Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

“I Don’t Need Your Network…” Revisiting 2009

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deletecityNow that I finally have all of my 3,700 lifetime blog posts here on one site, from time to time I want to look back on some of the ones that drew the most commentary/discussion, or ones that I just think are interesting to reflect on.

In December of 2009, I wrote a post titled I Don’t Need Your Network (or Your Computer, or Your Tech Plan, or Your…), and over a couple of weeks, it attracted 152 comments. And let me just say, the comment thread is better than the post itself. (Seriously, if you have the time…)

So what’s changed in the 6.5 years since that post went live?

Short answer: Not as much as I think I expected. I mean, aren’t we still pretty much asking these questions?

  • If at some point in the fairly near future just about every high school kid is going to have a device that connects to the Internet, how much longer can we ask them to stuff it in their lockers at the beginning of the day?
  • How are we going to have to rethink the idea that we have to provide our kids a connection? Can we even somewhat get our brains around the idea of letting them use their own?
  • At what point do we get out of the business of troubleshooting and fixing technology? Isn’t “fixing your own stuff” a 21st Century skill?
  • How are we helping our teachers understand the potentials of phones and all of these shifts in general?

The ubiquity of phone access, even for kids who come from the lower end of the economic spectrum, has arrived. In developing countries, smart phones are becoming essential tools for learning, education, business, community and almost everything else. By the end of this decade, 5 billion people in the world will own a smartphone. Does that in-our-pocket access serve as an important context for the decisions we make in our schools and classrooms?

Let me just say (once again) that I’m struck by the level of respect and civility in what at times becomes a fairly heated discussion that takes many different directions and offers many different examples on both sides of the debate. That’s getting harder to find.

And on a personal note, I think this post comes from the period when I was at my pinnacle as a blogger. The Twitter effect was just about to take root. I was starting to blog less and Tweet more, a trend that I’ve been trying to reverse in the last few months. Either way, it’s definitely interesting having an archive to look back on.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

(Image credit: Seth Doyle)

“A Weblog Is…”

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Out of the blue a few days ago, I got a Facebook message from a former student of mine who said that she had found a video that Intel had made about our classroom use of blogs in 2004, one that was shown during a keynote at ISTE (or at that time NECC) in New Orleans that year. I’ve heard quite a few people tell me that this was their first introduction to “Web 2.0” in schools. Click on the pic to have a look. (It’s only 2:30 long.)

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Now aside from looking about three decades younger than I do now, and the big CRT displays in the background, what’s changed? How many classrooms right now are doing what we were doing a dozen years ago? To be sure, there’s a lot of teacher-centric stuff being discussed in this video. But so much of it still feels “edgy” and “innovative” as compared to current classroom use of technology.

The point is not that I was some amazing teacher; the point is, again, how slowly this stuff happens in schools.

Your thoughts welcomed…

Blogging On…

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After five years here at Tumblr, I’m moving my blog once again. Seems I tend to make these moves on my big blogversaries…it’s 15 years this month that I started writing online, and in that time, I’ve posted 3,658 posts at the Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr sites that I’ve had along the way. How do I know the exact number? Because this week I’ll be transferring over to a new WordPress site that will bring together all of the posts from those blogs in one place. Pretty cool, for me at least, to have all those tidbits of thinking and learning at one searchable domain that I can control, hopefully, forever.

This transfer is not without it’s complications, however, and try as I might (and with the help of some knowledgable friends) I’ve been unable to find a relatively easy way of getting the comments from these various sites to port over into the new one. I was able to get 16,000+ comments from my Weblogg-ed.com WordPress site, and to be honest, they are part of the heyday of my blogging and have great meaning to me. Unfortunately, my Disqus comments on my Tumblr site may be lost, which saddens me. (Still working on this if anyone has ideas…) But at this point, it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make in order to get my house in order. And of course, lots of links from around the web will also break (I think.) Such is Web life, I guess.

As always, I sincerely thank all of you who have been reading my entries over the years. It’s been an incredible learning journey that I’m looking forward to continuing at my new blog when it goes live hopefully Wednesday or Thursday. Things have changed greatly over the years; there are new venues where I’m writing and posting, there are new audiences to build, and there are even more interesting and important conversations around the present and future of education that we need to have. I’m still learning and evolving and trying to make sense of the chaos that’s happening around us. But more than at any point in my life, I’m committed to engaging in conversations that are focused on making schools better places for learning for our kids and for our teachers. I started as a tools guy 15 years ago; today, I’ve moved, obviously, to a much different space. Here’s to continuing to grow and learn and evolve with you moving forward.

