From Anne:

My vision for classroom blogging is simple. Use it as a tool in the classroom to ensure that the students and the teacher are talking, reading, and writing frequently about how and what they are learning and thinking. Get them to explore their thinking and the teacher can do the same. Get them to interact with others through comments. Encourage others outside the classroom to join in on the conversations. Value the students’ ideas by making them feel safe to share real thoughts and feelings so discussions can be meaningful. The teacher sets parameters to lead students toward building a community of learners who respect and encourage each other. They can learn to disagree agreeably. They can develop a good standard for learning on the web. They will be writing about the content they are learning. They will be thinking about it. Best of all, they will be writing about it. Writing to learn!

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Bud Gibson at Michigan State pointed me to his analysis of Weblog use in his classes last fall and it has some interesting insights into the dynamics of a blog classroom. What I like is that he shares the struggles and the solutions out in the open so we can all learn from his experience. Here’s a snippet:

By design, blogging allows individuals to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without having to ask anyone’s permission. That was an explicit design consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with students…

Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place while still maintaining individual attribution.

Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me. Note, I did ask permission of everyone whose feed I aggregated into our site, but they did not have to go through a sign-on process and explicitly produce content for the site. By localizing content creation, blogs make it possible to ask permission and get a coherent stream of content.

Bud says that an analysis of student surveys about the class is upcoming.

So I took a much needed day away from the computer yesterday to go skiing with the family…it was seriously a perfect 10. (Right now, the slopes are getting another 9 inches of powder. Sheesh.)

Anyway, this morning I was greeted with a whole bunch of great thinking about the Read/Write Web in the classroom. And the good news is that this is becoming the rule rather than the exception. The bad news is that it’s a lot to capture, and it’s getting harder and harder to do justice to it all. (Especially if I want to go skiing with the kids from time to time…)

Here are some snippets and some pointers.

Aaron Campbell–

The possibility that personal webpublishing might encourage a move toward autonomy is real. Just as Fromm argued that the social structure determines which aspects of the social character are dominant, perhaps likewise the semantic social network as learning environment might play a role helping learners become more autonomous in the way described above. If institutions of learning founded their pedagogy and practice on learning methods that allowed the learner to develop this kind of autonomy en route to cooperative knowledge creation and the development of useful skills, we could indeed achieve at least a partial degree of sanity and peace in this world.

Tom Hoffman–

But, more significantly, I haven’t heard a peep from anyone about creating a blogging system specifically for schools. That isn’t too surprising either, because it also seems inherently unprofitable, especially with school budgets being stretched ever more tightly. We’ll see if blogging starts popping up as a feature in other school-based applications at NECC, but it is looking unlikely to me. Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be much demand for much demand for school-specific blogging tools, even among school-based bloggers. Perhaps I should point out why I think they would be important.

Jeff Moore–

And we all know the dirty secret. When you control for everything, socio-economics is all that kids need. Traditional teaching and measurement, and traditional “rigorous” curricula, are only relevant to certain socio-economic groups. They are only understood to be part of the formula for success by students who come to school ready to learn. They will never deliver on the promise to be a ticket out of disadvantaged communities, because they will never be relevant to a student who experiences more strife on the way to school than the high-socio-economic kid experiences in his/her entire life.

Educating the Net Generation (Educause e-book)

The Net Generation has grown up with information technology. The aptitudes, attitudes, expectations, and learning styles of Net Gen students reflect the environment in which they were raised—one that is decidedly different from that which existed when faculty and administrators were growing up.

This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum. Contributions by educators and students are included.

David Warlick–

What our students understand (and that we, as teachers, seem blind to) is that the very nature of information has changed. It’s changed in what it looks like, what we look at to view it, where we find it, what we can do with it, and how we communicate it. We live in a brand new, and dynamically rich information environment, and if we are going to reach our students in a way that is relevant to their world and their future (and ours), then we must teach them from this new information environment.

I’m awed and overwhelmed. Very cool.
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That will happen in 2007 according to predictions by Teemu Arina over at the new Flosse Posse Weblog dedicated to open source technologies in education.

