Pretty amazing that the 40 computers in my open source session at 8:30 were claimed by 7:45 and that a good 150 people (if not more) crammed into the room by the start time. (The photo was taken at about 8:15.) And even more amazing that the Internet connection basically went dead but I think the presentation went pretty well anyway. I’d guess about 40% of the people raised hands when I asked how many were bloggers or used blogs. And some really good questions saved me from tap dancing too much.

But what was really amazing was that totally unannounced, the superintendent at my own kids’ school up in New Jersey showed up. (And Laura, if you’re reading this, it was great of you to come.)

The Blogger’s Cafe has been the place to hang this morning, and yes, it’s official…”we” have “arrived.” At least on the surface. Maybe David has already done it but I wonder how many Read/Write Web sessions there are going this year. Must be close to if not over 100. And “2.0″ is everywhere on the exhibit floor, where I did my annual 30-minute walk just to see all the stuff I wouldn’t buy. (A couple of exceptions, but once again, if you totaled up all the money being spent on displays and schwag and the carbon footprint for getting it all here, you could easily buy a laptop for every kid in the country who needs one. And I’m sorry, but from the “let’s see how much junk we can give away that will end up in a landfill” category, Best Buy needs to be outlawed next year. This sound eerily familiar to a post I wrote last year, I think.)

Not to be cynical, (just can’t shake it) I’ve been wondering (and having great discussion with Cafe-ers) about just what station we have “arrived” at, however. It’s feeling like “I Can Blogville” which I guess is somewhere on the route to “I Can Help My Students Build Their Own Learning Communitiesville” or something like that. At the Google booth, I watched a line 10 deep snake up to take a turn at trying out Blogger. One after another, the Google guide showed people how to post. One after another, you could see the “Gosh, that was easy!” reaction. It was pretty cool just lurking, watching it. But again, I wonder to what extent that will somehow lead to an understanding of what changes in a network, where the real power is.

It’s not in the publishing. But I guess we have to get there first.

At any rate, if anyone from the session is reading, thanks so much for coming…would love to hear what your reactions are, and welcome to the blogosphere.

You’re halfway there.

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

That’s the title of one of four, count ‘em, four different presentations I’ll be giving at MACUL on Friday. (How I got talked into that I’ll never know!) When I originally submitted the idea, I saw it as a way to show how blogs in schools were evolving and branching out, and to have a conversation on the ways in which they would continue to mature. And while I still see that being a part of it, I’m feeling like the bigger, and in some ways, more important discussion is what we need to do to insure that blogs in schools even have a future. I don’t mean that in a defeatist sense as I obviously believe these tools need to play an important part in our teaching and practice. I mean it in the “what are the obstacles and how do we overcome them” sense. So I’d like to start the presentation early here by looking at the most widely articulated impediments to adoption of the tools and offering some very thin, discussion starting ideas about how we might respond to them. This assumes, of course, that you believe (as I do) that these tools can make significant contributions to our practice and to our (and our students’) learning, that they in fact do have the potential to fundamentally improve what we do in the classroom. And, it assumes that we all have access.

These are in no real order, though I’d be interested to hear what the top choices are.

One of the earliest edbloggers is Peter Ford who, with Adam Curry, started schoolblogs a long, long time ago, at least in blog years. Today, Peter has a great post about the state of the edblogosphere and the changes it’s undergoing:

Weblogs have had great impact so far because they have an inherent flexibility that allow teachers and students to explore, create and find solutions on their own terms. Software that imposes limits on teachers’ ability to teach will stifle creativity in the end. That for me, is where the present danger lies. Big corporations will start producing their blogsafe walled-gardens for schools to use. Districts and LEAs will love them, and pay handsomely for them but their very blogsafe and inflexible nature will drain them of their enabling power, adding just another demand on teachers in the classroom.

As we work our way through the current very legitimate concerns about blogging in the schoolplace, there’s no doubt there will be vendors that will try to capitalize on the current unsettled feelings that many districts are having. There are open source solutions that are would seem to satisfy most concerns, but I think that most districts don’t have the comfort level or the knowledge to effect them and that in the end, they’d rather pay to play.

