Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

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It’s a beautiful, sunny, 85-degree-day, and I should be outside, I know, instead of sitting here avoiding all the work I have to do: portfolio, weblog responses, etc. I’m feeling a bit burnt since prepping for my Media class is taking most of my morning, then teaching it all afternoon. I’m struggling with the weblog idea in Media, partly because I’m not in a computer lab per se, but partly because I don’t really have the time to set it up. Still, I could use it short term later in the quarter. As it is, I bet only about 25% of the kids have even visited the homepage, but at least I’m keeping it up as a lesson/homework site…that’ll help me next time.

Made some preliminary notes for the piece on J weblogs that I want to write. (If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free…) Just some big buckets that I want to make sure to cover:

  • Professional journalists like Gillmor, Sullivan, the Poynter Org. that are already using weblogs as a form of journalism. Mention the community journalism weblog from a few days previous as an example of what kids might do in their schools. (I should also talk to Xana about doing something like that online here. Tony?)

  • Some “research” about weblogs: history, forms, stats on use (Blogger has 500,000 weblogs but only about 100,000 that are actively updated) etc. as well as some examples of school-related weblogs (still slim pickin’s).

  • The community building/collaborative work aspects as evidenced by my J1 class weblog and my some of my J2 personal weblogs.

  • Notetaking, observation, process analysis aspects as evidenced by my J2 personal weblogs; beat potential as in my J1 personal weblogs; potential for expert interaction (Middlebury); Editing and response as per J2 class weblog (though admittedly these are not great examples); newspaper construction potential (as with altmuslim.com).

  • How to set up weblogs, with discussions of software (Blogger, Diaryland, Manilla), price, technical needs, etc.

I was happy to see that the one article I found really didn’t do justice to the potential here (read: I can do better.) Now it’s just a question of finding the time!