If you haven’t added your name to the list for our Thursday night EdBlogger meetup in San Diego, get to it! It’s shaping up to be a big event. Wear your buttons!

technorati tags:necc, necc06, blogging, education

Konrad Glogowski has an amazing post today about his grade 8 students’ blogging experiences, and it’s one that should be trumpeted far and wide in this community. Imagine being a part of this:

My community of grade eight student bloggers became so big and so engaging that I spent every spare moment reading and writing within this community. My class community suddenly blossomed and I started seeing myself as an important part of the classroom community and no longer as a teacher who peddles content. I became a participant in a series of dialogues. I witnessed the emergence of a semantic network, one where all links, all interactions were based on meaning.

One thing I really like about Konrad’s blogging is that he points me to so much good stuff about learning theory in the context of telling his stories about his students. Here, he references the community as networks of semantic relations that Stephen Downes writes about, Brufee’s “community of knowledgeable peers,” Bereiter’s “progressive discourse,” Scardamalia and Bereiter’s “intentional learning” ideas, and others. It’s a veritable feast for the brain, and it teaches me. And the best news is that he’s documented his transformative experience and plans to teach me, and us, even more in the days to come.

What really jumps out at me here is the power of the idea that we can now create learning communities of meaning that are much more powerful than communities of proximity. This community that I am a part of is testament to that. We are self-directed, nomadic learners, moving purposefully down paths that interest us, engaging in conversations, building connections and networks around our passions and our zeal to know more about them. We share our experiences to confirm our own understanding in the context of the community, hoping to teach, I think, and hoping to move the discussion forward. Is it strange that I get butterflies when I read things as powerful as what Konrad writes? That I can’t wait to make sense of it through blogging, to figure out what about it resonates? That I can’t wait to point others to it? Konrad is writing about his students here, but I think this could easily describe what we as edbloggers do as well:

…the idea of knowing in this community as“the intentional activity of individuals who, as members of a community, make use of and produce representations in the collaborative attempt to better understand and transform their shared world.”

A lot of us will be proximate next week at NECC, and that is always a good thing, but we’ll continue to learn from each other regardless of where we are. As long as, of course, we remain willing to contribute. In the case of kids, Konrad has found the best of both worlds:

That’s when I realized that this class community was truly engaged, that its members were interested in pursuing knowledge as researchers who are passionately involved and not as students who need to absorb the content.

How cool is that? Read the whole thing…

technorati tags:necc, necc06, connective_learning, blogging, education, learning

So, using David’s questions about blog assessment, here is how I might assess this post as I write it (with some commentary on the questions along the way.)

1. What did you read in order to write this blog entry? Yee Haw! Blogging starts with reading, and I read David’s post, which leads me to blogging. (I read some other stuff, too. See below.) And I think an even more interesting question to add is “What was your process of reading?” In the previous post about Net Neutrality, I worked between three or four different readings to assemble the ideas contained in the posts. There was nothing linear about it, which is another aspect of reading/writing literacy in hypertext environments that really interests me.

2. What do you think is important about your blog entry? I think the importance here is the deconstruction of the process and the inherent reflection that goes with it. Sometimes blogging is work, and it’s when I’m crafting a post (as opposed to writing it) that I know I’m involved in some real learning. As a blogger/learner, it’s crucial that I recognize and understand the decisions I make about what to write (based on feel and audience), how to write it, and when to publish it.

3. What are both sides of your issue? Well, some feel whatever you do in your blog is blogging. As is well known, I disagree. I do think this reflective assessment about the blogging can point to the power of reading, thinking, synthesizing, writing and reading some more.

4. What do you want your readers to know, believe, or do? I would add learn to that list. And I would also move this up to second in the list (if we are looking at this as process.) The audience aspect of blogging is central to the task, and if we’re not aware of what our purpose is, we won’t communicate it well. This is the Donald Murray school of anticipating the readers questions, responses, reactions. We have to become the audience (if there still is one, of course.)

5. What else do you need to say? I’m not sure this question works for me, because I’d hope that if I had more to say I would say it. What about What have you learned from the process? or How will you find out more?

Regardless, some good initial thinking on how we might begin to teach the metacognitive aspects of blogging.

technorati tags:blogging, assessment, education

So we’ve got buttons! 1,000 of them to give away at NECC in fact. They’ll be at the Open Source lab starting on Tuesday. (And Steve Hargadon was nice enough to ante up the $335 to get them made, so maybe we can figure out a way to make sure he gets paid back.) The Support Blogging wiki site was Steve’s idea, and since it’s going to be mentioned in this month’s School Library Journal, he’s urging edbloggers to go over there and add their names to the list. In case you’ve forgotten, the point of Support Blogging is:

“…to provide an opportunity for students, teachers, administrators, parents, and others to help promote an understanding of the benefits of educational blogging.”