Much of the power of blogs lies in the openness of blogs. Outside of school, they are a critical part in the open content movement that is expanding at a pretty amazing pace. That’s another whole issue that schools are going to have to get straight with, one that I myself grapple with to some extent. Freely sharing ideas and knowledge leads to more ideas and knowledge than not doing so. It’s not as neat and tidy as current solutions (textbooks), but it’s more valuable, if we know how to deal with it.

For connective learning to work, we have to be able to access and build networks around the knowledge that’s relevant. Teachers have to be able to create their own networks and model the learning process for their students. That’s what open blogging facilitates. Using blogs in closed environments may have some benefit, but as Peter says it won’t enable the true promise of tool.

Technorati Tags: blogging, connective_learning
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Since I’ve been more than apt to complain when journalists do the “blogs are online journals” story, let me compliment Cynthia Kopkowski from the Palm Beach Post who put together a pretty nice article whose headline actually refers to teacher bloggers as “saavy!” Wow!

Hey…that’s two articles in a row that actually paint Weblogs as learning tools…a trend?

And I’m open to a better estimate in terms of teachers blogging. 3,000 seems low and high at the same time. My guess is more are using them in some form, but I wonder if it’s close to how many are actually blogging for themselves on a regular basis.
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It’s good to have Anne back, isn’t it? Her presence on our panel yesterday was really great, and her list of things she’s learned from blogging has inspired me. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

If I wasn’t at iLaw last week, I would have sure liked to have been at Gnomedex. The big news, of course, was Microsoft’s announcement that RSS was going to be integrated into the next version of IE. (Wonder what Firefox will have by then.)

But the even bigger news was that there was a presentation on “Blogs in the Classroom” as well! Kathy Gill at the University of Washington gave it, and she gave some surprising stats about the blog knowledge of her incoming students: 89% had sipped the blog juice in one form or another, but only 7% had even heard of Flickr. Sheesh.

BTW, some great Gnomedex notes at Blogaholics.
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Back to iLaw: Yochai Benkler did a presentation on “The Internet and Political Values” yesterday that was, for the most part, way over my head, but the parts that I did get were pretty enlightening. One thing that really stuck was his deconstruction of the Long Tail, where it appears that there are a few blogs that get lots of readers and many, many blogs that get just a few. In the larger view, this is true, but what’s significant is when you break it down into clusters of blogs by interest. Benkler showed that within interest groups, the distribution is pretty standard: some blogs have a lot of readers, most blogs have a fair number (in relative terms) and some have very few. His point, I think, was that as the blogosphere grows larger, there will still be great opportunity for new bloggers to become significant contributors within their interest groups. Think of it as a lot of mini blogospheres, similar to our growing K-12 edublogger sphere. There have been so many great new voices added to our mix over the past six months or so, and that only promises to continue.

The other thing he talked about which I found interesting was how quickly the blogosphere can organize to take political action. He used the Sinclair Broadcasting Group story from last year as an example. Within a week after announcing they would run a controversial program about John Kerry, bloggers brought about movement against local advertisers of Sinclair that eventually caused the company’s stock price to go down and to them pulling the program. It was a pretty powerful case study.

Unfortunately, I can’t stay the full day today. My brain is spinning once again, not quite as buzzed as after last year, but buzzed nonetheless. It’s hard to capture it in one general thought or idea, but if I had to, I’d say the message here is that the huge waves of change caused by the Read/Write Web are just growing larger, that “the law” does not fully understand the implications of these changes, yet, and that it’s going to be a very interesting (and messy) decade ahead. Sounds right for education as well.
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THE Journal this month has an article I wrote about my Secret Life of Bees blog if anyone might be interested. It seems hard to believe that it’s been almost three years now since that project. Time flies…
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Over at ETI, Tom is writing about the future of blogging in preparation for our NECC panel in a couple of weeks. I’m cross posting this back over there in response.

My take on the future of blogging differs from Tom’s in some respects. Specifically, I don’t agree that the practice of reading and writing in blogs will remain unchanged in 10 years. If fact, I would doubt that blogs in their current iteration will be around in 10 years. To compare blogs to e-mail is, I think, to say that, like e-mail, blogging has only one fairly restrictive use. I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, Tom points out correctly that blogs have already evolved from basic link lists with little annotation to a more complex form of exposition, which is, ironically, a change he’s been fighting against and I’ve been fighting for.