Why Blogging is Hard…Still

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So at some point in recent weeks the blog-post-o-meter rolled through 3,000, and if I’m even close in my estimation that the average length of posts over the last seven and a half years has been around 3-400 words, that suggests about 1 million words of writing and reflecting and thinking here. That’s a pretty staggering number in my feeble brain.  You’d think that after all of that output this publishing thing would be almost as easy as breathing.

Well, it’s not.

I’m reminded of this because of conversations we’ve been having of late with team leaders in PLP. While the successes are many and impressive, a good number of people still find the thought of publishing to an audience, even a relatively small, private audience of like-minded souls, to be too daunting. It’s just way outside their comfort zone, and they just believe that their contributions would either not be relevant, interesting or useful. It’s hard to nurture these folks, to convince them to take small steps, to help them see the potential upside. And I really believe that there is an upside to sharing what you know and do with others; it’s the foundation for building learning networks.

But here is the thing: no matter how you slice it, blogging is a risk. And it’s a risk not just because you are putting yourself out there for the world, but because unlike many other types of writing that we do, it’s unfinished. At least that’s the way it feels for me. I don’t KNOW very much for certain. But blogging isn’t about what I know as much as it’s about what I think I know, and I find that to be a crucial distinction. For me, it’s the distinction that constantly makes this hard. It’s also the distinction, however, that makes blogging worth it. The one thing that a potential global audience does more than anything else is create the opportunity to really learn through writing in various texts, through the conversation and feedback that ensues. I say this all the time, that while a lot of my learning occurs in the composing of the post (or whatever), most of it occurs in the distributed reactions (when they happen) after I publish.

One thing I do know is that when I write with a humility of not knowing I get a lot more learning in return. That plays out in my reading as well. I am not the greatest commentor on other people’s blogs (though I am working on that.) But I find I am much more compelled to comment on posts where the author is obviously testing unfinished ideas. Where that person is not simply saying “this is the way the world is.” I find those types of posts less compelling.

And, obviously, the other risk is that my “thin thinking” will not simply be responded to but will be ripped to shreds at the hands of those who disagree or who may be smarter or more wordly than I. (They number in the billions.) Fortunately, that has not happened very often here, with some notable exceptions. What is hard to convey to new bloggers and publishers is that the debate is almost always civil, and that those naysayers who denigrate and tear down what they perceive as ignorance are not worth listening to. They are not teachers. I welcome disagreement, but I will tune out those who voice it with cynicism regardless of the validity of their response. When I read those constant smirkers, I wonder if they would treat younger learners the same way? Luckily, it seems, few of them are in classrooms.

Despite all of this, for me, right now, the rewards far outweigh the risks. I just wish I knew better how to convey that to those who see the scales tipping steeply in the other direction. And I wish I could help them understand that the angst I still feel every time I press “publish” is a good thing on balance, not something to avoid as much as to embrace as a path to a greater awareness of myself and of the world around me.

(Image “Sanskrit Blogging on the Rise” by chucks.)

"Why Johnny's Professor Can't Read"

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If this article in Innovate (registration required) didn’t keep hammering the “N-Gen” meme and all the requisite star-struck statistics and high-fallutin description so hard it would have been a lot more fun to read.  But the bottom line thesis is still important for all educators to consider:

Much in the same way that Rudolph Flesch’s 1955 landmark book Why Johnny Can’t Read criticized the American educational system for not teaching phonics, we suggest that today’s instructors are missing an opportunity by not learning to read the texts of the Net Generation. Failing to recognize these texts as valuable tools in the teaching and learning process, professors dismiss an entire constellation of literacy skills.

And here is the crux of the problem:

…while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia, online social networking, and routine multitasking, their professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a time, and as an individual activity that is centered largely around printed text…Not having been raised in the world of the N-Gen student, then, presents some significant challenges for faculty members who must attempt to address the needs of a learning style they have never experienced, may know little about, and may be unable to comprehend fully because of their different skills in processing information.

