So at some point in recent weeks the blog-post-o-meter rolled through 3,000, and if I’m even close in my estimation that the average length of posts over the last seven and a half years has been around 3-400 words, that suggests about 1 million words of writing and reflecting and thinking here. That’s a pretty staggering number in my feeble brain.  You’d think that after all of that output this publishing thing would be almost as easy as breathing.

Well, it’s not.

I’m reminded of this because of conversations we’ve been having of late with team leaders in PLP. While the successes are many and impressive, a good number of people still find the thought of publishing to an audience, even a relatively small, private audience of like-minded souls, to be too daunting. It’s just way outside their comfort zone, and they just believe that their contributions would either not be relevant, interesting or useful. It’s hard to nurture these folks, to convince them to take small steps, to help them see the potential upside. And I really believe that there is an upside to sharing what you know and do with others; it’s the foundation for building learning networks.

But here is the thing: no matter how you slice it, blogging is a risk. And it’s a risk not just because you are putting yourself out there for the world, but because unlike many other types of writing that we do, it’s unfinished. At least that’s the way it feels for me. I don’t KNOW very much for certain. But blogging isn’t about what I know as much as it’s about what I think I know, and I find that to be a crucial distinction. For me, it’s the distinction that constantly makes this hard. It’s also the distinction, however, that makes blogging worth it. The one thing that a potential global audience does more than anything else is create the opportunity to really learn through writing in various texts, through the conversation and feedback that ensues. I say this all the time, that while a lot of my learning occurs in the composing of the post (or whatever), most of it occurs in the distributed reactions (when they happen) after I publish.

One thing I do know is that when I write with a humility of not knowing I get a lot more learning in return. That plays out in my reading as well. I am not the greatest commentor on other people’s blogs (though I am working on that.) But I find I am much more compelled to comment on posts where the author is obviously testing unfinished ideas. Where that person is not simply saying “this is the way the world is.” I find those types of posts less compelling.

And, obviously, the other risk is that my “thin thinking” will not simply be responded to but will be ripped to shreds at the hands of those who disagree or who may be smarter or more wordly than I. (They number in the billions.) Fortunately, that has not happened very often here, with some notable exceptions. What is hard to convey to new bloggers and publishers is that the debate is almost always civil, and that those naysayers who denigrate and tear down what they perceive as ignorance are not worth listening to. They are not teachers. I welcome disagreement, but I will tune out those who voice it with cynicism regardless of the validity of their response. When I read those constant smirkers, I wonder if they would treat younger learners the same way? Luckily, it seems, few of them are in classrooms.

Despite all of this, for me, right now, the rewards far outweigh the risks. I just wish I knew better how to convey that to those who see the scales tipping steeply in the other direction. And I wish I could help them understand that the angst I still feel every time I press “publish” is a good thing on balance, not something to avoid as much as to embrace as a path to a greater awareness of myself and of the world around me.

(Image “Sanskrit Blogging on the Rise” by chucks.)

If this article in Innovate (registration required) didn’t keep hammering the “N-Gen” meme and all the requisite star-struck statistics and high-fallutin description so hard it would have been a lot more fun to read.  But the bottom line thesis is still important for all educators to consider:

Much in the same way that Rudolph Flesch’s 1955 landmark book Why Johnny Can’t Read criticized the American educational system for not teaching phonics, we suggest that today’s instructors are missing an opportunity by not learning to read the texts of the Net Generation. Failing to recognize these texts as valuable tools in the teaching and learning process, professors dismiss an entire constellation of literacy skills.

And here is the crux of the problem:

…while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia, online social networking, and routine multitasking, their professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a time, and as an individual activity that is centered largely around printed text…Not having been raised in the world of the N-Gen student, then, presents some significant challenges for faculty members who must attempt to address the needs of a learning style they have never experienced, may know little about, and may be unable to comprehend fully because of their different skills in processing information.

What I like about the article is that it attempts to make a cultural case for educators to get up to speed, not necessarily an technological one (though, obviously, the two are tied.) Learning cultures have changed:

Many faculty members developed their writing skills in a print world where text took the conventional form of paragraphs on a page or was packaged as a book or an article, a story or a novel; its production was typically conceived of as a solitary act. Consequently, their previous experiences with and understanding of text are quite different from that of the N-Gen student, which may lead to profound misunderstandings. When instructors perceive linear, print-based texts as a benchmark, the N-Gen’s texts may, at first glance, fall quite short. However, these digital texts do not necessarily lack style, coherence, or organization; they simply present meaning in ways unfamiliar to the instructor. For example, a collection of images on Flickr with authorial comments and tags certainly does not resemble the traditional essay, but the time spent on such a project, the motivation for undertaking it, and its ability to communicate meaning can certainly be equal to the investment and motivation required by the traditional essay—and the photos may actually provide more meaningful communication for their intended audience.

Whoa. I can hear the screams now. Essay writing akin to collecting images on Flickr? Even I bristle a bit on that one. But the overall point is clear: We can do this all differently now, and to not get our brains around the shifts has some real implications, specifically in the ways in which it limits us from understanding what our students create and, more importantly, helping them to create and construct with the most effect. And, as has been observed many times here and elsewhere, one of the biggest shifts is the move away from individual knowledge to distributed knowledge built on collaborative and, I would argue, network literacies that are unfamiliar to most of us. (Not to say these kids are born with them, btw.)