2007–Educators discover one-click publishing

In contrary to large and rigid content management systems, educators and students have noticed easy personal publishing on a wide scale. One weblog related to education is created every second according to statistics provided by Technorati. Google has launched a specially branded service called EduBlogger™ based on their popular Blogger™ service.

Teemu spun this prediction and many others out of an interview with Alan Levine that is definitely worth putting on your iPod.
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James Farmer has an interesting post about how students might use blogs to manage their learning. Here’s a snippet:

However, if that learner has their own blog ‘outside’ of the central, managed environment then things can start to look a bit different. Let’s say that in this case they are studying four units and they can simply create categories for each one (so postings relevant to that unit can go there and to their main blog if appropriate), that that category is then aggregated into the ‘central’ area (where unit guides, copyrighted study materials, core materials etc. can also be found) and that this blog also serves as a portfolio cum social tool for the student in question (as each learner has also been furnished with their own aggregator). The student in question owns the content, they are able to develop their blog as they choose and do with their content as they please, they are able to develop an online presence over an extended period of time and become parts of communities through their blog (communities that will form as naturally as communities form in f2f college) and they are able to subvert the technology in many wonderful ways (podcasting, photoblogging, vogging etc. etc.). It’s also their responsibility… and that is a great teacher in itself.

I’ve always thought that the most efficient model for using blogs in schools would be the one that collects student work from all courses and then feeds it out by categories to teacher aggregators. That way students build an online archive and ultimately, perhaps, portfolio of work throughout their schooling. Teachers simply subscribe to the relevant content from each student blog and comment back as necessary.

What James reminds me, however, is the importance of making the site truly one’s own by allowing students to develop the look of their sites and add personal experiences and artifacts as they see fit. Really, the blog should be something not only outside of the cms, it should be outside of school altogether. I mean how many of the 8 million + bloggers out there blog because their schools are asking them to? This is my blog, but this is a place where I think and learn a heckuva lot, and I’m not doing it for school. And so it should be.

We should encourage students to have online learning environments from which we as teachers can pull the relevant bits. That way we’ll be creating lifelong learning spaces, just like real bloggers do.

(via George
Siemens) Now I know I’m kinda strange, but the premise of this
article from Educause seriously gives me chills:

What
do we wish for? That every citizen, at birth,
will be granted acradle-to-grave, lifetime personal Web space that will
enable connections among personal, educational, social, and business
systems.

Ok, now I know that’s a lot to wrap your
brain around, especially on a Friday afternoon. But if you are at all
interested in the potential of the read/write Web and what it might
evolve into, I think this is must reading. The paradigm shift is
staggering, and the pedagogical foundation its build on is still pretty
rickety, but think about some of this, for starters:

The
LPWS will store
searchable content (personal, educational,social, business) that was
important in a user’s past and make it accessible for future use, as
well as current projects. Since technology changes over time, the older
sections of the Web space (for example, K–12 grade content) might be
technologically less sophisticated, but would connect nonetheless to
newer additions (such as postgraduate work activities).The primary user
would decide whether
a cell is private or public (potentially functioning as an e-portfolio
or Web site) and who will
be permitted to enter various parts of the structure. Some cells may
be off-limits (even invisible) to all but the primary user. Moreover,
the user will decide which cells connect to others and which do not. As
the user matures, an analysis of the types and numbers of connections
might assist in setting goals and strategies for subsequent personal
and professional development.

Um, whoa. I seriously want one of these. And the benefits:

Few students maintain ready access to both the content and products
from their K–12 years. College students typically sell their books and
lose access to their collegiate course management Web sites. While an
e-portfolio provides ready access to selected work products, intent and
effort are required to transport content between separate, often
incompatible systems. The LPWS construct will enable users to preserve
more knowledge over time and to forge richer connections between their
academic and work endeavors.

Read the scenario that’s included. In fact, read the whole thing. What
a concept.I think the reason this idea connects so strongly for me is
because of what I’ve been mentioning recently about this being a
learning log, and probably the most educational experience of my life.
It’s really wild when I think about it. For me, blogging just clicked;
maybe I had the gene, or maybe it was because I always wanted to write,
or that I’m an info junkie or a hundred other reasons. But I have
sampled the Kool-Aid, and I really do believe. In some really strange
way (remember, I am sorta out there…) it’s like my recorded life
began three years ago, and I really wish I had a more historical
archive. Should have started earlier.

