weblogg-ed

From the “Building the Compelling Case Department” comes this piece in the Harvard Graduate School of Education magazine Ed. about how students are already learning in social networks, why their emerging skills matter, and why educators must engage these tools themselves to help students use them to their full learning potential.

A study on the “participation divide” in digital content creation suggests that online publishing remains unequally distributed by social background, creating a two-tiered system of contributors and consumers—and underscoring the need to teach these technologies in all classrooms, especially in lower socio-economic areas.

We keep finding ourselves using less and less paper in our lives, yet schools and workshops are still overflowing with it. If our students’ futures won’t be paper-based, we need to start doing as much as we can to get off paper now.

We’ve been running into school Internet filters more than usual lately, and the problem seems to be getting worse instead of better. When teachers and even administrators can’t reach basic tools like Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, or Wikipedia, it not only leaves students unprepared for the unfiltered world they actually live in, it also undermines the professionalism of educators. The only way students and teachers will ever really master the Web is by being allowed to use it.

So the unending debate over whether or not reading on the Internet is “really” reading gets played out  once again in this New York…

We’ve liked Twitter since we first started playing with it last year, but there are some things that are really starting to annoy us about these 140-character “conversations” that we’re carrying on there, server issues notwithstanding.

Reflecting on unconference-style gatherings at BloggerCon and EduBloggerCon, and questioning whether we’re really moving beyond tools and vendors toward deeper conversations about how learning, networks, teaching, and schools are changing.

Reflections on Jeff Jarvis’s take on blogging ethics, the power of linking and quoting, and how these practices shape journalism, teaching, and expectations for non-fiction writing.