I think that evolution will continue as more and more communication goes online in more and more transparent ways. In fact, I would argue that in 10 years, especially in educational circles, exposition will be taught in what is currently blog form. I sincerely doubt that our current process of exchanging paper will still be around. I also believe that the social, collaborative aspects of blogging will also be subsumed into the writing process we teach. It will move writing as product to writing as conversation or contribution. Because of blogging, writing will take on more meaningful outcomes.

This type of blog work will become part of a much more complex and diverse learning environment which combines blog, e-portfolio, community and more. I think Elgg comes close to that vision, though I wonder what level of autonomy over these spaces students will be afforded. (That’ll take a few more decades…) And in similar ways, individual blogging will cede to more community aggregated forms. (RSS is already beginning to render individual Websites fairly meaningless.) Again, the emphasis will continue to move toward dialogue and conversation and away from monologue.

So, once again, to me this comes down to a distinction between form and function. To me, the form will not be sustainable, but the function, the blogging will become an integral part of what we do.

Konrad Glogowski has a post up titled “Grading Conversations” where he writes:

I think that student bloggers should be recognized for writing as part of a larger community of inquirers. Some of my most successful writers are those who are aware of what their friends are writing about and who participate in conversations with other bloggers in their class. This is an important part of knowledge- and community-building, especially when (as in my class) students investigate and write about related ideas. When the whole class is engaged in investigating human rights, for example, the interactions that occur among bloggers can have a strong impact on individual writers and the communal sense of knowledge-building. Students quickly become aware that they are all co-constructing knowledge and begin to spend a lot of time commenting on other blogs and other entries. When I mark their contributions, a part of their grade is given for showing that they are an integral part of the blogosphere and not just an isolated writer.

I just think that is so good, and so different from the ways in which most teachers approach assessment. I mean many of us give grades for something called “class participation,” but that is much, much different from “knowledge construction participation.” We’re saying to our students that while it’s important for them to share their ideas with the rest of us, it’s equally (if not more) important to be willing to contribute and test those ideas in the context of the class community. That they need to stop giving “answers” (which suggest the discussion is over) and start contributing insights and experiences and questions (which suggests the discussion continues.)

We need to stop thinking in terms of assessing answers and start thinking about how we assess the contributions our students make to the conversations about learning that are happening in our classrooms. It’s not going to be an easy shift, because it’s much less concrete compared to what the system now calls for. But it’s great to see that teachers are starting to move in that direction, and that they’re willing to enter the conversation for themselves.

(via Clancy Ratliff) Interesting couple of threads running through the higher ed universe regarding how students should refer to themselves in their class blogs. It’s not so much a safety issue at that level as it is a student being linked to work that is less than excellent issue. Like what happens when someone does a search on them before a job interview and the freshman comp essay full of misspellings and grammar errors pops up. Jill Walker says

If a student has to publish under her full name during her learning experience, and makes mistakes, they’ll show up for every future employer or lover who googles her name. That doesn’t seem like a safe environment for learning.

What a concept, huh? But it’s true. I know that whenever I come across a new source these days I find myself Googling the name to see what comes up. Or what doesn’t. (I would hate to be dating these days…)

I don’t have any problem with giving students at the college level a choice of how to represent themselves in their blogs. As Jill says, some are more comfortable than others with their online lives and won’t even think twice.

That’s why I’ve recommended to my blogging students this semester that they use pseudonyms unless they’re quite comfortable about claiming their identity online. Many of them do. As they become more secure in the environment, and especially once they understand, really understand, that anyone can read it now and in the future, then real names are just fine and a good part of establishing a durable online identity that you’d be happy for anyone to see.

Certainly, however, owning your ideas whether they are text or video or whatever raises the stakes, in a good way, I think. There’s no question that the bloggers I read think hard about what they write and about whether it’s correct or not. I find it hard to get to good ideas that are delivered poorly…must be the English teacher in me. But I find it equally as difficult to get to good ideas given anonymously. In fact I’m at a point now where I don’t subscribe to any anonymous feeds.