Anyway, this is what the
read/write Web makes possible for us and for our students. We just have
to grab it.

Nancy Peckham at New Mexico State is doing action research on Weblog use in the classroom. She wants to know:

Can the use of BLOGS (Web logs) as the journal writing instrument in the classroom and/or for Action Research promote writing skills, individual voice, understanding of technology, and collaboration between students and teachers?

If you get a chance, you might want to take her survey.

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Barbara and Anne are making me whistful about getting back in the classroom. (I spent about 30 minutes with a class yesterday getting them setup with Weblogs and I just didn’t want it to end…I’m definitely teaching at least one class next year no matter what.) I just love reading about what they’re experiencing with their students and this technology.

Barbara is reflecting on four years of using Weblogs with her students at Middlebury. That’s like 25 in blog years; in fact, she’s probably got just about as much practical experience with all of this as anyone out there. And it shows. This is just a great post that illustrates the power and flexibility of Weblogs, and it really inspires me to keep looking for more ways to integrate them at my school.

Watching these students take what they have learned in a single semester and apply it to their lives provides me with valuable feedback on why we should integrate technology into our classrooms carefully, thoughtfully, and meaningfully. If we show our students how these tools might work in their efforts to communicate their experiences, to connect with communities and to engage in complex intellectual and artistic endeavors, we can step back, out of the way, and watch them take over their education.

It’s that “complex intellectual endeavor” that I find most interesting, because that is what leads to real learning. I’ve been bemoaning the relative lack of complexity of Weblog uses in K-12, and I swear I get butterflies when I think about how cool it would be to get high school students (or younger) doing the kind of complex work that Barbara’s students are doing. And, like Barbara, we need to model that work for our kids. There is energy in this moment, and we really need to find more ways to take advantage of it.

Blogging has to be integrated into the course pedagogy…it is a new means of expression that must be used accordingly with the course goals in mind. In other words, what does linking and commenting and writing evolving, multi-media hypertexts in this virtual space do to the course goals, methods and structures?

Yeah…it is a new means of expression, more than a writing tool. And they are complex texts that can be in constant production, evolving over a long period of time. And that whole aspect of multi-media is something that she and Hector Vila are really getting me interested in.

Anne, meanwhile, is off on another most excellent blogging adventure with her kids. She’s embarking on a WebQuest with her Blooming Bloogers using Bloom’s Taxonomy (get it?)

Starting today, you are going to take charge of your learning. You will tell the story of what you are learning and what it means to you. You will decide what is worth knowing, You will satisfy your own burning curiosity. You will ask good questions about what you are learning. You will use Bloom’s Taxonomy to help you get to some really good thinking. Plan to knock your audience’s socks off! You are about to embark on an exciting journey. Stand-by! You are about to enter the wonderful world of weblogging!!!

It looks like a great project that is bound to break some more ground for us all. If you get a chance, let Anne know what you think as she’s looking for feedback.

I still love to read about the emerging influence of bloggers in the political sphere. (Wonder when that will happen in the education world…) An article titled “Bloggers Become Weapon in US Presidential Election” from Agence France-Presse says that bloggers

have become a vital source of information and commentary, and an alternative to traditional newspapers and television.

And yesterday as I was listening to a discussion on NPR about how most people don’t really tune into the news any more, the host mentioned blogs as a viable alternative that the younger generation might make good use of. (By the way, did you know that the median age of people watching network news is 60!!! Wow.)

But the one quote I liked best from the article was from Howard Finberg at the Poynter Institute, who said bloggers “…are, in a sense, an editor on your behalf.” I absolutely love that metaphor; blogger as editor. And that’s why I think every student should have a blog and be blogging. Because they all need to be editors, every single one of them. Because there is soooo much information out there and because most schools aren’t doing much to teach them how to be smart consumers of that information. (Only a fairly small percentage take the media literacy course we started here.) I’ll say this again, they may not end up being bloggers, but they need to end up thinking like bloggers regardless.

