Barbara Ganley’s blog is down due to structural issues, and she’s reflecting on the impact:

And so, my missing the blog isn’t about an addict finding withdrawal a torture. It’s about being denied a powerful tool in my teaching set, and if I don’t get it back by the end of the week, I don’t know what I’m gonna do…

I know I would have felt the same way had it happened to me. I don’t think I would want to ever go back to xeroxing papers and handouts and evaluating my students just on their ability to discuss each other’s work in a synchronous way. Not to mention carrying stacks of paper around. And the good news is I think there are actually a couple of other teachers around here who feel the same way.

So anyone know how to get five columns with feeds from five different blogs on the same page???
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Steven Krauss from Eastern Michigan University has an article in Kairos that goes into some depth about his attempt to use Weblogs as tools to teach writing on the higher ed level. Has some trickle down to K-12 classrooms though.

His premise is pretty straightforward:

I have begun to wonder if it is advisable or even possible to see blogs as a collaborative or especially “interactive” writing environment. (2) Or, more accurately, I’ve come to believe we shouldn’t substitute blogs for other electronic writing tools that foster discussion and interactive writing, particularly email lists, commonly known as “listservs.”

What I find most informative about this article is his dissection of what he didn’t do with his blogging experiment that he feels contributed to its demise. In short, he chose the wrong software for his needs (Blogger,) he didn’t create specific requirements for blog usage, and he had no other place for online discussion. He does some great analysis that really should be must reading for anyone thinking of using Weblogs in this context.

Students (or anyone else) don’t just want to write, and certainly not in a blog space. As Walker puts it in her “Talk at Brown” notes, “How empowering is it to be forced to blog?” And yet, that is ultimately the power and even charm of web logs: it is very easy to master technology and interface in which just about anyone who wants to can post their writings and thoughts about anything. However, like the paper diaries and journals that web logs are so often compared, the writer has to have a reason– and generally, a personal reason– to write in the first place.

Yes, but…here is where the distinction between blogging and using blogs crops up again. It isn’t enough just to provide the digital paper; we have to teach kids how to use it well (blogging.) The writer does have to have a reason, a passion, in order to get the most from blogging. But what I think we have to accept is that the subjects they want to blog about may have little to do with our subject matter. But we can still teach the genre and the cr
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It’s weird but in two different conversations I had today the question came up about what it takes to get teachers to use blogs over the long term. I mean I’ve trained a lot of people on how to use Weblogs, and everyone thinks it’s really neat, but very few actually stick with it. I know that blogging takes more time at the outset, but the learning curve is definitely not steep, and it would seem a great way to organize materials and archive lesson plans at the very least.

Seems like the teachers that stick with it just get into the habit, somehow. It works for them on a level that allows them to do it 10 or 20 or 100 times until it just becomes a part of their practice. I would hate to go back to teaching without blogs…but then again, I’ve got way too much of a blogging habit to even think about doing something as silly as that…

Helen Barrett has been busy trying out various Weblog platforms to see how they fare as online portfolios. Interesting to see the variations, but I think most of the differences are primarily cosmetic.

Tom doesn’t think that blogs are the right medium for this experiment anyway:

Let’s cut to the chase, you can’t really make an e-portfolio with weblog software, they’re just not built for it, and wikis will only be useful if you neuter them. What you need is an open source, enterprise-class content management system. The main things Helen can borrow from blogs is the idea that people shouldn’t be screwing around with DreamWeaver to create web pages any more and e-portfolios should be using RSS, RDF, XML and web standards.

But really, how many decades is it going to take before more technical acumen is necessary to become an authority in educational technology? The lack thereof is really tiresome, and it is much more of a problem today than it would have been eight or ten years ago, because so much power is at our disposal, if we only have the capacity to reach out and grasp it.

His last point makes me wonder if he thinks only programmers can be experts at ed tech. I know he sees the landscape through very different eyes than Helen and I do, and his vision is pretty amazing. But authorities at ed tech also need the acumen to deal with educators who have very little energy or interest in the toys, and I think what Helen is trying to do is take a first step for a lot of those folks who have no clue what open-source is even about.

