Well, here’s a first. One of our English teachers who has been using Weblogs behind closed doors for his creative writing classes told me that one of his PIPs (Personal Improvement Program) for next year is to incorporate blogging (noun AND verb) into his Media Literacy classes! He really wants to explore the use of Weblogs as a research tool, but he’s also interested in seeing what happens when students read, think, synthesize, write, respond and read some more in terms of pushing their understanding of the topic. We talked briefly today about how regular blogging and responding to other’s blogging might just serve to help students make learning more relevant and therefore more meaningful. (Don’t tease me…) And we talked about how with this particular class, at least, there is an opportunity to write about an area in which they are interested, maybe even passionate about like gender issues, violence, politics…whatever. This might be a great opportunity to do some action research. We’re going to get together over the summer to formalize it a bit more, but I’m really psyched that he took the initiative to make this a part of his professional development plan.
Key is, as Robert Scoble says, is that passion part.
Lately people have been asking me “how or when does weblogging and/or syndication go mainstream?” It goes mainstream when everyone in society gets passionate about something. If someone isn’t passionate about SOMETHING they won’t get weblogs. Hence, the numbers of weblog authors and readers will remain small, when compared to overall society. (Via Dave Winer)
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