Let’s face it, the percentage of educators that Johnny comes into contact with K-16 who are fluent at digital texts is maybe 10%. That doesn’t mean that Johnny won’t be able to figure it out on his own. (You know others have suggested that “literacy is natural,” though I do want to probe that idea bit further at some point.) But it does mean, I think, that we’re missing an opportunity to help Johnny make even more of his digital potential. And I’ll ask you, if you had the chance for your own children to have 100% of their teachers who understand these shifts, wouldn’t you want them to? I know I would. Doesn’t mean that we make everything that happens in the classroom digital or Web 2.0 or whatever else. There are plenty of things worth doing the way we’ve been doing them for a long while. But for my kids to have teachers who don’t have a choice in the matter because they just “don’t get” digital environments is unacceptable.

Just testing you can guess what… Sure wish I had smaller thumbs!

Awesome session by Konrad this morning. We had about 50 people in the room from around the world, and it was streamed into Second Life as well. (Here is the chat.) It was just so much fun to be in a packed room of people who were into not just the tool but the pedagogy as well. Enjoy!

Just a quick pointer to a post by Jeff Jarvis who has some interesting observations about blogging ethics in the context of linking and quoting from other sources. Seems the Associated Press has attempted to get some bloggers to stop using pull quotes (even as short as 35 words) from its stories and, somewhat understandably, the blogosphere is rebelling. Jarvis is leading the charge, and describes the ethic of link and quote as this:

It says to our readers: Don’t take my word for it, go see for yourself. And: Here’s what the source said; I won’t rephrase it but I will quote it directly so you can see for yourself.

I’ve always thought that this was one of the powerful qualities of blogging, the ability to send the reader back to the original to see the context for the writing. It’s what made me love teaching journalism with blogs, because it was so easy for me to follow my students’ line of thinking, but because it also gave me a great opportunity to talk about the issues of plagiarism and fair use and copyright with my kids. And, like Jeff, it’s what I want and expect now from traditional journalism, whether newspapers or magazines. It’s an expectation that makes print more and more difficult for me to read. It’s an expectation that I have of just about all non-fiction writing.

What’s interesting is that when I teach blogging workshops, this concept is not an easy one for people to wrap their brains around. The ease with which we can link and connect ideas makes this vastly different from the analog world. And the importance of links in connecting people is one of the foundational points in all of these discussions.

The continual disruptions to traditional journalism continue to fascinate me, another reason that I’m really looking forward to PDF next week.

From the “Do We Really Want Our Daughters to Learn This on Their Own?” Department comes this excerpt from the cover article of the Sunday Times Magazine this week titled “Blog Post Confidential“:

Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade’s reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.

One girl’s careening story about enlightenment when it comes to telling to much on her blog (and others doing the same.) A story for our times.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I read this story, and as I read almost anything having to do with kids or young adults trying to navigate these spaces if they wouldn’t have a better time of it had they had teachers and adults who were modeling and guiding them on how to do it well…

From CNN:

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted that he was being held.

No wonder we take kids’ cell phones away from them in school…

So the cool news here is that the CommentPress project that’s been spearheaded by the folks at The Institute for the Future of the Book is about to evolve into something that I think will be greatly useful for educators using WordPress blogs in their own practice or with their students. For the uninitiated, CommentPress is currently a WordPress template that allows readers to leave feedback not just on posts as a whole but instead on each individual paragraph in the post. That in iteself has creates all sorts of potential, but it does mean making an entire blog capable of doing that, which you many not always want. So here’s the news: in the near future, the CommentPress functionality will be released as a plugin, meaning bloggers will be able to select individual posts to have paragraph level commenting without making the whole blog subject to that.

Just off the top, that creates some cool possibilities for student feedback on each other’s posts and for deconstructive feedback on teacher provided models in terms of writing instruction in general. And it also enhances the idea of “connective writing” in that I really think we need to help our students use in their practice. Personally, I can’t wait to install it here so you guys can really pick apart my ideas.

Finally, if you want to participate in a pretty interesting experiment using CommentPress, check out the new book “Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Gamrs and Software Studies” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto fame. Here’s the teaser:

Expressive Processing is the name of my forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press. Now is the time, in traditional academic publishing, when the press sends the manuscript out for peer review — anonymous commentary by a few scholars that guides the final revisions (and decisions). As Jeff Young reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, we’ve decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: asking the Grand Text Auto community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.

Noah, who is a professor at UC San Diego, is asking readers to do an open review at the paragraph level using CommentPress. It’ll give you a chance not only to get a read on what looks to be ain interesting work but to experiment with this new blogging tool as well.

Technorati Tags: blogging, commentpress

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At the risk of riding into another semantic train wreck, I’m looking for a couple of good examples of student blogging. Blogging as in writing that has “Links with analysis and synthesis that articulates a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked [to] and written [about] with potential audience response in mind.” (Was that really almost four years ago?)

