful; it was also filled with profanity and posts about puppies and kitties. Currently, I’m planning a unit on Dante’s Inferno and would love to use blogs or wikis to come up with something collaborative but am a bit stymied as to how to make it work in the context of analyzing a difficult work like Inferno.

By: Tom Hemingway

Tom Hemingway — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 07:48:35 +0000

I guess this depends in part on whether you’re focusing on knowing the corpus of a discipline (e.g. chemistry), or on doing the practice of that discipline (e.g. “doing” chemistry), which includes participation in a community of practice. Blogs and such aside, the more fundamental question is, are you teaching your students to document knowledge or create it?

By: Christel

Christel — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 05:30:45 +0000

I’ve just spent some time working with students who used blogs to discuss important issues. My thesis analyzed their thinking and I’ve posted part one and two online. My blog up until now has just been a posting of links for other teachers but I’ve decided to take the plunge and join in a few discussions since I’m a social constructivist at heart. I look forward to your thoughts about the work posted. More to come later.

By: John Connell: the blog » Blog Archive » Blogs and Research

John Connell: the blog » Blog Archive » Blogs and Research — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 20:18:29 +0000

[...] I liked the synergy in two posts I happened to read in the same trawl this evening through my aggregator. First there was Will Richardson and then there was Anne Davis. [...]

By: Tom Hoffman

Tom Hoffman — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:47:41 +0000

What if, instead of asking a bunch of rhetorical questions, you pressed your point a bit more? Could it be that a lot of what passes for internet literacy instruction is flat out wrong?