Welcome Scott Moore to the ed-blogger list from the University of Michigan whose blog already has me learning. He’s thinking big blog ideas…like over 1,000 students in a section big. Oy. At least he’s thinking like Barbara Ganley in terms of highlighting the best posts from him mini blogosphere in his own course blog. But 1,000 students. Sheesh. Hope he has a lot of teaching assistants…

Anyway, Scott writes about the Cluetrain Manifesto as it applies to education, and I think the vision is, as they say, spot on.

The Cluetrain authors point out that the internet has restored the original conversational dynamic of the marketplace, where individuals exchange information in their authentic voices. Similarly, in education the internet can bring the conversational dynamic to large (distributed or not) courses, where individuals exchange ideas, research, and opinions online.

Applying the concepts of the Cluetrain to education, the internet heralds the end of “education-as usual,” ending information asymmetries forever. “Education-as-usual” is characterised as both top-down control of students by a de-personalized university and a barrier erected between students and the university’s professors. In the traditional education model, lectures are one-way channels through which students are bombarded with information. Top-down, cookie cutter, de-personalized lecturing has become an annoying barrier to education, the opposite of a conduit to real learning.

Professors (and universities) that do not join the conversation will soon have no students to talk to. The internet enables students to talk about the professor amongst themselves. Encouraging professors to join in conversations with students enhances the professor’s credibility and increases the chances that the professor’s voice might be heard.

Weblogs offer a way for a professor to reclaim a place in the education of students using the professor’s authentic voice. Blogging helps a professor build a community around a course and increases his students’ commitment to the ideas discussed in the course. Blogging is individualistic, customized, and scalable. It originated in individual conversations and is a ground-up, grassroots phenomenon. Technology is changing the modern university.

The end of education as usual. Hmmm… Could we be at the beginning of the end? (Last night’s speech sure didn’t sound like it.) But I think we are at the beginning of the realization that the Internet is presenting new and valuable opportunities for learning, and that at some point, students and teachers taking advantage of those opportunities will overwhelm the idea that every student must learn the same thing at the same time at the same pace in the same place from the same person. More and more, teachers are beginning to connect these ideas, learn in different ways, see the potential. We are moving ever so slowly toward a more constructivist, collaborative, reality based form of learning, not schooling. And I really believe that as what happens in our classrooms becomes more and more transparent, the pressure to change will come from more people and more directions. It feels painfully slow, right now. But the fact that my blog roll is growing every day makes it real, and real change, fast or slow, is worth the effort.
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At NECC, Presenters from Innovative Video in Education (IVIE) are showing some great examples of student produced videos that speak to a “millenium student’s” need to use various forms of multimedia to facilitate learning.

They describe students as digital natives vs. digital immigrants. Adults are DSL –digital as a second language. Students want to learn with technlogy, with one anohter, online, in their time, in their place, doing things that matter. And the process of video supports that: brainstorm, story board, write/revise script, tape, edit final draft, publish. Video involves every aspect of a student’s creativity.

We can use video to reach some of the standards that we couldn’t otherwise achieve. And video production is supported by a wide variety of learning theory including constructivist, multiple intelligences, transfer and more. It’s active learning that sticks, that makes connections in the brain. In many ways that I’ll try to get into later, it parallels to what we can do with Weblogs, especially in the area of constructivist thought.

Some really amazing examples of ways to use video to facilitate learning. The website has most of videos for viewing.

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From the BBC comes this story about a school in England doing some large-scale stuff with Weblogs at an early age.

Children as young as seven in one British school are using weblogs as part of their normal routine, and are doing better than non-webloggers as a result, their teacher says.

If you read the article, you’ll see that the improvement is being shown in the IT area, as in copying and pasting. Now that’s great, but somehow I guess I was hoping there was some evidence of improvement in writing or critical thinking skills or something that they can’t get by doing it somewhere else. While the article sings the praises of blogging, it never really delivers anything more than general observations about what Weblogs seem to be able to provide in some situations. Nice, but…well, nice.