I put up a couple of Tweets looking for examples, and while many folks were more than helpful in providing me with posts to look at (thanks to all who offered), none of them fit the bill, somehow. Much of the writing was good if not excellent. And most had a link or two to sources. But it felt too report-ish, not “connective” enough somehow.

Maybe I’m asking too much here, but I’m still surprised at how difficult it is to find K-12 students using their blogs to really try to connect with their readers around the topics that they are reading and writing about. To do more than reflect, but to really articulate new thinking or understanding in the writing.

Technorati Tags: blogging, learning, writing, education

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Google Reader now makes recommendations and, more importantly, relays some data on how many posts occur on those unsubscribed to blogs per week (down to the tenths, btw.) And it’s that last part that gives me pause. I wonder if there is a way to analyze the blogs that I am currently subscribed to in terms of posts per week. Since I’m now in Prius mode and all about data driven decision making (for certain things) I started wondering if there is a pattern to my subscriptions. A very quick, unscientific, first impression look through my feeds shows that the vast majority of them return about 5 posts a week and that very, very few have more than 7-8.

And so here is the thing. On my “Google Reader Recommended List” were a couple of widely read edubloggers that I’m not subscribed to, and when I looked at the average number of posts per week data, I winced: 16.4 and 14.8 respectively. Those numbers absolutely preclude me from subscribing. It’s too much. I’m figuring that the best of those blogs will be filtered by other bloggers who I am subscribed to, and in practice, that’s precisely what happens. (There were links to both of those blogs that came through my reader this morning.)

Which begs the further question that Stephen Downes raised a while ago and that continues to niggle at my thinking: Should we approach all of this more toward reading blogs (and the people that write them) or reading ideas, no matter where they come from? It’s not totally an either or, I know. And there are nuances and complexities to both. But I’m starting to toy with the idea of taking most of the names out of my aggregator and moving toward tracking concepts and tags. What kind of effect do you think that would have? (I have some ideas that I’ll chuck into the comments.)

This all coming on the heels of closing out the first month in three years where I posted fewer than 10 times to my blog. Hmmm…

(Photo by Arlette)

Technorati Tags: blogging, rss, googlereader

Just a brief on a development from the folks at Future of the Book. They’ve created a new WordPress theme that allows for comments to be left on each paragraph, not simply at the end of the post. Huge potential there from a teaching writing standpoint and from a focusing the conversation standpoint. If you want to see it in action, check out McKenzie Wark’s book “GAM3R 7H30RY” and you’ll get a great idea of how it works.

Now I just need to find somewhere to get the theme installed so we can play…

Technorati Tags: blogging, writing, wordpress

Don’t get me wrong, NECC is great this year. But he highlight of my week was an e-mail I got from one of my former students who has a novel coming out this fall. Seems I played a small role in saving her from a dreary life as an investment banker and helped nudge her toward a professional writing career. (Financially, of course, this was a dreadful mistake.) Absolutely gave me a warm fuzzy, and made me, just for a few minutes at least, long for the classroom and the kookiness and creativity and angst of teenagers. Diane was a great one.
And the best part? She’s got a blog, too.

Technorati Tags: necc07, necc2007, blogging, education, learning

So, certainly things have developed over the last few years in terms of blogging tools for educators. And it seems that more and more of the platforms are gearing themselves specifically to address the calls from teachers for varying levels of transparency, safety, etc. I remember way back in 2002 we chose to install Manila because it was one of the few to allow differing levels of public-ness (if that’s a word) even though at the time the process was pretty clunky. But today, that’s not the case any longer. And in the last couple of days I’ve seen some blurbs on some even more ed-centric options that are beginning to provide some real choices.

For instance, Edublogs has just announced a plugin that makes blogs private to all but registered and logged in Edublogs users. (Full disclosure: Edublogs hosts this blog in exchange for the ad at right.) And Bill Fitzgerald just announced that he’s released DrupalEd for free download. Add those to recent releases by 21Classes and even the new Blogger, David Warlick’s ClassBlogmeister, and even Vox, and all of a sudden, there’s much more to think about. (And btw, Manila is still around…)

So I’m wondering what teachers in the trenches are using right now. And I took literally 30 seconds to put up a new page at Support Blogging where we collectively might start to make a menu of the options. (I’m sure I’ve missed some.)

The good news is that we have some options out there to explore if we want to do that.

Technorati Tags: blogging, learning

The front page of today’s New York Times features a story about the attempts of Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales to create a set of guidelines for “Web Civility” in the light of what happened with Kathy Sierra and others.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

Should we feel lucky, I wonder, that a sense of civility has pretty much been the norm in this community to date? Obviously, since most all of our conversations in some way revolve around students, I think this whole process will be important to follow as it plays out.

Technorati Tags: education, blogging, learning

Jeff Felix of UC San Diego is doing research for his Ed.D. and sent along this request:

If you are a teacher who uses a blog in the classroom, please join your peers and take a short, simple survey! This survey will help other teachers to better understand the powerful benefits of blogging with their students. It will also help them avoid many of the travails that you went through! Take the survey now; it will take less than 10 minutes! Click here to take the survey.

Technorati Tags: blogging