And while you are there, you can check out the “official” NECC EdBlogger Meetup wiki page for our Thursday night event. If you are not already listed you can either add your name in a comment here or even get an account to the Support Blogging wiki and add yourself.

Let’s make some blogging waves at NECC! Go Blogs!  Go!

technorati tags:necc, necc06, blogging, education

Clarence shares some answers to his Podcasting, Blogging Exam Question, and my favorite without question is

“…..now that we have podcasting and blogging anyone can do it. You don’t need to be some rich person in New York, you can produce from your own home. It has also changed how we can learn in today’s society.”

Amen. Amen.

technorati tags:blogging, education

Yesterday, Bud pointed to the work of Karl Fisch in Centennial, Co, and although I had seen Karl’s name popping up in various spots and I think even linked to him on a couple of occasions, Bud urged me to “Pay attention” to Karl’s work. So, this morning, I did some digging around “The Fischbowl.”

The latest post on Karl’s blog is a really interesting explanation of a staff development program with real vision, and how blogs have become pretty central to the way he and his teachers reflect on their practice and create community around common goals which were to “improve teacher and student use of technology, to achieve curricular goals, to help transform our school to a more student-centered,constructivist approach, and to prepare our students to succeed in the21st century.” The program has been funded by a couple of grants, so the teachers who are involved have been given some time to meet and think and focus on those goals. And if you read some of the end of the year entries in the individual teacher blogs along with Karl’s summation, it seems to have been a very successful undertaking. I was especially struck by this description:

What we are asking our teachers to do is to examine all of those assumptions they have made about education, instruction, and their classes and really think about what they feel is important and what the best ways are to achieve their goals. For many teachers, they really haven’t thought about a lot of these issues since their methods classes in college. Once they were actually in the classroom, it was survival mode at first and they naturally did many of the same things their more veteran colleagues were doing. After a while the focus was often just doing those things better when what was needed – sometimes – was to question whether those were the right things to be doing in the first place. While I as the “leader” of the staff development certainly have strong opinions, we’ve all agreed that we will continue to be individual teachers with differing opinions, styles and ideas about what is “right”. My role is to get them to think about their instruction, to “push” their thinking and make sure they are not only doing the best job they can, but that what they are doing truly aligns with their beliefs. In the end we will hopefully do a better job of working together to achieve our common goals for students. And we will discuss freely and openly the issues facing our students in a time of rapid change.

How cool is that? Now I know that in most schools, there is little time for discussions of this type, for real reflection on practice. But when you look at some of the work and the writing that these teachers are doing on their own personal and class blogs (see the links in the right hand column) it pretty easy to be amazed at the results. I’ll just to point to one interesting post from early in the school year titled “Will Blogs Take Over the World” by one teacher who writes

…twice already members of the outside world have commented on our class blogs (though one was actually helpful), and some of my students have used the blog to passive aggressively attack each other. I’ve addressed these situations, and I think use of the blog will continue to improve, but I think that so many students are accustomed to blog sites like “MySpace” that the line between the personal and the academic blogs can be fuzzy, especially in a course like English. But for the most part, I am blown away both by my students’ perceptive comments and by their honesty. I feel a little closer to them now, and I look forward treading their entries.

You can follow the rest of her journey as she blogs about her year. And make sure to read the comments to this post from last month where she writes:

This year my students have seemed more like actual humans to me…in past years certain students might as well have been 2-dimensional cutouts because the only things I knew about them was how often they turned in their homework and how proficient they were in reading handwriting. When I look at them this year, however, I can see little pieces of the adults they’re becoming. And I’m excited for their futures, even if I no longer play a part.

It’s good, and, I think, powerful stuff. Blogs and blogging can have amazing effects on so many levels…we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. But with efforts like those Karl and his teachers are putting in, I’m still really excited to see what will happen as more and more teachers start to bring this tool into their practice.

technorati tags:blogging, education, teaching, professional_development

(via Tim Wilson) So Moodle released 1.6 yesterday with a blog feature that I think is a pretty good start though I wish the following options were available per post instead of globally per blog:

• The World can read entries set to be world-accessible
• All site users can see all blog entries
• Users can only see blogs for people who share a course
• Users can only see blogs for people who share a group
• Users can only see their own blog

Even more interesting, I think, is the discussion that the community has had around how blogs should function in Moodle. Definitely worth taking a few minutes to read the vision of how all of Moodle’s component systems work to supplement the blogging experience instead of combining it into one tool. (For instance, Moodle blogs will not support comments.)

Regardless, I love seeing Moddle moving in this direction, and I love the thoughtful approach the community is taking.

technorati tags:Moodle, blogging

I’ll agree with Clarence…Flock is my new browser of choice, and that just after a few hours of playing.