I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately, this need for some real classroom research. I’ve been thinking about broaching the idea with one of my English teachers, seeing if maybe I can finagle some duty release or something if she agrees to teach one class with blogs and another section of the same class without. We could take a look at levels of participation, frequency of edits, words written, lots of other data like that and try to come to some conclusions about what really happens when you introduce Weblogs into the mix. Of course, there are a ton of variables to consider, and I’m sure it would take almost as long to set up the study as it would to carry it out. Still…it would be nice to get some hard data.

(via Rick Barter) Samantha Blackmon at Purdue offers this reasoning behind her use of Weblogs with her students:

There are many reasons for blogs in the classroom. The one that stands out for me most as I use a blog in my summer gender and literature class is that students get the opportunity to write about the texts that we read and to see and respond to what others in the class are writing. They seem to find affirmation that they are puzzled by, frustrated with, amused by, or totally hating the same things about the texts.

She has a class blogging about Pride and Predjudice that gets to some of what she describes.
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(via Ray Schroeder) In light of my weekend at I-Law, I’m not surprised at the news that 53 percent of kids admit to downloading music even though 88 percent of them know its protected by copyright. But what did surprise even me was this:

But only 18 percent of the students surveyed said they learned about copyright law from a teacher or other educator.

That’s just amazing. And as I said the other day, it’s indicative of the changes that we need to make in our classrooms when it comes to helping kids understand and manage everything that the Internet means, from research to news gathering to p2p to community. In my perfect school, it’s a mandatory course on Information and Internet Literacy covering media and blogs and p2p and all that stuff. But that means that more and more teachers need to become literate in these areas too, and in turn, they need to model effective an appropriate use. This quote could have come out of my mouth, too:

“I believe students understand the concept of copyright, but have few models of appropriate behavior to follow,” said Jim Hirsch, associate superintendent for technology at the Plano Independent School District in Texas. “Xeroxing of printed works, videotaping, ‘TiVo’-ing, ripping CDs, scanning, et cetera, are all techniques used in the workplace and at home by adults–which provides the illusion of appropriate use.”

Maybe it’s a course kids could take WITH their parents…

(via David Weinberger)

Hi we are room 209. We are students in the Chicago Public Schools and we maintain this blog. This blog is a way of asking questions, writing about the things we are learning, discussing ideas from many sources, (books, blogs, letters, interviews) and reflecting on those ideas.

And the kids want our opinions on “Who is king of the jungle?” Another great example of an easy way to expand the classroom to include a variety of voices.
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All of a sudden today, I’ve seen about thirty comments put up on the old Secret Life of Bees site that we did almost two years ago now. Someone out there somewhere must be teaching the book and having students respond to my students’ posts. That happens every now and then, but usually not with such a flurry like today. By the way, the latest hit count on the site…867,366 with over 1,500 coming in the first 12 hours today. Still pretty amazing.

Jill Walker posts a copy of the Weblog review assignment she gives to her students to

“…become familiar with the blog genre, gain experience in writing for a web audience and develop your skills in describing, contextualising, interpreting and assessing websites.”

I’m realizing that many of the assignments of this type regarding blogs and blogging have gone uncollected. Might be good to start a list using my handy dandy Furl RSS feed.
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Nancy Peralta has picked up on the student blogging thread and points to some of her own reasons for keeping a Weblog, the main one being audience. I love her enthusiasm:

To me, blogging is all about the audience – it’s about the fact that there IS an audience. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t get any response from readers. I know because I’ve tried journaling about a dozen times and never kept it up longer than a week or two. It’s the interaction between my readers and I, my reading other blogs, and my ideas being picked up on other blogs and commented about that keeps me blogging. It’s the audience and community, the reading/writing connection, that makes blogging so fantastic for me!