What I like about the article is that it attempts to make a cultural case for educators to get up to speed, not necessarily an technological one (though, obviously, the two are tied.) Learning cultures have changed:

Many faculty members developed their writing skills in a print world where text took the conventional form of paragraphs on a page or was packaged as a book or an article, a story or a novel; its production was typically conceived of as a solitary act. Consequently, their previous experiences with and understanding of text are quite different from that of the N-Gen student, which may lead to profound misunderstandings. When instructors perceive linear, print-based texts as a benchmark, the N-Gen’s texts may, at first glance, fall quite short. However, these digital texts do not necessarily lack style, coherence, or organization; they simply present meaning in ways unfamiliar to the instructor. For example, a collection of images on Flickr with authorial comments and tags certainly does not resemble the traditional essay, but the time spent on such a project, the motivation for undertaking it, and its ability to communicate meaning can certainly be equal to the investment and motivation required by the traditional essay—and the photos may actually provide more meaningful communication for their intended audience.

Whoa. I can hear the screams now. Essay writing akin to collecting images on Flickr? Even I bristle a bit on that one. But the overall point is clear: We can do this all differently now, and to not get our brains around the shifts has some real implications, specifically in the ways in which it limits us from understanding what our students create and, more importantly, helping them to create and construct with the most effect. And, as has been observed many times here and elsewhere, one of the biggest shifts is the move away from individual knowledge to distributed knowledge built on collaborative and, I would argue, network literacies that are unfamiliar to most of us. (Not to say these kids are born with them, btw.)

Let’s face it, the percentage of educators that Johnny comes into contact with K-16 who are fluent at digital texts is maybe 10%. That doesn’t mean that Johnny won’t be able to figure it out on his own. (You know others have suggested that “literacy is natural,” though I do want to probe that idea bit further at some point.) But it does mean, I think, that we’re missing an opportunity to help Johnny make even more of his digital potential. And I’ll ask you, if you had the chance for your own children to have 100% of their teachers who understand these shifts, wouldn’t you want them to? I know I would. Doesn’t mean that we make everything that happens in the classroom digital or Web 2.0 or whatever else. There are plenty of things worth doing the way we’ve been doing them for a long while. But for my kids to have teachers who don’t have a choice in the matter because they just “don’t get” digital environments is unacceptable.

Blogging Ethics

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Just a quick pointer to a post by Jeff Jarvis who has some interesting observations about blogging ethics in the context of linking and quoting from other sources. Seems the Associated Press has attempted to get some bloggers to stop using pull quotes (even as short as 35 words) from its stories and, somewhat understandably, the blogosphere is rebelling. Jarvis is leading the charge, and describes the ethic of link and quote as this:

It says to our readers: Don’t take my word for it, go see for yourself. And: Here’s what the source said; I won’t rephrase it but I will quote it directly so you can see for yourself.

I’ve always thought that this was one of the powerful qualities of blogging, the ability to send the reader back to the original to see the context for the writing. It’s what made me love teaching journalism with blogs, because it was so easy for me to follow my students’ line of thinking, but because it also gave me a great opportunity to talk about the issues of plagiarism and fair use and copyright with my kids. And, like Jeff, it’s what I want and expect now from traditional journalism, whether newspapers or magazines. It’s an expectation that makes print more and more difficult for me to read. It’s an expectation that I have of just about all non-fiction writing.

What’s interesting is that when I teach blogging workshops, this concept is not an easy one for people to wrap their brains around. The ease with which we can link and connect ideas makes this vastly different from the analog world. And the importance of links in connecting people is one of the foundational points in all of these discussions.

The continual disruptions to traditional journalism continue to fascinate me, another reason that I’m really looking forward to PDF next week.

A World of Oversharing

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From the “Do We Really Want Our Daughters to Learn This on Their Own?” Department comes this excerpt from the cover article of the Sunday Times Magazine this week titled “Blog Post Confidential“:

Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade’s reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.

One girl’s careening story about enlightenment when it comes to telling to much on her blog (and others doing the same.) A story for our times.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I read this story, and as I read almost anything having to do with kids or young adults trying to navigate these spaces if they wouldn’t have a better time of it had they had teachers and adults who were modeling and guiding them on how to do it well…

Student 'Twitters' His Way Out of Egyptian Jail

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From CNN:

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted that he was being held.