It took me absolutely zero time to configure it so I can blog right to my Word Press site, save bookmarks in del.icio.us, upload pictures to Flickr and (thunder and lightning) read my feeds all in the same space. I mean for the first time, I am seriously thinking of retiring my Bloglines account. Whoa! I mean the aggregator alone is worth the switch. It makes saving posts easy, gives you all sorts of options for reading what’s new (like creating your own columned newspaper interface), allows you to bookmark and blog with one easy click (which I know Bloglines has but without this elegant workflow), and just feels so integrated with the whole package. I’m taking the opportunity to REALLY focus my reading even more by trying to keep to 75 or fewer feeds. And I’m having to make some really tough decisions because I do want to expand my reading to include some non-ed stuff and relevant searches. We’ll see.

The blog interface has a spellcheck, let’s me add tags really easily, and has a spellcheck. (Did I mention that?) It’s also got a cool little clipboard/web snippet tool that I can dump stuff into for later use. My goodness…

At any rate, score one for convergence.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more as I play, but I have to say at first blush, this is a very, very cool tool.

technorati tags:Flock, convergence, browsers, blogging

In preparation for her day at Kennesaw State University last week, Anne put together this great wiki resource site that should be on everyone’s resource list. (And check out her nifty use of Rock You on the language arts examples page. You go girl!) It’s chock full of reflection and links and thinking, and it’s just pure quality. And the best part is that it’s not just the folks at Kennesaw that get to enjoy it.
[tags]weblogs, education, Anne_Davis[/tags]

The folks over at the CCCC Blogging SIG are taking the blog by the horns in terms of beginning to gather some empirical research about the effects of blogs in the classroom. I still think it’s weird that no one has published any results of studies with this tool yet. I may have to carve out a few hours to go digging around some more. They’ve also got some other things on the agenda. One of my favorite snippets is this one:

…we need to move the profession towards a space where we’re more aware of blogging as professional activity. To what degree can we “get credit” for blogging? And, deriving from that, how can we start thinking about blogging as professionals? (One question that was asked in response: if blogging becomes a professional activity, does it lose some portion of its value as teaching/writing tool?)

Wow…we’re finally getting serious about this stuff, huh? Good questions that we’re all grappling with on some level, and I’ll be interested to see how things progress.

So Chris Sessums is learning from his blog by deconstructing his learning, on his blog, which is what this is really all about. I know I sound like a snob when I start talking or writing about how blogging is an intellectual exercise, but that’s what this is for me, and I think his post today is a good example of what I mean. I also like the way he defines the scope of what teachers can do with a blog:

1. Modeling: the teacher �puts his/her mind on display�
2. Coaching: teachers observe students performance of a task, offering feedback
3. Scaffolding: helping a student complete a task slightly more difficult than the student is capable of completing on his/her own.
4. Articulating: drawing students out dialogically, helping to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge
5. Reflecting: debriefing, replaying and discussion after an activity
6. Exploring: students tackle new areas on their own

What’s interesting to me is how the items in that list have less to do with teaching than facilitating and creating a learning environment. And thanks to a bit of Web serendipity, I stumbled across this relevant link in one of my del.icio.us feeds today excerpting Carl Rogers’ “Freedom to Learn”. There’s more than what I’m snipping here, but this will give you the gist of what he has to say:

a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher…

Like I said, there is much more to it that needs reading in order to fully understand his ideas. But the learning here for me at least is an even more heightened sense that blogs can be spaces for self directed learning, and that to use them well as teachers, we may need to stop thinking about how to teach with them as much as focus on how we might bring them into our own practice to model what our students can do with them.

It’s been interesting reading the threads that have developed around my “To Blog or Not to Blog…” post from a couple of days ago. The comments on the post itself were pretty amazing in their own right, but the extended conversations were equally thought provoking. Chris Sessums, Barbara Ganley, Vicki Davis, Bud Hunt and many others blogged about it, and I’ve been trying to tap into my own reaction as to what they and their respective commentors have been saying. It’s a great example of the messy, distributed nature of the Web these days, and ironically, I think, an example of why many people might find it frustrating.

What strikes me about all of this is the level of engagement of the participants. All of these teacher-bloggers on some level felt compelled to enter the conversation, to take the time to do some deep thinking, obviously, and articulate those thoughts in a post to share with others. Some came here first, then followed up with posts on their own sites. Some just felt compelled to comment on one or many of these posts. There is the palpable energy of a community of learners who are connecting around questions and answers to better understand their own practice and then share back that understanding with the community to further the conversation. And that investment of time and energy, I think, deepens my trust in the community as a place where I can come to ask about what I don’t understand or what I want to learn more about. It is, for me a powerful occurence, one that does not happen with such consistency in my physical space.