This post is primarily for the attendees at the blogging session yesterday at the New England Library Association conference in beautiful downtown Manchester, NH. The link to the presentation is here, but beware it may take some time to load (1.9 mb). And, please refer to the RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators that I mentioned for more on how to use RSS in your libraries and classrooms.

As I was driving back home last night I realized that I may have skipped over one important part in our RSS discussion that you really need to know, and that’s locating the feeds themselves. On some blogs, you can find a link that says “Syndicate this site.” or something similar. But in most cases, just look for the XML button (shown here.)

Just click on the button, take the URL from the page of gobbledygook that appears, post it into your aggregator, and start collecting news.

Thanks for all of your enthusiasm and great questions, and please let me know if I can help in your Weblogging adventures.

Barbara Ganley’s blog is down due to structural issues, and she’s reflecting on the impact:

And so, my missing the blog isn’t about an addict finding withdrawal a torture. It’s about being denied a powerful tool in my teaching set, and if I don’t get it back by the end of the week, I don’t know what I’m gonna do…

I know I would have felt the same way had it happened to me. I don’t think I would want to ever go back to xeroxing papers and handouts and evaluating my students just on their ability to discuss each other’s work in a synchronous way. Not to mention carrying stacks of paper around. And the good news is I think there are actually a couple of other teachers around here who feel the same way.

So anyone know how to get five columns with feeds from five different blogs on the same page???
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Steven Krauss from Eastern Michigan University has an article in Kairos that goes into some depth about his attempt to use Weblogs as tools to teach writing on the higher ed level. Has some trickle down to K-12 classrooms though.

His premise is pretty straightforward:

I have begun to wonder if it is advisable or even possible to see blogs as a collaborative or especially “interactive” writing environment. (2) Or, more accurately, I’ve come to believe we shouldn’t substitute blogs for other electronic writing tools that foster discussion and interactive writing, particularly email lists, commonly known as “listservs.”

What I find most informative about this article is his dissection of what he didn’t do with his blogging experiment that he feels contributed to its demise. In short, he chose the wrong software for his needs (Blogger,) he didn’t create specific requirements for blog usage, and he had no other place for online discussion. He does some great analysis that really should be must reading for anyone thinking of using Weblogs in this context.

Students (or anyone else) don’t just want to write, and certainly not in a blog space. As Walker puts it in her “Talk at Brown” notes, “How empowering is it to be forced to blog?” And yet, that is ultimately the power and even charm of web logs: it is very easy to master technology and interface in which just about anyone who wants to can post their writings and thoughts about anything. However, like the paper diaries and journals that web logs are so often compared, the writer has to have a reason– and generally, a personal reason– to write in the first place.

Yes, but…here is where the distinction between blogging and using blogs crops up again. It isn’t enough just to provide the digital paper; we have to teach kids how to use it well (blogging.) The writer does have to have a reason, a passion, in order to get the most from blogging. But what I think we have to accept is that the subjects they want to blog about may have little to do with our subject matter. But we can still teach the genre and the cr
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It’s weird but in two different conversations I had today the question came up about what it takes to get teachers to use blogs over the long term. I mean I’ve trained a lot of people on how to use Weblogs, and everyone thinks it’s really neat, but very few actually stick with it. I know that blogging takes more time at the outset, but the learning curve is definitely not steep, and it would seem a great way to organize materials and archive lesson plans at the very least.

Seems like the teachers that stick with it just get into the habit, somehow. It works for them on a level that allows them to do it 10 or 20 or 100 times until it just becomes a part of their practice. I would hate to go back to teaching without blogs…but then again, I’ve got way too much of a blogging habit to even think about doing something as silly as that…

Helen Barrett has been busy trying out various Weblog platforms to see how they fare as online portfolios. Interesting to see the variations, but I think most of the differences are primarily cosmetic.

Tom doesn’t think that blogs are the right medium for this experiment anyway:

Let’s cut to the chase, you can’t really make an e-portfolio with weblog software, they’re just not built for it, and wikis will only be useful if you neuter them. What you need is an open source, enterprise-class content management system. The main things Helen can borrow from blogs is the idea that people shouldn’t be screwing around with DreamWeaver to create web pages any more and e-portfolios should be using RSS, RDF, XML and web standards.