No wonder we take kids’ cell phones away from them in school…

Blog Commenting Evolves

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So the cool news here is that the CommentPress project that’s been spearheaded by the folks at The Institute for the Future of the Book is about to evolve into something that I think will be greatly useful for educators using WordPress blogs in their own practice or with their students. For the uninitiated, CommentPress is currently a WordPress template that allows readers to leave feedback not just on posts as a whole but instead on each individual paragraph in the post. That in iteself has creates all sorts of potential, but it does mean making an entire blog capable of doing that, which you many not always want. So here’s the news: in the near future, the CommentPress functionality will be released as a plugin, meaning bloggers will be able to select individual posts to have paragraph level commenting without making the whole blog subject to that.

Just off the top, that creates some cool possibilities for student feedback on each other’s posts and for deconstructive feedback on teacher provided models in terms of writing instruction in general. And it also enhances the idea of “connective writing” in that I really think we need to help our students use in their practice. Personally, I can’t wait to install it here so you guys can really pick apart my ideas.

Finally, if you want to participate in a pretty interesting experiment using CommentPress, check out the new book “Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Gamrs and Software Studies” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto fame. Here’s the teaser:

Expressive Processing is the name of my forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press. Now is the time, in traditional academic publishing, when the press sends the manuscript out for peer review — anonymous commentary by a few scholars that guides the final revisions (and decisions). As Jeff Young reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, we’ve decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: asking the Grand Text Auto community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.

Noah, who is a professor at UC San Diego, is asking readers to do an open review at the paragraph level using CommentPress. It’ll give you a chance not only to get a read on what looks to be ain interesting work but to experiment with this new blogging tool as well.

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Looking for Student "Blogging"

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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.

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Reading Ideas Instead of People, Take 22

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Google Reader now makes recommendations and, more importantly, relays some data on how many posts occur on those unsubscribed to blogs per week (down to the tenths, btw.) And it’s that last part that gives me pause. I wonder if there is a way to analyze the blogs that I am currently subscribed to in terms of posts per week. Since I’m now in Prius mode and all about data driven decision making (for certain things) I started wondering if there is a pattern to my subscriptions. A very quick, unscientific, first impression look through my feeds shows that the vast majority of them return about 5 posts a week and that very, very few have more than 7-8.

And so here is the thing. On my “Google Reader Recommended List” were a couple of widely read edubloggers that I’m not subscribed to, and when I looked at the average number of posts per week data, I winced: 16.4 and 14.8 respectively. Those numbers absolutely preclude me from subscribing. It’s too much. I’m figuring that the best of those blogs will be filtered by other bloggers who I am subscribed to, and in practice, that’s precisely what happens. (There were links to both of those blogs that came through my reader this morning.)

Which begs the further question that Stephen Downes raised a while ago and that continues to niggle at my thinking: Should we approach all of this more toward reading blogs (and the people that write them) or reading ideas, no matter where they come from? It’s not totally an either or, I know. And there are nuances and complexities to both. But I’m starting to toy with the idea of taking most of the names out of my aggregator and moving toward tracking concepts and tags. What kind of effect do you think that would have? (I have some ideas that I’ll chuck into the comments.)

This all coming on the heels of closing out the first month in three years where I posted fewer than 10 times to my blog. Hmmm…

(Photo by Arlette)

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MicroCommenting

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Just a brief on a development from the folks at Future of the Book. They’ve created a new WordPress theme that allows for comments to be left on each paragraph, not simply at the end of the post. Huge potential there from a teaching writing standpoint and from a focusing the conversation standpoint. If you want to see it in action, check out McKenzie Wark’s book “GAM3R 7H30RY” and you’ll get a great idea of how it works.

Now I just need to find somewhere to get the theme installed so we can play…

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This Makes My Day

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Don’t get me wrong, NECC is great this year. But he highlight of my week was an e-mail I got from one of my former students who has a novel coming out this fall. Seems I played a small role in saving her from a dreary life as an investment banker and helped nudge her toward a professional writing career. (Financially, of course, this was a dreadful mistake.) Absolutely gave me a warm fuzzy, and made me, just for a few minutes at least, long for the classroom and the kookiness and creativity and angst of teenagers. Diane was a great one.
And the best part? She’s got a blog, too.