I noted to my superintendent the other day that another good thing about Weblogs is that they open a door to technology use for the timid and uninitiated. It’s a pretty low bar to jump over, and if they can hurdle this one, who knows what might be next. I think Helen’s work is giving some people a reason to try to make the jump.

Barbara Ganley has posted her complete BlogTalk paper titled “Blogging as a Dynamic, Transformative Medium in an American Liberal Arts Classroom” which, not surprisingly, is an enthusiastic and articulate reflection on her successes using Weblogs in the classroom. It’s another great resource for teachers of all levels.

First, she says that Weblogs offer

“…educators a unique opportunity to engage their students in a dynamic learning environment in which they are at once the actor and the reflector, the commentator and the instigator.”

I like the way that describes the duality of blogging, the read/write relationship.

Arguing that “the world has changed; the classroom has not,” she notes that schools continue to ignore the social aspect of learning that Weblogs offer to a generation that is increasingly familiar with the digital commons, moreso than their teachers. She has a great quote from James Duderstadt:

“They expect–indeed, demand–interaction, approaching learning as a ‘plug-and-play’ experience; they are unaccustomed and unwilling to learn sequentially–to read the manual–and instead are inclined to plunge in and learn through participation and experimentation…They learn in a nonlinear fashion, skipping from beginning to end and then back again, and building peer groups of learners, developing sophisticated learning networks in cyberspace. In a very real sense, they build their own learning environments that enable interactive, collaborative learning, whether we recognize and accommodate this or not.”

She also writes about how for a classroom Weblog to be effective, everyone must own it. Barbara’s use of Weblogs has evolved from a tool for classroom management to individual student blogs to one what she calls “Motherblog” for the class which everyone is responsible for.

For the weblog to work as a facilitator of efficacious learning, it is essential that everyone has an authentic voice and an authentic role on it, that everyone has a hand in creating the medium as well as the message in an environment in which the reader becomes the writer, the student the teacher, the teacher the learner as we traverse boundaries of classroom and real world, our communities forming,shifting and reforming.

One aspect of all of this that Barbara has mastered, I think, is using her own posts to synthesize discussions and to probe and ask questions, all the while modeling the genre for her students.

…the blogger-teacher is using the unquenchable homepage as a place to synthesize the postings streaming in, to ask questions designed to push the thinking forward, to point to particular posts as models, challenging our assumption that learning experiences are essentially individual, private affairs conducted according to time-honored if unspoken rules about student-teacher interactions. It is a jarring and exhilarating, if for some, bewildering experience.

And she writes about the importance of linking in blogging:

In the learner-centered collaborative effort, students learn the value of linking to one another’s work, often taking a thread from a classmate’s assignment or online discussion, referencing it and building on the idea until it becomes something new all while engaging them in a call-and-response kind of conversation with their peers. In so doing, students learn lessons about citation and translating from the informal language and thinking of the online discussion to the more rigorous demands of formal academic discourse.

Obviously there is much more here, especially the part about the students basically taking over the course in the third week. Not sure that’s going to happen on the K-12 level, but it certainly could happen for various aspects of our classes. But what’s inspirational about this, at least to me, is the way in which she has used the Weblog to deepen and broaden the learning of her students. Her effort to make such good use of this tool is obviously enormous, and in some ways daunting. But even with a more narrowed focus and scale, the importance of the ability of Weblogs to help students construct and evolve their own meaning and understanding of course content is not to be underestimated. Barbara gives us a great framework for making that happen.
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Ken says:

So maybe here’s my point: blogging is not democratic only because it gives each person a place to publish — it is also democratic because it is a body of practices that help each person invent something worth reading.

That’s an interesting way of thinking about it…reading invents writing, which when you think about it isn’t all that radical, but I’ve never heard it put that way. My reading of his blog has helped me invent this post which, hopefully, is something worth reading. (If this makes no sense, see the last post about levels of brain cookedness.)

It’s so cool that he’s going down the blogging as genre road as a way to move students into more traditional forms of rhetoric. What I can’t wait for, however, is the first “Blogging 101” class out there, where blogging is taught for it’s own value, equal to essay or personal narrative or… I’d really love to teach that course.