I’m sure most of us wouldn’t be doing this in any sustained fashion if we didn’t think anyone was reading. Just look at the voice that we use in our posts. We’re all definitely writing to someone, and that motivates us (most of us) to write clearly and thoughtfully and relevantly (is that a word?) Audience dictates our selection of topic (Is this too personal? Is it too silly? Will anyone else care?), it dictates our tone (Is this readable? Is it too pedantic?), and it begs us to revise (Are there mistakes? Is this confusing?) I know I’ve referred to this before, but that Donald Murray philosophy is always at the core: good writing is a conversation with the reader. Audience matters. (Yesterday, in fact, I decided to check the referrer logs for our library Weblog, and wouldn’t you know, as soon as I forwarded the results to our librarians, there were a bunch of new posts on the site.)

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t get any response from readers.”
—Nancy Peralta

Nancy also points out, as have others, that student blogging starts with little or no audience, and least none that is not constructed for a particular blogging environment. But Nancy talks about a simple yet potentially effective idea for solving that problem in creating what she calls “blog alliances.” Hook up with other teachers whose kids are blogging and have them read and respond back. She’s done this with her students and Anne‘s kids with good success. In fact, I’ve done it with Anne’s classes with great success. But I think Nancy wants to push this idea to a wider circle.

I think there is some potential for this as more and more teachers start using Weblogs. Maybe we need some type of clearinghouse for teachers looking for other teachers to work with. Another good idea to put into the mix.

And by the way, if you really want to see some GREAT fifth-grade blogging, check out Emily’s site from Anne’s group in Georgia. She was one of the students that my journalists worked with last year in an early blog alliance we set up, and she’s just doing amazing things. It’s really inspiring. Now the big question is, will Emily be blogging in high school???
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From an e-mail from one of the project coordinators:

We are very excited about an online collaborative project that we will be starting tomorrow, Tuesday, April 13th. Four classes will be reading the novel, Sarah, Plain and Tall, two classes from Galloway Twp., New Jersey and two classes from Hazel Pattison Elementary located in Katy, Texas. This project provides students with an opportunity to discuss characters, predictions, and connections with students from various backgrounds and life experiences. After reading two chapters, students will document their journal entries by using a weblog, or online journal. This technology, allows participants to type their thoughts and instantly post them to the internet. Students have been assigned team numbers and will read and respond to their partner’s entries. Classroom teachers will also “highlight” postings within their classrooms and comment together as a class.

Obviously a lot of work has gone into the planning of this collaboration. Another cool project to watch…
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I’m heading to the desert for a few days to a) learn how to use our new student information system and b) escape this chilly, clammy, yucky spring we’ve been having in the Northeast so far. Hoping to maybe hook up with Alan Levine to do some blog talking. 85 and sunny tomorrow in Phoenix…have mercy.

Today may have been my last day in the classroom…my new supervisory duties will definitely preclude my teaching next year, and the prospects after that are mixed, as are my feelings. I have really loved working with kids in the classroom for the past 20 years. They never cease to amaze me in ways good and bad. But while I’m sincerely going to miss the interaction and the fun and the honor of teaching them, there are a few things I’m not going to miss, like the time investment needed to do a good job (and the little voice at the end of each term that the job wasn’t good enough,) like the Sunday night stress that comes along with trying to plan the week ahead, or like the papers (or posts) that made me wonder why I became an English teacher in the first place. I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to teach at a school that supports creativity and risk, and I feel equally lucky to have a new role that has really reinvigorated me in many ways. I’m sure I’ll find opportunities to work with kids in the future (there is much blogging to be done,) but for now, I can honestly say I’m looking forward to the break.

Seb picks up the recent thread and runs with it, building on Ken’s essential question about how we can utilize Weblogs for old and new uses.

If your main purpose is getting students to write more then a server based Webpublishing system has some interesting advantages but it could also be done in a very different way. And Ken has given us a few nice examples of how we might use this whole Webpublishing toolbox to essentially do things we have done before. So what are the things we do with personal Webpublishing that go beyond what we have done in formal educational settings before? What are the qualitative differences for your personal learning since you have started to spend some time putting your stuff out there?

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My Journalism 2 kids have been working hard all quarter on stories that they are trying to sell to real magazines, and as the quarter is coming to an end this week, I thought I’d post links here and ask for some feedback on their behalf. So, if you have a few moments, and one of the topics below piques your interest, I’m sure they’d appreciate a constructive comment or two via their blogs. When you get there, just scroll down to the bottom of their Weblogs and “Join Now” and then click ‘discuss’ below the post.