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Blogging Environments

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So, certainly things have developed over the last few years in terms of blogging tools for educators. And it seems that more and more of the platforms are gearing themselves specifically to address the calls from teachers for varying levels of transparency, safety, etc. I remember way back in 2002 we chose to install Manila because it was one of the few to allow differing levels of public-ness (if that’s a word) even though at the time the process was pretty clunky. But today, that’s not the case any longer. And in the last couple of days I’ve seen some blurbs on some even more ed-centric options that are beginning to provide some real choices.

For instance, Edublogs has just announced a plugin that makes blogs private to all but registered and logged in Edublogs users. (Full disclosure: Edublogs hosts this blog in exchange for the ad at right.) And Bill Fitzgerald just announced that he’s released DrupalEd for free download. Add those to recent releases by 21Classes and even the new Blogger, David Warlick’s ClassBlogmeister, and even Vox, and all of a sudden, there’s much more to think about. (And btw, Manila is still around…)

So I’m wondering what teachers in the trenches are using right now. And I took literally 30 seconds to put up a new page at Support Blogging where we collectively might start to make a menu of the options. (I’m sure I’ve missed some.)

The good news is that we have some options out there to explore if we want to do that.

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"A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs"–NY Times

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The front page of today’s New York Times features a story about the attempts of Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales to create a set of guidelines for “Web Civility” in the light of what happened with Kathy Sierra and others.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

Should we feel lucky, I wonder, that a sense of civility has pretty much been the norm in this community to date? Obviously, since most all of our conversations in some way revolve around students, I think this whole process will be important to follow as it plays out.

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Teacher Blogging Survey

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Jeff Felix of UC San Diego is doing research for his Ed.D. and sent along this request:

If you are a teacher who uses a blog in the classroom, please join your peers and take a short, simple survey! This survey will help other teachers to better understand the powerful benefits of blogging with their students. It will also help them avoid many of the travails that you went through! Take the survey now; it will take less than 10 minutes! Click here to take the survey.

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Blogger "Next Blog" Solution?

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So I’ve been bumming since the Blogger Beta went live and the old hack that would get rid of that potentially dangerous (at least for classroom teachers) “Next Blog” button from your blog stopped working. But yesterday in one of my presentations here at NCCE, Glenn Malone offered up a solution. Problem is, I can’t get it to work on my MAC, but I think it might be user error on my part.

Here is the work around that Glenn offered (and Glenn, if you read this, please follow up in the comments if I get any of it wrong.)

1. Go to the Gecko&Fly site that has some new Blogger Beta Templates and choose one you like.
2. Click on the link to visit the template page.
3. Download the template code.
4. Unzip the file and open up the code in a text editor and copy it. (Here’s where I get stuck and need help from MAC users…see below.)
5. Open up your current template in Blogger, select all and paste the new template code over it. Save it.

Here’s my problem…I can’t seem to open the code for some reason. With some of the templates, when I unzip the file and click on what extracts, it tries to open it in some game application. Strange. And when I do get a file that will open in the text editor, it’s not xml…it looks like a web page. So I’ve never been able to get to step 5. Any ideas?

UPDATE: Thanks to Dan Meyer who e-mailed with the final step. Just paste the following into the CSS of the template.

#navbar-iframe {
height: 0px;
visibility: hidden;
display: none;
}
(I wonder if that works with Classic Blogger as well?)

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June 11, 2001: "Let's see if I can start a log…"

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For a variety of reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about blogging as an act, my love of it, my frustration with it, my history with it. In that spirit, today my brain wandered a bit, trying to reconstruct how exactly I came to blogging, what my first post was, and what the impetus was behind this amazing relationship I’ve had with it. I’d thrown some time at this before, searching through my Blogger archives, the Wayback machine, trying to find the very first words I blogged, but with no success. But today, I had one of those “doh” moments, realized it had been there right in front of my face all along, and finally found it.

So, just so I get the chronology down, I hope you’ll indulge me in a little personal blogging history. (Or not, of course…) Piecing it together now, I find hugely interesting the process I worked through in my own practice with all of this.

So, yeah, June 11, 2001 it starts. Taken out of context, those first words give this whole story a more romantic (if it could be that) feel than it deserves. It turns out the first blog I created was in the “Nerdy Books Journal” which I started during the year I took off from school to help Wendy launch her books. I kept work notes and links as we tried to market and make connections. As it turned out, when I went back to school that fall, the blog pretty much died.