An exceptional article by Stephen Downes in this month’s Educause Review should become, as others have said, must reading for any educator interested in using blogs in the classroom. Stephen does just a great job of giving context to Weblogs as classroom tools, providing an overview of the tools out there, and challenging some of the assumptions that have attached themselves to blogs as they become more and more mainstream.

The best part, however, is that Stephen really sets the stage for where our discussions need to go next.

And herein lies the dilemma for educators. What happens when a free-flowing medium such as blogging interacts with the more restrictive domains of the educational system? What happens when the necessary rules and boundaries of the system are imposed on students who are writing blogs, when grades are assigned in order to get students to write at all, and when posts are monitored to ensure that they don’t say the wrong things?

That gets to the essence of one of my most closely held beliefs about all of this, that the real power of the tool is in the type of writing it facilitates, namely, blogging. Which in turn leads to the larger question of how do we use Weblogs to nurture blogging? How do we create enough freedom within our curriculum to allow students to write about their passions? How do we find and develop audiences for our students to reach and interact with? How do we use Weblogs to develop lifelong learning skills instead of just making them storehouses of digital paper?

Jeff Rice speaks to this when he asks “What about Weblog pedagogy?”

What I tend to be seeing is a lot of usage of the tool for non-web practices: taking notes, journal writing, etc. Some folks seem surprised that students yawn at this approach. Course, these students were probably yawning when we did the same thing without a weblog, right (and I, too, have been guilty of asking students to use weblogs in such a way for group work or research)? Oh great. Another stupid journal assignment, but now I have to do it on the Web… Weblogs are being used all the time, all over the Web, but in ways which don’t mesh with many of these created assignments. Folks want to write. Many find this tool very helpful for writing. Academia is too far behind to understand how to integrate it into the classroom.

I think I’ve just decided to make that my question/quest for this school year…how do we integrate Weblogs into the classroom in ways that enhance learning instead of just manage practice? The only way to answer that is to focus on what makes a Weblog unique as a writing environment, because everything else could be just as well accomplished with paper and pen or Word or any of those other tools that we’ve been using.

Anyway, a great article, with another one about wikis in the same issue, and a third by Middlebury’s own Bryan Alexander. Good, good stuff…all by bloggers.
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Some nice discussion at Kairosnews about the reactions of students when they get their own blogs. The thread starts with a link to a post on TechSophist that I think makes some interesting points about why classroom blogging is sometimes difficult for students.

While questions about assessment and posting requirements and quality are ones we all have to think through, I’ve often felt that one of the hindrances to blogging with my students was that we met every day and that I only saw them for nine weeks. To me, a blog almost feels more like something I would do outside of class, or that it would keep me connected to my peers and teachers when we weren’t physically together. In college where classes meet once or twice a week, that would work well. But in K-12, unless you’re using some alternate day block schedule, we pretty much see each other every day.

Ironically, however, that’s not the case with the author of this post:

…to accelerate the “community feel” that exists in a successful group blog, I will have blogging be in-class with the video-projected screen to lend accountability. I did that this summer, but not every class period; most of the blog assignments were outside of class and intended for discussion the next class period. Unfortunately, class time would come and postings were embarrassingly low, leading to weak discussions by the few students who read the assignment at all. In order to get the blog habit going, daily class time may be needed… Moving the bulk of blogging to in-class writing may seem artificial, but writing instruction can seem that way anyway.

I guess I wonder, however, if that isn’t the point…why should we continue to teach kids to write in artificial environments when blogs give us an opportunity for real writing? Why not stick to paper? Just thinking it through…

The discussion mentioned above has some other great ideas. Connection to a community space is essential. Dennis Jerz adds:

I give students their own blogs but also make those blogs integrated into a communal site. Assignments in which students are asked to comment on each other’s blogs, but are also asked to “Find two peers who disagree with each other and blog about their differences,” or “Quote from a primary source to support or disagree with a statement made by another student.” I let them know that their portfolio would include general requirements such as these. I also think it was very successful when students were asked to blog their oral presentations first, and in class to present from their blog. Those students who posted early often got comments from their peers (or their friends who are blogging in other classes, or strangers who happened across the blog entry).