Meredith on why teenagers don’t care about the news.

Matt on teenaged video game entrepreneurs.

Devin on the importance (or lack thereof) of the SATs.

Erica on the latest pre-teen fitness craze.

Kristen on cheerleading as a sport.

Claire on the changes that legalized gay marriage may mean to schools.

Jenna on the struggles of mom and pop record stores.

Amelia on selling homemade jewelry.

Dana on teenaged shop-a-holics.

Whitney on spoiled kids.

From Yahoo News:

MSN Blogbot will aggregate content from hundreds of thousands of Web logs and index that content based on which Web logs are most popular and credible, Redetzki said. The service should go into beta soon, and Microsoft plans to introduce MSN Blogbot worldwide, she said.

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A couple of the teachers at my school have enlisted Lan Cao, the author of Monkey Bridge, to participate with their students in a Weblog discussion of the book. It’s along the lines of my Secret Life of Bees project last year. I still think this is one of the best classroom uses of Weblogs, bringing in authors and writers and experts from outside the class walls to work with students as everyone else gets to follow along. I know I haven’t written much about it, but my student who is working with the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist is having such a great experience. If you check out her site, click on the discuss links to see what he’s been writing. I’m learning a few things myself, and that is very, very cool.

I’ve come across a couple of posts recently that speak once again to the difficulty of making blogs work in academia.

Crawford Killian–My students, with a few exceptions, continue to avoid posting in their course blogs. My faculty colleagues are even more reticent. The blogs I left up last semester have been deserted by the students they were created for. So as a means of voluntary interaction, they leave a lot to be desired.

I’d have to agree. I’ve tried a number of different ways to get students and teachers to continue blogging after class or workshop is over with little success. It’s frustrating that they can’t share in the rewards that I find from blogging. Here’s another:

Aaron Campbell–We spent most of the time in class today discussing the difficulties of posting to our websites. Much of the recent inactivity on learner sites seemed to have stemmed from an uncertainty as to what was appropriate. One learner felt intimidated and confused about what to post. Another thought it was necessary to keep her posts academic and was spending ‘three days editing’ before posting. This led back to a discussion of what blogging was all about: process, not finished products and artifacts. The importance of engagement with the medium and what that entailed followed. It was postulated that consistent (meaning daily or every other day) reading, reflecting, posting, and commenting was important for generating the kind of cognitive momentum and conversational flow necessary for the greatest benefits to arise. The analogy of starting a fire by rubbing a wooden stick back and forth between the hands was used. If you operate in a stop and start mode, you’ll never generate the friction needed to bring flames into being. This is similar to the practice of vicara (a Pali/Sanskrit word) for sharpening concentration. As with what we’re trying to do, only by consistent and focused effort can one successfully incorporate blogging into our daily habits so that it becomes a part of the conscious mind and the benefits can follow. It only seems natural that in order for dialogue, conversation, online interaction, or ‘wierd debate’ (as James put it) to flourish, it needs consistent attention, energy, food. So it was recommended that these learners attempt to create a habit of posting daily or every other day, even if it be a just a sentence, an off-hand thought, or a link to another site. Eventually thoughts will flow and a greater level of comfort and ease with the new meduim should come about.

Another issue raised was that of public exposure. One learner stated that he was uncomfortable with how much to reveal about himself. The future consequences being ‘too exposed’ could be detrimental to his employement or releationships down the line. He found himself struggling with ‘self-censorship’, as he described it. This is really a dilemma, for what we think and say when we’re twenty-one-years old might differ significantly from what we will be ten years later. Yet to worry too much about the image we are creating when we publish online, stiffles our creativity and voice. There are no answers, other than to be as honest and sincere as we can. Each person has to find her balance with that.

I was especially struck by the “As with what we’re trying to do, only by consistent and focused effort can one successfully incorporate blogging into our daily habits so that it becomes a part of the conscious mind and the benefits can follow” line. I think maybe I need to articulate more clearly the benefits I’ve experienced…I don’t often go there with students. But as I’ve said before, and as Anne so clearly states here, blogging is work.