But on the high school level, there is no choice. I’ve mentioned that we only let our kids use first names, pseudonyms if they prefer, and that they refrain from even mentioning other students by full name. They’ll have plenty of time after high school to lay claim to their public body of work. But I struggle with this nonetheless. We want students to take ownership, we want them to be a part of the larger conversation, yet how much ownership can they take when they write anonymously? And when they know that the site will be “depublished” at the end of the year? While it doesn’t totally take away the value of the blog, it certainly diminishes it.

Not sure what the answer is…

(via Stephen Downes) Mercy. I think we’re getting somewhere. Here is a list of almost 200 blogging in education related articles as listed at Kairosnews. I think I’ve only read about a quarter of what’s there (a fact I’ll probably not divulge to my wife and kids.) As Stephen says, it’s hard to believe the scope of the writing on the subject.

Go, Blogs! Go!
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(via Bryan Alexander) The Village Voice offers a pretty interesting piece on blogging in academia, including quotes from my hero.

“I’ve published a bunch of articles in law reviews, and I think I’ve gotten maybe a total of 10 letters about them in the history of my career as an academic,” he says. “I publish stuff on the blog, I get literally hundreds of e-mails about things all the time.”

It’s a wonderful thing.

But here is the blogging (the verb) quote, from six-year (!) blogger Josh Kortbein:

I write my blog because I wish that things were different, and I’m thinking about how to make them that way.

That feels right from where I sit, too. Blogs as platform. That’s what blogging is…

Bud Hunt gets it right when in mentioning our recent blogging vs. journaling discussion he writes:

But I wonder how many students are actually participating in this conversation. Are adults once again making decisions for students without their input? Wouldn’t it be terrible if the decisions about blog use in classrooms were all made for students, instead of with them?

So what does he do about it? He asks his students. And they answer, here, here, and here (among others.)

But I also found their reactions to Bud’s class blogging “experiment” to be equally interesting. Here are some excerpts.
From David the Student:

man blogs can be useful to our school because it is out there letting us be big and connected to the world. yes there will be problems but only user problems and it is worth every bit of effort.

From Moe the Student

Blogging to me, is a place where you can post your ideas, and your thoughts on certain subjects. You can show the world what you are interested in, and link to certain sites, or other blogs related to your interest. Then the really awesome part comes along…people may comment, and help make your thought process easier. They may comment and tell you, “well, here is really great site,” and you will learn more, through the help of other people.

From Elle the Student:

I’m so freakin’ curious about this, y’know? And now I’m aware that people are out there listening/reading what I actually have to say. This class definitely makes me feel like I’m a part of something bigger than just a classroom.

And, from Mike the Student:

If this post and the comments on Bud’s blog are any indications, then the educational blogsphere may soon have all of it’s eyes turned on us. It may be up to us, the students, to decide the place of blogs in the schools.

I feel like I’m part of something.

Good stuff, and it’s very cool to read the way kids are thinking about the technology. Kudos to Bud for getting them started.

So Barbara has anotheranother great post up, writing about how her students are changing in their expectations and needs from their time in college. They are pushing against the traditional structures, asking to mix the classroom experience with online community and off campus travel, capturing all of it in their Weblogs with the voices of teachers and mentors and loved ones mixed in. I love that image…seriously love it…the reflective, interactive chronicling of learning. The getting it down, capturing the experience if for no other reason than to acknowledge it, and to help it take root. That is one of the reasons I maintain this space, to make the learning stick in my brain by articulating it in writing. It’s one thing to nod your head as you read or listen, but it’s another entirely to write it, especially for an audience.

My natural inclination is to try to envision that happening with they younger kids in my world. The kids like Barbara’s 15-year old daughter who has “propelled herself through her high school curriculum so fast…because it has been excruciatingly mind-numbing.” I’m not sure high school kids could ever have enough license to explore the meaning of their learning in the ways Barbara’s students do. But I wonder if the making of meaning that blogging their education might require would transform the experience for them, and, in the process, give educators a heck of a lot more insight as to what our students are learning. Help us make it less mind-numbing.

Barbara’s students want more:

They want what goes on in the classroom to have some bearing on their lives as well as enabling them to develop skills of critical inquiry.

What a concept. I would bet that high school students want that same thing. The question is how long will it take us to see the growing irrelevance of the traditional system of education and seriously rethink what we do in the classroom to make learning more meaningful to our students. Right now, it’s feeling like this mountain is pretty darn high…