Exactly a month later I started the School Stuff blog which was basically just a personal link/notes blog that I kept up for about six months. Then, on October 23, 2001, I started my first class blog for my Beginning Journalism kids:

Welcome to the journalism blog!

I’ve set this up as a place where you can come if you need to find information about class, about journalism, and about the world. I’ll be posting homework information here regularly; you can find it at the top of the left hand column. I’ll also be posting links, and from time to time I might just throw out some of my own feelings about stuff that’s going on.

You can post here too if you like. Just let me know if you would like to get access. Your names will get posted with each entry, and I have administrative control over content. It would be another way you could contribute to our understanding of journalism and to show effort on your part. Let me know if you want to give it a try.

I’ll be updating this a lot in the next few days, and you guys are going to be my guinea pigs for some other stuff over the next couple of weeks. I know you’re happy. Bear with me, okay?
If you want to set up your own Blog, (I love Blogs!) I’ll be happy to help.

I love how tentative that sounds now, looking back. In all honesty, it makes me nostalgic as all get out, that experimentation phase, not knowing exactly what I was doing or where it was going to go. It’s what I miss most about being in the classroom, without question.

On November 13 of 2001, I started a class portal blog for my Web Pages and Portfolios class.

Please bookmark this spot as it will be the place where you can check for updates on assignments, links to cool sites and information about page creation and design, and links to your own personal weblogs.

Scanning the posts, I remembered that I had them set up their own blogs at Diaryland (which, I’m amazed to say, is still in existence.) They were the first of my students to have blogs.

About a month later, my first really personal blog was born, and I do mean personal. In fact, I’d forgotten just how personal some of the posts were at the very beginning. That was back in the day when I never thought anyone was going to be reading anything I wrote anyway, so I figured baring my soul was perfectly ok. (Um, no, not linking to that one.) After I got my first couple of comments, I changed course pretty quickly. That site did eventually turn into Weblogg-ed about a year later.

Then, on January 25, 2002, I started yet another blog, this one for my Journalism 2 students aimed more toward discussion and actually getting kids involved in a learning community online:

Welcome to the Journalism 2 Weblog where we will carry on a conversation about this class and about journalism as a whole. I’m expecting you to get in here and add to the conversation twice a week. That means an average (read: “C” for you grade grubbers) effort on your part would be around 15-20 meaningful posts over the next nine weeks. The more the better. (Remember the word meaningful,however.) A weekly topic will be posted in the left-hand column to get you started, but if you want the big bonus points, post here on your own. Find interesting articles or links that you think the class would be interested in and add them with a bit of comment or question. For a good example of what I’m talking about, see Metafilter. Debate is encouraged, but remember, be civil. I’ll try to enter the conversation too. So have fun with this and use it as a way to push your learning about journalism, the news, and the world around you.

Oooo…the grade thing hurts! But, I have to tell you, reading through some of those early posts from my kids, I can understand why this whole blogging thing bit me so hard. I mean seriously, read those very first three posts and you’ll see what I mean. And as I quickly scanned through some of the 1,057 posts that we accumulated on that blog in those nine weeks (which is amazing in itself) I am floored by the amount of thinking and linking those kids were doing. That was a very uncertain and scary time (as if today isn’t…) and it’s neat to read the kids working through it.

And that was it…I was hooked. I started blogs for my yearbook kids, my softball team, and the next fall I cajoled the technology guys to install Manila on one of our servers. That September we did the Bees, and my classes went paperless. They’re still serving up over 500 sites at my old school…pretty cool.

(Note: Just in case you got this far, I ended up having to re-templatize most of those old blogs today since they were all pointing at old servers which were long gone. Thank goodness Blogger let me push them back over to Blogspot…)

(Photo “Brace for Impact” by Big-E-Mr-G)

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I Blog, Therefore…

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I’m a geek, I know. But I just loved this post on “blogging restructures consciousness?” by Ben Vershbow at if:book. I mean really, really loved it for a lot of geeky reasons, not the least of which is that it models everything I love about blogging. It’s a topic that I have a deep affinity for and probably would never connect to in physical space or through traditional publishing. It’s a topic that resonates with my own search…does blogging literally change who we are? It’s a post that synthesizes a lot of different ideas from disparate sources, all linked of course. And it’s a post that challenges my brain; these ideas are just out of my reach without doing some mental stretching. Ben’s obviously crafted this essay with a great deal of thought from a bloggers’ perspective.