This makes me think about all the different blogging styles of our community. One of the reasons I started blogging was to improve my own writing. I’ve never really thought of myself as an especially good writer and it always takes me more time than I wish it would. I don’t just get an idea and then have the ability to quickly write about it. I have to think about it, read more, reflect again, and then write. Then I reread and am never really sure if I got it down how I meant it. I figured if I wrote more, I’d get better and surely I would be able to do it faster. I’d like to think my writing has improved (although I think I’m still too wordy) and I don’t think I am much quicker (and I would still love to have that skill!).

Cool Blog Tools

Tim Merritt points to Mandarin Designs which offers up a whole bunch of little tweaks to make your blog look more interesting (or more busy depending on your point of view.) So I’m playing a little bit. I feel another design change upcoming…
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A presentation by Joe Moxley, Patricia Roy and Anne Jones from the University of South Florida at the Symposium on 21st Century Teaching Technologies:

Weblogging offers teachers a unique way to engage students in the Composition classroom. As a tool, blogs allow students to post and archive their work in a way that is easy to use and access. As a genre, blogs offer students new rhetorical situations in which to communicate their ideas. Our work explores the various metaphors applicable to blogs — blog as journal, blog as news column, blog as annotated bibliography, blog as meeting place — in order to more fully realize the potential blogs have for preparing students for advanced learning and professional writing situations.

Wish I could have been there…
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Today, out of the blue, something really weird started happening in a couple of student Weblogs. The kids created the posts and entered titles leaving blank the URL lines which link the titles to somewhere. But we discovered that on three posts, the titles mysteriously got linked to here, here and here, all sites that list links to porno type places. Funny thing is when you click on any of those links, they just take you to more pages of links that look the same. No pictures, but lots of bad words.

Both kids deny doing it, and the teachers tend to believe them. I tend to believe them simply because the sites look so similar, and I would guess that dubrovia.net would be pretty strange for a kid to run accross. Has anyone heard, seen this happen before? Could there be some virus doing this? Any help appreciated.

So I had them tell me why they wanted to work with a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist this quarter, and while many of them did a good job, this response is why I love the profession.

I spelled out my blogging expectations to my Journalism 2 students yesterday. I drew somewhat from “Blogging for Learning” done by Richard Effland at Maricopa. His concept is to “build an ‘idea’ base and then reflect upon that in terms of what they feel they are learning.” He goes on to build in a collaborative group aspect to the process as well. I like this idea as well: “The Blogs are a means to establish a ‘data base’ for ideas and build upon these a series of higher level reflections all directed at channeling ideas into a recognition of what is being learned.”

I think this is a nice step forward. Seems that Richard is piloting this concept of learning logs for the college, and that the question he wants to answer is whether or not students believe Weblogs enhance their learning. I’d imagine that if that study proves positive, there would be a good deal of support for giving students Weblogs where they could capture and reflect and build upon the learning they do in all areas of the curriculum. (That’s a pretty mind-boggling concept, isn’t it? Think of the connecting we could ask our students to do…)

I framed it a bit differently with my students, though the concept of learning log is something I am emphasizing with them as well. I’m really interested in the “blogging as genre” aspect of this, so I’m asking them to really focus on the connections that they can make with the information they are gathering. This includes finding a deeper meaning to relevant personal experience that may tie into their topics. For instance, Claire wants to write a story about what it’s like for gay high school students who are taught a basically heterosexual sex ed curriculum. Where do they get their answers? What effect does this have? I would expect that in her Weblog, as she collects articles and research and interviews, that she would also bring in her personal observations and experiences with her gay friends, and that her blogging would reflect her own struggle with understanding the topic. If she can do that, if she can more consciously build on what she already knows and synthesize that to push her even furher forward, it would be very cool.