And Samantha Blackmon talks about the importance of keeping it all relevant:

This term I am relying on blogs heavily in my advanced comp class where we are focusing on political rhetoric and looking specifically at the convention bloggers (as well as other things). I think it could get interesting very quickly, especially if the students don’t want to blog (or just don’t get it)!

The distinction is how do we nurture blogging instead of just the use of blogs? By creating community. By making writing real and relevant, not artificial. By giving students audience. I’ve said it before, Weblogs are just tools, but blogging is where the learning takes place.

A really great post from Aaron Campbell on the potentials of blogs and wikis in developing students that know how to create knowledge rather than just possess it. It really captures the disruptive nature of all of this, and crystallizes the huge shift that will be required should we adopt on a wide scale. The whole post is worth the read, and it’s one I know I’ll return to later when I have a bit more time. This sentence captures it pretty well:

I believe that personal publishing via weblogs and wikis on the growing social semantic web can be an excellent educational practice for feeding the being mode in young minds. The medium emphasizes process over goal, collectivity over individuality, decentralization over centralization, humanity over automation, authenticity over simulation, freedom over control, self-directed over teacher-directed, and the dynamic over the static. Furthermore, it can be self-reflective, potentially giving rise to insights into the socially constructed nature of self-identity.

That’s really well put, and defines much of what’s “different” about the read/write Web. But making that happen in schools is a huge task, as Aaron notes:

When learners are given the chance to join in the authentic and cooperative social practice of constructing knowledge in society, we are providing a new educational arena which encourages a participatory and potentially political orientation toward the ‘world out there’ – necessary for a healthy democracy. I can’t help but wonder though, whether our institutions of “learning” are commited to helping young people ‘know themselves’ or to merely condition them for a status quo existence, currently a predominant having mentality.

Good stuff.
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From the “Shameless Self-Promotion” Dept. comes this Q & A with About.com.

A pretty straightforward presentation about the potentials of Weblogs in libraries and schools. This paragraph, however, caught my eye:

I think the late Douglas Adams would have approved of weblogs. The snowflake/blizzard analogy may refer to something completely different, but it does seem to encapsulate their very essence, i.e. something which starts life small, but which gradually ‘snowballs’ into something bigger as more people contribute comments, ideas, news, etc. Above all weblogs can, and should be, fun – which is perhaps why they appeal to children and are being used by children’s librarians.

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I’ve been contacted of late by a few teachers trying to work through the security and privacy issues that go along with the use of Weblogs in the classroom, so I thought I’d take a little time to go over how we handle it and to pose some of the other questions that we still struggle with.

First, let me say that these issues are ones that we’ve spent a lot of time discussing and debating. The last thing that we want, obviously, is to put our students at risk as they work more transparently and publish to a wider audience. Even though (knock wood) we’ve not had one problem in the hundreds of student Weblogs that we have created here, parents are legitimately concerned about the potential abuses.

So, we do a few things up front. Our Acceptable Use Policy asks parents to approve the publication of student work to the Internet. If for some reason that approval is missing, teachers send home another form, and to date we’ve not had any students who didn’t eventually get permission. We also encourage our teachers to communicate with parents about what Weblogs are and how and why they are using them. Usually when teachers tell parents that the Weblog can be used to keep them more in touch with what their children are doing and what’s happening in class, they like the idea.

When students use their Weblogs, we limit identification to first name only. Even though we need an e-mail address to set up the account, we either use bogus e-mails or rely on a feature in Manila (the software we use) to hide the address when it is legitimate. We talk to kids about what to do if they are contacted by “strangers,” that they should never give out personal information or start on line conversations with those not vetted by the teacher. In addition, teachers are asked to subscribe to the feeds of their student Weblogs which include any comments that might be left. While some are more vigilant than others, I do think most teachers are able to monitor activity on the sites to a satisfactory degree. Finally, both the teacher and I are “managing editors” of the student sites, so if things break or if there is abuse, we can deal with it in short order.

For some classes like Creative Writing, where students are writing about more personal issues, we close the entire site to the public. Manila has an “Editor’s Only” function that permits use of the site only by those students that the teacher allows. Or in other cases, where we want the content to be seen but the interactivity to be limited, we will have students become members of each other’s sites thus allowing them the ability to comment before closing the site to outside membership. (In one configuration of Manila, membership is a requirement for posting feedback.)