But really, how many decades is it going to take before more technical acumen is necessary to become an authority in educational technology? The lack thereof is really tiresome, and it is much more of a problem today than it would have been eight or ten years ago, because so much power is at our disposal, if we only have the capacity to reach out and grasp it.

His last point makes me wonder if he thinks only programmers can be experts at ed tech. I know he sees the landscape through very different eyes than Helen and I do, and his vision is pretty amazing. But authorities at ed tech also need the acumen to deal with educators who have very little energy or interest in the toys, and I think what Helen is trying to do is take a first step for a lot of those folks who have no clue what open-source is even about.

I noted to my superintendent the other day that another good thing about Weblogs is that they open a door to technology use for the timid and uninitiated. It’s a pretty low bar to jump over, and if they can hurdle this one, who knows what might be next. I think Helen’s work is giving some people a reason to try to make the jump.

Barbara Ganley has posted her complete BlogTalk paper titled “Blogging as a Dynamic, Transformative Medium in an American Liberal Arts Classroom” which, not surprisingly, is an enthusiastic and articulate reflection on her successes using Weblogs in the classroom. It’s another great resource for teachers of all levels.

First, she says that Weblogs offer

“…educators a unique opportunity to engage their students in a dynamic learning environment in which they are at once the actor and the reflector, the commentator and the instigator.”

I like the way that describes the duality of blogging, the read/write relationship.

Arguing that “the world has changed; the classroom has not,” she notes that schools continue to ignore the social aspect of learning that Weblogs offer to a generation that is increasingly familiar with the digital commons, moreso than their teachers. She has a great quote from James Duderstadt:

“They expect–indeed, demand–interaction, approaching learning as a ‘plug-and-play’ experience; they are unaccustomed and unwilling to learn sequentially–to read the manual–and instead are inclined to plunge in and learn through participation and experimentation…They learn in a nonlinear fashion, skipping from beginning to end and then back again, and building peer groups of learners, developing sophisticated learning networks in cyberspace. In a very real sense, they build their own learning environments that enable interactive, collaborative learning, whether we recognize and accommodate this or not.”

She also writes about how for a classroom Weblog to be effective, everyone must own it. Barbara’s use of Weblogs has evolved from a tool for classroom management to individual student blogs to one what she calls “Motherblog” for the class which everyone is responsible for.

For the weblog to work as a facilitator of efficacious learning, it is essential that everyone has an authentic voice and an authentic role on it, that everyone has a hand in creating the medium as well as the message in an environment in which the reader becomes the writer, the student the teacher, the teacher the learner as we traverse boundaries of classroom and real world, our communities forming,shifting and reforming.

One aspect of all of this that Barbara has mastered, I think, is using her own posts to synthesize discussions and to probe and ask questions, all the while modeling the genre for her students.

…the blogger-teacher is using the unquenchable homepage as a place to synthesize the postings streaming in, to ask questions designed to push the thinking forward, to point to particular posts as models, challenging our assumption that learning experiences are essentially individual, private affairs conducted according to time-honored if unspoken rules about student-teacher interactions. It is a jarring and exhilarating, if for some, bewildering experience.

And she writes about the importance of linking in blogging:

In the learner-centered collaborative effort, students learn the value of linking to one another’s work, often taking a thread from a classmate’s assignment or online discussion, referencing it and building on the idea until it becomes something new all while engaging them in a call-and-response kind of conversation with their peers. In so doing, students learn lessons about citation and translating from the informal language and thinking of the online discussion to the more rigorous demands of formal academic discourse.

Obviously there is much more here, especially the part about the students basically taking over the course in the third week. Not sure that’s going to happen on the K-12 level, but it certainly could happen for various aspects of our classes. But what’s inspirational about this, at least to me, is the way in which she has used the Weblog to deepen and broaden the learning of her students. Her effort to make such good use of this tool is obviously enormous, and in some ways daunting. But even with a more narrowed focus and scale, the importance of the ability of Weblogs to help students construct and evolve their own meaning and understanding of course content is not to be underestimated. Barbara gives us a great framework for making that happen.
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