And in terms of the ideas, mull on this a bit:

The kind of communication that he and his fellow rhetoricians have been orchestrating in recent years in the blogosphere — not to mention parallel developments elsewhere with wikis, message boards, social media, games and other inchoate forms that feel as much like public spaces as documents — has a speed and plasticity that approaches oral communication. A blog post isn’t so much a finished opus as a lump of clay that readers and other bloggers collectively shape through comments and discussion. Are these new technologies of the word (and beyond the word) restructuring consciousness?

And this thought provoking description from the blog that spurred Ben’s post:

After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned. My interior monologue has virtually disappeared. I no longer have aesthetic-based epiphanies, and I almost never concern myself with examining internal passions or emotions anymore. Blogging has not just changed the activities in which I engage–the activities in which I engage in order to be a successful blogger have profoundly altered the way my mind operates and the way I conceptualize my agency in relation to others. In effect, I do not exist in the same way I once existed.

Whoa. Now I know this is a guy who blogs 65-hours a week…extreme blogging, anyone? Even so, as I read the rest of that post, I wonder how my own 10-20 hours a week of blogging and writing (if not more) have transformed my own existence…

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Blogs as Research

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I’ve been playing around with Google Reader and just noticed an interesting thread between the first two posts that I shared to my public page. First, David Weinberger:

I came away realizing why media literacy programs often bother me. Frequently, the idea even is that we have to teach our children how to recognize the Internet sites that are as reliable and safe as what they’ll find in a library. That’s a useful skill, but the overall picture is wrong. If you want to know what’s going on in a field, the static and credentialed sources generally aren’t where you want to go. The credentialed sources are great for certain types of information—the solid and stolid facts, the commoditized information, the boring truth—but the real intellectual action is usually occurring in the blogs, newsletters, and forums. Confining students to the credentialed sites is likely to kill their interest and enthusiasm. [Emphasis mine.]

And then, from Alex Reid:

In any case, I will say this about research and blogging. When I read scholarship I encounter ideas that I find interesting and thought-provoking. However, if I were going to think about what I teach in my courses, much of the valuable information I rely on comes from blogs, and not only from academic blogs. If I want to know what teachers in new media were doing a year ago, I guess I could read a journal. If I want to know what people are doing now, what new developments are emerging, what is working and what isn’t, I would look at blogs. Wouldn’t you? [Emphasis mine.]

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see this conversation develop more fully on the K-12 level as well? What if we stopped blocking blogs and implicitly telling students that they aren’t reliable and instead start making them a part of our daily classroom practice? What if, as Joyce Valenza‘s matrix suggests, we start teaching our students to make good decisions about the content they encounter, to be effective editors? What if we modeled for them how to engage in the ideas instead of just consuming them?

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State of the EdBloggosphere–Survey Results

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Well, that didn’t take long.

Now I know this is all totally unscientific and probably doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but here are the results from the survey I posted Monday with some brief thoughts. I’d love to know what you think. (By the way, I screwed up in terms of allowing people to choose an answer AND comment…seems it was one or the other not both. So some of these “results” don’t add up to 100%.)

Question 1: What percentage of educators in your country would you guess are using Read/Write Web tools in their professional orclassroom practice?

56% of respondents said less than 10% of educators were using the tools, and another 19% said it was less than 25% (Many of the 24% of people who left comments noted that it was less than 10% in their countries.)

Observation: We have a long, long way to go. And any real tipping point is still a ways off.

Question 2: What is the chief barrier to implementing Read/Write Web tools in the classroom?

  • Lack of time: 17%
  • Lack of PD: 20%
  • Standardized Tests: 7%
  • Safety/Privacy Concerns: 6%
  • Technology Support: 10%
  • Lack of leadership and vision on a local, state or national scale: 18%

Observation: It strikes me that the two things I seem to hear most about, namely testing and safety concerns, came in at the bottom of the heap.

Question 3: What group do you think most needs to understand the potentials that Read/Write Web tools have for learningin order to bring about their use in the classroom?

