Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption. Failure to harness that potential energy would prove a terrible misstep at this junction in American education.
The author of the essay, Justin Reich, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, makes the case in a pretty interesting way, weaving in research, classroom observations and personal experience in a way that I find pretty compelling. Especially because he seems to really understand the “connective” or network aspect of the writing process.
Or, we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.
I agree that that is the choice. No one is denying that much of what students (and adults for that matter) are writing wouldn’t be worthy of publishing under traditional standards. But the fact that kids are writing and publishing in a variety of texts, traditional or not, is, I think, a wonderful reality, one that if we know how to leverage it gives us great opportunities to help kids get better at all types of writing.
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.
Alec Couros’ post on digital citizenship makes some valid points, but I’m not convinced that a few examples of really vile content and lazy practice are reasons to think that the concept of citizenship is in some way fundamentally shifting. But I also don’t fall all the way to the Tom Hoffman side of the fence that says citizenship is little more than what many (though not Tom) would call information literacy.
What rings most true, however, was Stephen Downes’ comment about Tom’s post where he says, simply,
The vile content - and it most certainly is vile - is neither new nor original. And it’s not the kids that are creating it.
The fact is that we have been conditioned to see the worst at the expense of the best, primarily by a media that is always on the lookout for the lewdest, awfulest, stupidist behavior of our cultural icons. A media that then inculcates a connection between crass insignificance and news. And, perhaps to that extent at least, Tom is right. If we teach ourselves and our kids to simply stop and use these “five habits of using one’s mind well,” we’ll get a long way down the citizenship road.
How do we know what’s true or not true? How credible is our evidence?
Is there an alternate story? Perspective? How might this look from another viewpoint?
Is there a connection between x and y? A pattern? Have I come across this before?
What if… supposing that…? Could it have been otherwise if x not y had intervened?
And finally, “who cares”? Does it matter? (And, perhaps, to whom?)
Especially the last one.
But I also believe that citizenship suggests more than critical thinking. It requires participation and action. It requires contribution. And the ways in which even our kids can contribute in this environment and the global scale those contributions now have do change the equation. And most importantly, let’s not forget that a lot of kids are creating and contributing and participating in ways that should make us very proud. For instance:
A ten-year old girl in upstate New York who starts a blog Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference that in just a week’s time has caught the interest of a whole bunch of kids from around the world who want to make a difference too.
Or the imminent launch of a network of student bloggers from around the world:
Or, though it’s not directly related to kids, the uber alternative to vile (religious music aside):
(Add your own examples below…)
Point is, there is a lot of good stuff out there too. And not that that fact is new or original, but there are a lot of kids who are doing it, and in the process, learning citizenship. And at the end of the day, if we really want to help our kids become good citizens themselves, the best we can do is to use our own minds well and model our own participation wherever and whenever we can.
A new blogging platform created specifically for teachers and students is going live this week at 21Classes. (Full disclosure: I was a paid consultant on the project.) The gist is that teachers can easily set up classroom portals and individual student blogs that have varying levels of transparency and make it easy for teachers to monitor and/or moderate workflow at every level. Now I’ll be honest that I haven’t dug into the finished product as much as I need to, so I can’t yet vouch for the full execution of the ideas, but I will say that the intent was to create the type of environment that would allow teachers and students the ability to work in private or public and would create some avenues for individual feedback among them. You can get a list of the features here.
The free version of the site includes 2MB of space for each student up to 50 but includes Google ads. For $8.95 a month, you get 25MB of space for each student up to 100 sites with no ads and some other options.
If you do give this a shot, let me know what you think.
This isn’t much different from doing it with SuprGlu (in fact it may not be as elegant) but since it’s the first use of a public Google Reader page to collect a classroom full of student blog posts that I’ve seen, here’s a link to it. The posts are from a 6th grade social studies class whose teacher Mike Hetherington is “mother blogging” here and offers up some pretty good “rules for blogging,” a wiki, and some podcasts (though nothing recent.)
Mike latest post on his blog is, I think, another great example of a teacher using a blog to build community among his student bloggers.
An encouraging headline (there seem to be a few of these popping up) from the trenches that “Erasing Divide, College Leaders Take to Blogging,” though a closer read shows how tenuous and how timid these first steps are.
While some colleges and their presidents have seen their reputations shredded on student blogs, and others have tried to limit what students and faculty members may say online, about a dozen or so presidents, like Dr. McGuire, are vaulting the digital and generational divide and starting their own blogs.