I know as a parent, I hope my own children will find the same level of passion that I have about whatever it is they might be interested in. It’s only natural, I think, that an educator who feels the power of that engagement would want to share that experience with his or her students. I love the way Barbara articulates this in her comments here:

Not all of us will be fabulous bloggers, or oral presenters, or readers, or emotionally intuitive. But if each of us will bring our own expertise to give to the others, we will be engaged–our learning will be efficacious.

And that is the most important part of all of this, this question of how do we get our kids engaged? How can we get them to be motivated to learn? And, since these tools seem to be working for us, how can we use them as vehicles, conduits for students to tap into their own passions? And how do we get other teachers to at least consider them?

Not every student needs a blog or a podcast or a wiki to be engaged, I understand that. Blogs and podcasts and the audiences they facilitate will not engage every child. But are we not at the point where we can honestly say that the learning potential of these tools is such that every teacher should have them as a part of his or her toolbox?

So I�m going to take a moment to once again get defensive about blogs, and specifically blogging. Hopefully it won�t be offensive.

David Warlick pointed to a series of video interviews with ed tech experts at the recent CUE conference in California, and I happened to check out the one on �Ed Tech Trends� with David Thornburg, Hall Davidson and Peter H. Reynolds. First, let me say it�s a great discussion of what�s happening in the world of edtech, and I�m happy to report that blogs and wikis are at the forefront of the discussion. Go and watch it if you get a chance (a long with the other featuring Steve Dembo and David Warlick.) That�s the good news.

The bad news is that to some extent, I think the conversation misses the point. What got me going was when Hall Davidson said �Blogs are online journals when done right� and then added that it�s �not a format that going to pull anything else out of you� compared to more traditional tools. David Thornburg had an equally lukewarm assessment, and while Peter Reynolds I think got it more than the rest, he didn�t get the chance to articulate it very well. (He also said that he considered MySpace a blogging site.)

Ok, I know. Let it go. The thing that gets me is that none of these three are bloggers of any consistency, at least that I can find. Hall does blog at the Discovery Educator Network, but not very often. And I guess I just wish they wouldn�t opine about the usefulness of technologies that they don�t fully understand. Blogs are much more than online journals when done right. They offer much more than the traditional tools in terms of giving voice, building community, enhancing learning not just from a writing standpoint.

To be fair, all three of these guys grasp what�s happening with Web technologies, and much of what they have to say is right on and, frankly, very optimistic and energizing. They really get the sense of community that these tools can create, and they understand the powerful connections that they can bring about. In fact, the best excerpt from the whole thing was when Peter said that from a teaching standpoint, your colleagues are no longer just the people down the hall. They are teachers in Australia and journalists in Russia and scientists in India. What a very cool, expansive way to start thinking about teaching.

Ok, I feel better now. Back to more fruitful blogging�

I thought the responses to my “Caring About the Content” post were incredibly thought provoking as were a couple of e-mails that I got on the subject. I love the stories of students who are invested in their blog work in different ways from traditional mediums. And today, Clarence Fisher makes the case even more clearly:

Along these same lines was the fact that many kids listed the fact that no one else gets a chance to read a written document except for me as a disadvantage of using this form. A written document goes nowhere except into a binder and eventually a garbage can. It is not connected to anyone or to any of their other work. A written document has no context, no history, no connection to their other work or the network they exist in, it stands alone.

I gave this speech almost verbatim to our supervisors last week during their Tablet PC training. I have one-half of one filing cabinet filled with paper in my office. That’s it. The rest of what I need is in various digital repositories just waiting to be connected to a relevant audience should the need arise.
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(This is the last title in the theme, I promise.) So I just have to point to “my” bloggers at Seton Hall once again as they are really getting pretty inspired and inspiring. One of them is now suggesting they try to collaboratively write an article for Educational Leadership magazine about their blogging experiences.

In a few days we will have been bloggers for three months! As I look back over this experience, I realize that I have learned a lot about the possibilities of this tool, about what�s being discussed and debated in the well-established blogs I�ve subscribed to through Bloglines, and most importantly, I�ve gained even more respect for my fellow members of Cohort IX. The depth and variety of the posts in the Seton Hall Weblog stretch my thinking, challenge my opinions, lead me to make connections and inspire me to try new things.

How cool is that? And I have to tell you, I haven’t been doing a very good job of tending that blog garden, of synthesizing their work in the “mother blog” or commenting back to their work in much more than rapid fire response. They’ve been slowly gaining momentum on their own, and of late, more and more have been joining the conversation, finding the time to post, understanding the benefits of reading and sharing. Now this group has been together for over a year, which I’m sure has something to do with it, and they have more than a year left in their program. It’s an interesting dynamic.

There is energy in what they are doing, and I’ve been really pleased to see the extent to which many of them have taken part. As always, I’m sure they would love to hear from benevolent outsiders with encouragement or ideas.
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