Still, it would be nice if we were able to “approve” comments before they were posted. (That would make me sleep much better at night, believe me.) And I would love it if Manila gave the option of having some posts only viewable by members of the site while having others that anyone can see. It would make the drafting process more effective, I think.

Bottom line is that there is a fair amount of setup and a lot of vigilance that has to go into this process. But once it’s set up, and once everyone understands the whys and hows, I think we do a pretty good job of finding a balance between transparency and privacy.

Now, having said that, I’m not as well versed on the capabilities of the other blogging packages out there. If you use Blogger or MT or something else and would be willing to post about your privacy process, I’m sure it would add much to this discussion.

(via a whole bunch of sources)

I would agree with most of those, but I would also add something along the lines of “Easy to collect info from a variety of sources.” (Not great, I know, but it’s early…) There’s no doubt that RSS has changed the way I consume information…I’m sure I’d be more inclined to just go to the usual sources without it.
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Two summers ago I kind of invited myself up to Middlebury College to talk to some of the really early thinkers in edublogging like Sarah Lohnes, Hector Vila and Barbara Ganley. I remember feeling really inspired by the way they talked about their use of Weblogs and their willingness to share their visions and ideas. It was a great few hours for me and really my first face to face connection with this community.

I didn’t realize until earlier today that Barbara had participated in the recent BlogTalk in Vienna and had done a presentation on her exploits using blogs in her writing classroom titled “Blogging as a dynamic, transformative medium in the writing classroom of an American Liberals Arts College”. Her post and pre-conference notes provide a wealth of insight into her use of blogs and her thinking behind it. It’s definitely worth the read, and I just want to excerpt a couple of passages that I find particularly noteworthy.

… blogging does make a difference, a significant difference in the quality of my students’ experience in the classroom and the measurable outcomes of that engagement. Blogging–more than anything else I’ve tried–facilitates connections in my classroom, connections that ultimately allow us to move far beyond mere classroom walls in our embrace of the learning experience. My students really think that anything they set their minds to is possible–they can have serious discussions with experts in the field; they can consult in slo-mo asynchronous exchanges with classmates about the perplexing questions confronting them; they can read one another’s work and learn from it as they remake it in their own responses through their own projects and papers. The writing grows–the thinking deepens, Hector, rather than becoming secondary to the delivery, to the surface flash of the visuals. My students demand more of themselves than ever before–they want to do it all. And they want to do it at a very high level of accomplishment indeed.

It goes without saying that Barbara puts a huge amount of time into planning and studying these interactions, but she has created, I think, an interesting model for the writing classroom, at least, that in some ways can transfer down to the K-12 level. This gets a bit theoretical, but the idea is important:

Students in a group-blogging course epitomize the writings of Lévy and Johnson through the formation of a strong, resilient learning collaborative in which multi-media work naturally blends into research, personal reflection deepens scholarly insights, and the students see themselves as crucial participants in their education. We will demonstrate how students became the course, using the interface as a way to “take over,” becoming their own teachers in a unique synthesis of online and f2f work; they narrated a different course than expected and, if as Roland Barthes notes that “narrative is a hierarchy of instances,” the students’ narratives in this course suggest that they are indeed evacuating—challenging—even these post-modern categories. Student bloggers, in this course, demonstrated how they created an “Other” of the teacher. Finally, we will examine the ramifications of this work for us as teachers—our use of class and planning time, our relationships to our students and colleagues, and our relationship to our pedagogical goals–and new directions this work will take us in the future.

I think the real genius of Barbara’s approach is the way she presents that technology to her students and then gets out of their way in slow, measured steps until it becomes their space, or as she calls it, the “Motherblog.” The Zen-like “become the course” which only a truly supportive, collaborative environment can facilitate. Throughout the post there are a number of linked examples that illustrate her thoughts. The result?

Through the Motherblog, the individual student is no longer privileged, nor is the primary classroom transaction flowing from teacher to group, and then student to teacher. Groups of individuals become committed communities of learners, education becomes group experiment, and the classroom becomes a wildly productive place student-centered, project-based inquiry. It is an exciting, unnerving place, indeed, promoting often astonishing outcomes for our students and fearless faculty.