I keep thinking that if I frame it correctly, if I keep pushing them to examine their blogging in the context of their learning that the Weblog will reveal itself as a tool where learning is not only recorded but where it evolves. That whole meta-cognitive aspect that we basically ignore could really flourish in a Weblog. Maybe…

Met with the senior administrative team this morning to give them an update on where we are with our new school Website that we’re building around Manila sites. Everyone liked the look (thanks, Bryan), and everyone likes the concept of having more people creating content on the site. That’s the good part. Now comes the piece that I knew I would have to tackle at some point: how do we make sure that all of this distributed content is appropriate and correct and representative of the Star School that is Hunterdon Central? The easy answer is that we put the onus of appropriate, correct and representative content on those who are creating it. But as past practice has shown, while most of what is generated for public consumption from our school is of high quality, there are moments when what we create does not reflect the highest standard. I think that’s probably true in most schools and organizations. At the moment, the senior team is very sensitive to these kinds of issues, and so the subject turned to Weblog as Website process.

First off, we decided that until we get more comfortable with this, we’re going to turn off the comments. Since we haven’t found a way to review comments before posting, this wasn’t going to happen anyway. Maybe a year or so down the road we can start experimenting with reader feedback. My superintendent wants two levels of review for posts that are made by advisers or departmental folk or whoever might be posting. Ultimately, the district public information officer would push the final “publish” button. I don’t think this is unreasonable as once we get all the sites running my guess is we’re talking about maybe a dozen posts a day (which would make me very happy.) With the notification feature in Manila, everyone in the loop could be notified automatically when a new post is queued for approval. So, in general, I can see it working. But there are all those little in between steps that I have to figure out. Who approves what? How, when, where do I train all of them? What flak will I get from adding the review process to a lot of people’s plates? Who is gonna win Iowa?

I’m almost glad I’ve gotten to this step. It really has been the last kind of murky piece in the picture. I’ve got a pretty detailed process to write of how we get from idea to publish. Hopefully, when I’m done, we’ll really be ready to see if this works.

My brain is still lodged in “how to bring blogging as genre to the classroom in a meaningful, writing-centered way” mode. As I’ve said before, I think there are many characteristics of Weblog writing that potentially make it a valuable addition to the curriculum in a number of subjects.

The most obvious to me is in the area of research. The ability to use hypertext to link to sources is a huge advantage to student and teacher alike in that it makes it pretty easy to check on a student’s understanding of citation, quote or paraphrase, among other things. I think the ease with which linked sources can be accessed also inherently makes for a more careful use of those sources by the student.

Now I know blogging is more first-person, more casual by nature than formal research writing. But one essential skill that consistent bloggers develop is the ability to read critically in preparation to write critically. I’m hearing Jay Rosen yet again: readers becoming writers, completing the transaction of ideas and extending the conversation. Certainly, the best essayists are those that can draw from a variety of sources and bring them together into some coherent, more complete understanding of the subject. Ditto the best bloggers, like Doc Searles, whose post today on the media and politics is a great example. He has obviously taken the time to read a variety of authors, done some meaningful thinking about what he has read, and used it to fashion his own interpretation and ideas. Isn’t that what we want our students to do?

It ties in with another area that really interests me: media literacy. I think Weblogs could be an outstanding tool for teaching kids to observe, think about and then deconstruct the media they are exposed to. And as this pretty interesting article in Technology Review notes, “Media literacy education must be integrated into our curriculum from kindergarten through college. But to succeed, educators need to update and rethink the assumptions shaping many existing media literacy programs.” I think there’s a need for blogging in there somewhere. More thinking on this later, I’m sure, but I see a proposal coming into view…

Tim‘s influence remains at Buckman Elementary where Helen Nolan the principal is pushing the envelope with Web logs as communication tools. I love this: “And, all teachers are expected to add at least one page of content to the school weblog.

Teachers and other staff members are using the weblog in different ways. The librarian, for example, has posted a suggested reading list and book reviews for students. A first-grade teacher showcases student writing with an “authors’ corner.” Another teacher has students perform daily journal writing on the weblog, while in a science class, students post mealworm observations and photos. Student artwork also appears in a colorful online gallery.

All cool ideas, and all making me really psyched to start implementing pages for people.

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