It’s challenging to build communities, and to communicate effectively with blogs, you have to have a vision behind it, a purpose and an audience in mind. I think blogs will still come in and out of fashion; but for class purposes a project can be sustained for enough time to be meaningful to those involved.

Ssshhh! It’s IT Blogwatch, in which spies start to adopt blogs, wikis, Web 2.0, and “open source intelligence”. Not to mention how not to use a huge neural network……

“Back in 2003, a Department of Defense agency decided to train its analysts in the use of blog software, in the hopes that they would begin posting about their work, read one another’s blogs, and engage in productive conversations. But the agency’s officials trained only small groups of perhaps five analysts a month. After they finished their training, those analysts would go online, excited, and start their blogs. But they’d quickly realize no one else was reading their posts aside from the four other people they’d gone through the training with. They’d get bored and quit blogging, just as the next trainees came online.”

Substitute “teachers” for “analysts” and “countless potentially useful technology innovations” for blogs, and that describes what happens all too frequently in schools. How do we go from voices in the wilderness to cultural sea change?