  • Classroom Teachers: 50%
  • Administrators: 32%
  • Parents: 6%
  • Community Members: 1%

Observation: Not a great question, I don’t think. A pretty obvious answer.

Question 4: Which of the following tools do you currently employ in your professional/classroom practice?

  • Weblog: 92%
  • Wiki: 71%
  • RSS: 77%
  • Flickr: 42%
  • Social Bookmarking: 53%
  • Skype: 36%
  • Podcast 57%

Observation: Not really surprising…again.

Question 5: In general, how much of an effect do you think Read/Write Web tools will have on classroom practice 10 years from now?

  • Look the same: 2%
  • Classroom practice will look a bit different, but no fundamental change: 32%
  • Fundamental change: 40%
  • Transormation 19%

Observation: Actually, a bit more optimistic than I expected.

I posted all of the comments to a Google Doc page. Here are a couple I found interesting:

“As a College IT Director our students are beyond the tech/web2.0/Read&Write abilities of our faculty. We must adjust…or students will choose a ‘better’ school that provides these services and ‘talks’ to them with the tools they use.”
“I think the biggest problem at my school is that so many faculty members don’t know their way around a computer well enough to try 2.0 tools. They think I’m some sort of guru because I can connect a computer (set up monitor, plug in right sockets, etc.) and can do a bit with web pages. In fact, blogging and wikis are so far beyond them, it’s a little scary.”

“I am a Media Specialist, former Computer Applications teacher who could not use Read/Write tools due to filtering policies. The transfer was so that I could become more of a voice for change in the way we do business in the area of technology use…it is not the technology, it is what the technology allows students to do. This shift is ironically difficult to realize in an educational setting.”

Maybe more later…

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Blogging From Guantanamo to My Classroom

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From the “15 Minutes of Fame” and the “It Feels Weird Actually Posting About This” Departments comes news that this month’s issue of Teacher Magazine is not only carrying a feature length story about yours truly but has for some insane reason actually decided to put my picture on the cover under the heading “The Blogvangelist.” (Free registration required.) I’m flattered, obviously, and somewhat embarrassed by the attention. (My kids, however, think it’s cool and actually took out the garbage this morning.) Regardless, the story does focus primarily on the work, and includes quotes from such luminaries as Alan November, Darren Kuropatwa, Anne Davis, Sree Sreenivasan, Chris Lehmann, and others.

But the best part, to me, however, is a sidebar that the writer Patrick McCloskey put together after interviewing my former student Meredith Fear and her Pulitzer Prize winning journalist/mentor Scott Higham who worked together in her blog in my class a few years ago. First of all, I didn’t realize that Scott actually gave her feedback in her blog while he was in Guantanamo Bay working on a story about a secret CIA detention facility.

Whoa!

And this quote literally warms my heart:

“For me,” Higham reflects, “the benefit was being able to plug into the mind of a very sharp teenager and connect on a professional level across generational lines. I witnessed the evolution of her thought processes and writing skills as she dealt with feedback. Blogs allow a teacher to literally take their kids out into the world from classrooms anywhere in America. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

That’s the type of affirmation we can all share with those we’re taking this message to…

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Getting Closer…Another Student "Blogging" Example

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So here we have an example of a high school civics class blog by a student that is using the tool pretty well, I’d say. Especially just a few days into it. Once again, comments on Civics dude! are open, which has led to a pretty interesting exchange between student and unknown commentor. To guide you through it, here’s the original post, the comment, and the student’s response. I love this part from the student:

I think it’s so funny that someone I don’t even know who it is (Gayatri?) is posting comments on my schoolblog. I see how it can be very upsetting reading a highschool kid’s view on what America is doing. It is truly not my meaning to sound ever-knowing, or wise. Let’s face it, I’m seventeen and I don’t know 1% of what’s going on in the world. But I think that not understanding that I am a student trying to learn and expand my world, is pretty narrow-minded, as Gayatri said I was.

This is getting closer, I think, to what can happen…writing in response to reading for real audiences.

And by the way, Sanna’s teacher, I think, provides a great model for teachers to follow in terms of pointing to good blogging work by their students. This is how you start modeling the connections, by reading and linking. I snipped one such “mother blog” post below…click it to go read the comments.

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