Obviously, Barbara’s teaching has been greatly affected by her use of Weblogs. And it’s great that we can investigate these ideas ourselves through her publishing them in her own space. There is a lot to think about here, and it’s good, inspiring stuff.

Tom says:

…it is more accurate to think of weblogs and wikis as work arounds for the broken parts of the web, rather than a new innovation.

Well, they are new innovations that repair some of what’s broken with the original intent of the Internet. But I can’t disagree that the shelf life of blogs and wikis as we know them probably isn’t too lengthy. It’s happening already, the seamless integration of these tools into browsers and Internet based networks. I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around what things will be like in say 10 years or so, but I’m almost positive it will be one stop shopping…no separate publishing software needed.

The Internet really has become my notebook in a big way. Used to be a pretty much just a research tool, but now it’s the warehousing and organizing tool as well. I can almost picture what a personal, interactive portal on the Internet might look and feel like…almost. Tom quotes Tim Berners-Lee whose original vision for the Internet was “to connect every person to every other person.” We’re getting there…

“As academics, we might be more comfortable and familiar with notebook weblogs and filter-weblogs, but our students coming out of high school are likely to know the genre as an expressive and social space.”

Many have pointed to the great collection of writing about Weblogs at Into the Blogosphere, and I’m looking forward to reading as many of the 20 pieces as I can. The first one I was drawn to, however, was “Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs.” The title obviously exudes relevance and one of the authors, Kevin Brooks is someone I have corresponded with on occasion to talk about blogs. There was a lot about the piece that I think is worth noting, in fact I copied out about two and a half pages of stuff that I want to think more about. But just a couple of the high points.

The web is remediating all media that has come before it (print, music, film, television, radio, paintings, email, etc.); therefore in our teaching we wanted to emphasize for our students that weblogging is not a radically new way of writing, but a repurposing of familiar (we hoped) print genres.

I agree, even though I think blogging as a genre of writing is certainly something a bit different from what we have asked kids to do in the past. We ask them to collect and synthesize and construct deeper or different truths when we teach research, but I still think the added quality of real audience changes the eventual output. Blogging is in many ways a collaborative undertaking; you take ideas, you give ideas and hope others take them, etc. That part of the process is certainly something we haven’t asked kids to do before.

We spent quite a bit of time offering guidelines, tips and examples, including an explicit definition of journal, notebook, and filter weblogging for our students. Our definitions were modifications on Rebecca Bloods’ definitions of:
• “blogs” (what we call journals): “short-form journals. The writer’s subject is his daily life, with links subordinate to the text,”
• notebooks: “Sometimes personal, sometimes focused on the outside world, notebooks are distinguished from blogs [journals] by their longer pieces of focused content,” and
• filters: “organized squarely around the link, maintained by an inveterate Web surfer, personal information strictly optional” (pp. 6-8).

I was really intrigued by these breakouts as they connected to something I wrote a while ago in attempting to clarify what is and is not blogging. I still think blogging is closer to what the authors call filtering than anything else.

Basically, the results of the study were positive:

But the generally positive response to weblogging that emerges despite these differences suggests that as the genres and motives for weblogging are understood more clearly, the practices has sufficient cultural and pedagogical appeal to encourage and motivate student writing even in a post-literate age.

…As students’ become more familiar with weblogging, our pedagogical emphasis on teaching weblog genres as remediations of print genres will likely give away to an emphasis on teaching academic and personal weblogging genres, and teaching weblogging genres as part of a system of online genres that have fairly porous boundaries.

Again, this makes me think about some ways that we might approach instruction in the genre. Should we move from personal to academic writing in the Weblog? Is there a comfort level students might attain from personal writing that will allow them more potential for success with a more thoughtful, scholarly style.

And, here’s the task for we here in the K-12 world:

In both semesters, our students preferred the journal weblog regardless of which course they were enrolled in, and as student awareness of weblogging increases, the personal, daily reflection seems likely to be the defining characteristic of weblogging. As academics, we might be more comfortable and familiar with notebook weblogs and filter-weblogs, but our students coming out of high school are likely to know the genre as an expressive and social space. (Emphasis mine.)