Veterans of campus public relations disasters warn that presidents blog at their peril; “an insane thing to do” is how Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who advises universities and their presidents in contract negotiations, describes it. But these presidents say blogs make their campuses seem cool and open a direct line, more or less, to students, alumni and the public.
Still, part of getting through to the other side is wallowing in the disruption for a while.
If nothing else, this trip has reminded me how much fun it is to work with kids and how I really love to be in an environment where I can be serious and be really silly at the same time. All of the kids that I met this week in Liverpool and Bolton just sparkled about the idea that they could begin to be a part of a more global network of learners (even though the phrasing might have been a bit different.) And yesterday back in Liverpool, we got about twenty more of them up and running with blogs. If you get five minutes or so and could do a quick read of a couple of them and leave comments, I’m sure that would go a long way to helping them sustain their work. (Now before you ask, we reminded them over and over not to use their full names or identify themselves, but obviously, some didn’t listen.) And in an attempt to start capturing more of this in video, here’s a little snippet of one of the kids in the group.
The bad news, if there is any, is that as they were leaving, one of the girls turned back and said “Now I only hope our teachers let us use these…” Now there’s an idea.
Tim Lauer posts today about Moving to Drupal to create a more complex and flexible blogging/learning management environment for teachers at his school. I have to admit that Drupal
is not something I know very much about other than it seems to be very customizable depending on your work flow requirements. (There are times I wish my brain had a better understanding of code and programming, and there are times I’m glad I don’t.) Tim writes:
I am really excited about using Drupal as a basis for web based student and teacher interaction. Drupal has a host of features that will allow us to have students and teachers use Drupal to manage the workflow of assignments and student response to assignments. For example each of our 4th and 5th grade teachers will have a blog which she will use to post assignments and announcements to students. Each 4th and 5th grade student will have a Drupal based blog that will live behind our firewall.
The student blogs in Drupal will be designed so that the left sidebar will host an aggregator that will pull in the last two assignments from each of the teachers and post them on the sidebar. (see graphic) When this feature is enabled in Drupal each of the aggregated posts also has a little button next to it which show up when a student is logged in. When the student clicks the button, the teacher assignment blog post is captured and quoted in a new student blog post. The student can then continue to write his or her post in response to the assignment.
Sounds like a pretty nice work environment for the students.
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.
Anne pointed to this pretty amazing exchange that occurred on one of her student blogs recently, and it’s an interesting and effective example of how involved parents can contribute to their childrens’ learning in these more transparent spaces. I wonder how many teachers actively invite parents to at minimum read and perhaps respond to the work that their children are doing in their blogs. I know when I was in the classroom, I made a point of letting parents know what the URLs of the blogs were, but I left the decision to have parents comment on the sites up to the students themselves. Since it was high school, most opted not to let that happen. But a few did, and while the responses were not many, almost all of them were helpful, instructive, and relevant. And I do think for the students who allowed their parents to contribute it was a positive experience, especially for the parents who like the opportunity to be more involved.
Anyway, it’s nice to see such great discussion happening on student blogs. It’s rich, personal and, in this case at least, adds a great deal to the topic.
The Higher Ed BloggerCon seemed like a pretty cool idea when it was first announced and it’s absolutely fulfilling my expectations, through Day 3 at least. It’s a month long event that features two screencasted presentations a day, and it kicked off this week with the teaching strand. I’ve learned something from everything that’s been posted thus far and I’m really looking forward to what Ewan and James have on tap for Friday. Some pointers so far:
Mark Ott’s presentation on screencasting was good, and the discussion afterwards even better. Take away ideas: Using teacher created screencasts to review material for exams and asking students to take teacher generated podcasts and mix in their own recorded reactions to the content.
Tyler Magee’s work using blogs to connect marketing classes in China and her own students provides a clear framework on how to set up collaboration online. Take away ideas: Creating community like this to study collaboratively takes a fair amount of planning and nurturing, but it pays off in the end (at least in this case.)
Nicole Ellison and Yuehua Wu of Michigan State University shared the results of “from one of the first empirical studies exploring whether online writing offers a true pedagogical advantage over traditional writing projects submitted on paper.” The result? Pretty mixed, and not statistically telling for the most part. Students spent more time on the paper assignment compared to the blog assignment. But generally, students said the blog was a postive experience, and more thought it was a more effective use.
In “Blogs for Learning,” Ellison and Ethan Watrall talk about an upcoming website with online resources for teachers and students who want to engage in academic learning. (The site will go live this fall.) In some primarily anecdotal research that they’ve done, they identified these problems with student blog use:
1. It felt like busy work or a chore because of a lack of interest in the class, time pressures, irrelevance, or a perception that what they wrote was not being read. 2. It was too overwhelming to read all of the posts. 3. They had trouble interacting with other students’ blogs because they felt uncomfortable or because there was nothing of interest to comment on.There is another session on copyright and podcasting that I haven’t gotten to yet. And tomorrow, it’s wikis and nomadic desktops.
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Great articulation by Kevin Clark of a really important shift in thinking that we have to get to:
Politicians often rationalize technology initiatives by saying “Were educating our students for the future, they need to know how to use technology for their future professions.” Its not the technology that they need to know how to use. They can use it already…a lot better than your local representative. The connections and community-building that can occur within student blogs is what they need to know how to do.
This is similar to the interesting discussion from a post a few days about about mis-understanding blogs. It’s getting to be less and less about the tool and more and more about the opportunities the tools create, the “why”, not the “how.” And the “why we should use any of these tools” question is all about their capacity to build connections and community. It’s one thing to master the skills to create whatever artifact you want: PowerPoint presentation, claymation sequence, screencast, blog post…whatever. But it’s another thing entirely to know how to take that creation and use it to connect to people, ideally to other learners, and start conversations with them about the value and meaning of whatever it is we create. That’s the shift. Creation in the relative vacuum of the classroom can no longer be the final goal. It’s publishing. It’s teaching through that creation, connecting through that creation that we should be striving for.
So I’m not sure if this is the best online etiquette, but I feel compelled to share an e-mail I got from a long-time edblogger this morning with some really disturbing news. Basically, without warning, his district blocked internal access to all of his student blog and podcasting sites.
This afternoon, my district…officially blocked all of my 150 student blogs - both my online magazine and my 100 student blogs for my classroom. The urls you put in your book will work anywhere in the world except in my school, and maybe China.
Now that in itself is pretty ridiculous when you take it at face value. But it’s even worse when you understand, as this teacher does, that they’re not just blocking blogs. They’re blocking a community of learners and an innovative educator who are making great use of these tools. He says:
The blogs have energized my classroom this year. We’ve had over 11,000 hits to our student blogs and online magazine since October of last year. That’s 11,000 times that someone else is reading my students’ writing. We literally created a community of readers and writers.
And why did they do this?
As far as I can tell, the school’s technology officials had no valid reason for shutting me down. I have meticulously created the templates where we blog. I closely monitor all pages. None of the students are identified. Parents are aware of what we’re doing, and support it.
Surprised? I’m not. It’s becoming clear that we’re going to see this more and more, and while I’ll bet the district is going to raise the safety defense, it really has much more to do with losing control than anything else.
But what we have here, it seems, is also an opportunity for parents to stand up and come to the defense of good pedagogy. (What a concept…) And that might be a first. Isn’t it about time we read a newspaper or magazine article where parents and teachers and students are advocating for the learning that comes with less control rather than the ignorance that comes with ratcheting it up?
Buried deep in my gmail account I found an e-mail from John Hendron from the Goochland, Va. school district who wanted to alert me to the new podcast that he’s been doing for the district and the fact that the whole district has moved to blogs in a big way. Every teacher in the district will have his/her own blog, and student blogs seem to be close behind (though the audience will be restriced to the within the district.) I’m hoping I can do a Gizmo call with him to flesh out some of the details, but in the meantime, take a listen to his recent “We Blog, We Learn” podcast as he reads a letter he’s written to introduce his students to blogs.
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As parents wring their hands about Internet predators, many teens are worried about a different kind of online intruder: the school principal.
Students are blogging about schoolyard crushes and feuds, posting gossip about classmates on social-networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com, and sharing their party snapshots on public Web pages. Increasingly, their readers include school administrators, who are doling out punishments for online writings that they say cross the line.
The Bloggers’ FAQ on Student Blogging addresses legal issues arising from student blogging. It focuses on blogging by high school (and middle school) students, but also contains information for college students.
Bottom line, however, is that case law just hasn’t been blogified yet. In light of the current discussions, this part is pretty relevant:
Is My School-Hosted Blog a Public Forum?
A public forum is one where the student bloggers, not school administrators, have the authority to determine the content. Whether a school-hosted blog would be considered a public forum, and therefore not subject to Hazelwoodcensorship, is determined on a case-by-case basis, looking at the school’s policies and statements. If your school has an Internet Policy or Terms of Use for its site-hosting services, look it over carefully to see if the school has a right to edit or censor content.
And, of course, the ultra bottom line is that we need to get EVERYONE up to speed on this stuff as quickly as possible.
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