Which begs the question, if blogs become used more widely as learning tools in higher ed, shouldn’t we be pushing our students past the social space?

All around thought-provokingly good stuff.

Just wanted to post Bernie Dodge’s NECC presentation link about incorporating blogs and wikis with Web Quests. It was a really thought-provoking talk that I know got lots of people (over 500) thinking a lot more about how to use these technologies. The important point to note, I think, is his reference to blogs and wikis and pedagogy. At his talk, Bernie said on a couple of occasions that teachers really need to think through how to use these tools, not just to blog for blogging’s sake. His context with Web Quests is such a great way of not only learning to use the tools but to think about how to use them well. For example, this Austrian class that used a wiki to compile what it found about the upcoming US presidential elections. And there are countless other ways that teachers can do this.

Oy…I need more hours. We should all be wikiing or collaborating to capture these ideas in one place like at Tom’s Webloggy Websites for Schools. Just very tough to carve out more time than it takes to read, think, and reflect on things in this space.
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(via Lilia) Mark Bernstein warns against the dangers of comments as evidenced in the most recent flame war involving Dave Winer:

Weblog comments incite duels. Duels are bad for society. We should all forego comments and return to carefully blogging responses — including responses we disagree with, but excluding responses we cannot tolerate.

Interestingly, the comments on Lilia’s post make for some good thinking, which is what my thinking on this is. I can’t imagine this site without comments, or not being able to comment on other’s sites. (There are a few people in this community who don’t allow comments and I find that frustrating at times.) I’ve only had one bad experience with comments in the past three years and that was from some very sensitive MAC user who took me to task for a pretty innocuous error. I got over it.

I think the value of comments far outweigh the potential for abuse. Now in a classroom setting, there obviously needs to be a watchful eye. But I love having other people’s opinions (when they feel like sharing them) right there with the original post.

While Trackback is nice, I haven’t found it to be especially accurate. But I have been thinking how good it would be for students to keep all of their own comments in their own spaces and then be notified of other’s feedback using Trackback. At least then all of their work, including their feedback to others, is in one space. I have found keeping track of that stuff to be pretty difficult.

But bottom line, to me, comments are what help make blogs such interesting tools to use in the classroom.
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Tom posts some interesting thoughts on some of the things we need to think about as implementation of Weblogs and wikis and such continue to evolve.

And the classroom is a demanding environment for wiki software, too. Most wikis are only edited by a couple people, at a fairly slow pace, so the fact that two people can’t edit the same page at the same time is generally not a problem. Wikis can’t handle having twenty five students trying to edit the same pages concurrently, or 90 kids all trying to add links to the homework page at 9:30 pm. Which is not to say that wikis won’t work, but the teacher will have to make sure they don’t end up with too many students trying to edit the same page at the same time.

While I was in Bernie Dodge’s great workshop about wikis and Weblogs as WebQuests I was thinking a lot about our idea to create a media literacy wiki for students to create the text. I really want to pursue the idea, but I also need to do lots more preparatory thinking on how to make it work.
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We’re underway here at Xavier University with about 30 captive teachers who are hopefully learning about Weblogs and their use in the classroom. It’s really great to be together with Anne , Tim, Tom and Steve doing “blogvangelism” again. I know that many of us talk about the virtual community and friendships, but one of the best things about all of this has been getting to know these quality people who are sincerely interested in students and learning. Very cool.

Anne’s showing her Lit Circles blog and we’ve been talking about the use of “Nom de Blog” as one person put it. The security issues are always the stickiest to get through with all of this, and we’ve also talked about how to set up collaborations with other schools and students. I really think that is where the power of all of this lies, just in connecting teachers and students together.

Tom’s been talking about the wonders of RSS, and even more importantly, how to read Weblogs. It’s an interesting idea that I don’think about very much any more, but definitely something that is important to understand when you start to create your own space.

And now Steve is getting ready to help the participants set up their own sites. Clarity has developed and “one-click” type of setup so that most of the parts of the Weblog are automatically populated after you answer some preliminary questions. So, if all goes well, in a couple of minutes there will be 30 more teachers blogging. The crusade continues…

Click to see the full size pics.

I know that many people have already linked to the “Meet Joe Blog” article that’s running in Time this week. For most who have already tasted the Blogging Kool Aid, there’s not too much new, although I did like this description:

What makes blogs so effective? They’re free. They catch people at work, at their desks, when they’re alert and thinking and making decisions. Blogs are fresh and often seem to be miles ahead of the mainstream news. Bloggers put up new stuff every day, all day, and there are thousands of them. How are you going to keep anything secret from a thousand Russ Kicks? Blogs have voice and personality. They’re human. They come to us not from some mediagenic anchorbot on an air-conditioned sound stage, but from an individual. They represent — no, they are — the voice of the little guy.

Now, the best part? One of my librarians took it upon herself to send an all staff e-mail linking to the story and saying it was a must read.

Golly it’s nice when someone else picks up the banner…
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David Huffaker has published a really nice piece on Weblogs in the classroom at FirstMonday titled “The Educated Blogger: Using Weblogs to Promote Literacy in the Classroom.” David’s study at Georgetown was also featured in a BBC.com article a couple of days ago. Here are a couple excerpts:

Blogs represent a perfect medium for literacy. Authors must read and write as they would on paper, while increasing their comfort with computers and the Internet. Because blogs do not require exceptional technical skills, but still offer the opportunity to “tinker” using Web programming languages for customization, blogs remain equitable for all age groups and both genders, and still provide a medium for learning programmatic skills.

While it’s not the literacy that I’m most interested in when it comes to blogs, there’s no doubt that they can be a good way to learn many of the technical skills that go along with the Internet.

And:

The characteristics of weblogs such as the personal space it provides and the linkages with an online community create an excellent computer–mediated communication context for individual expressions and collaborative interactions in the form of storytelling and dialogue. Ease–of–use and anytime–anywhere access make blogs an excellent tool for educators. It’s easy for bloggers to understand and easy for teachers to implement. It offers an environment where learning is not limited to the classroom; authors can access their blogs when an Internet connection is available. Finally, it’s fungible across disciplines — it can be advantageous in the science class as it is in the creative writing class.

To be honest, the storytelling angle is not one that I’ve thought much about, but it certainly has potential, and he does a good job of exploring that in some detail.

A weblogs-in-schools article in today’s Guardian from an interview the author did with me about six months ago. I’d almost forgotten it. And, for the record, never have I used the words “hitnosis,” “blogstipation,” “blogorrhea” or “barking moonbat” (though I do suffer from some of these maladies from time to time…)
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The New York Times takes an in depth look at the psychosis of blogging, and I’m afraid to say that it cuts a little to close to home.

Where some frequent bloggers might label themselves merely ardent, Mr. Pierce is more realistic. “I wouldn’t call it dedicated, I would call it a problem,” he said. “If this were beer, I’d be an alcoholic.”

Well, maybe not that close to home. I mean I did manage to go for three whole days without posting when I was on my wet and rainy outdoor adventure last weekend. And I swear I was only shaking from the chill, not withdrawal. Really. I’m serious.

A couple of people have asked me recently how much time I spend doing this stuff and I sheepishly mumble something like “more than I should” or “too much.” But I also take comfort in the fact that there ain’t too much navel gazing going on here, and that every now and then someone lands in my in-box sharing their classroom blogging experiences or asking questions. I doubt that would happen if I was writing about the way it’s taken two weeks to clear the Wild Rose and weeds off this pitched slope behind our house and how it took four truckloads of mulch to prep it for planting this ground cover stuff that looks like a bad haircut and…you get the idea. And frankly, I don’t really get the blog as personal journal/daily travails thing anyway. I still like paper for that stuff.

But golly, you read the Times piece and you’d think that we’re all a bunch of self-obsessed geeks who climb into our closets with our laptops for a regular fix at the expense of our families, colleagues and even countrymen.

I really take exception to the last one.

Note: This seems to be one of those flaky Manila posts where comments don’t work. Click here to read Jeremy’s response.
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So this is good news…right?

Gates called blogging and the RSS Web content syndication service a “very interesting phenomenon.” He suggested that by using RSS as notification system, customers can “get the information you want when you want it.”

Substitute “parents,” “teachers,” “students” etc. for “customers” and at least Weblogs as school communications tool looks promising.