No, not me. I’ve learned to take it slowly at my school as that’s what is required. But Gil Chapman of Galloway Township (NJ) Schools has some major Manila plans.

Judging by the response so far we should have about a thousand blogs up and running by mid-point of next year. This will really prove to be an interesting experiment.

Sounds like me last year. I wish him luck, and it will be interesting to see if the realities of public school implementation play out differently for him. I keep watching Pat too as he slowly builds his school sites. From what I know now, I think the adoption by request model combined with some gentle nudging has gotten better results.

For instance, I’m going to go around to our sending districts this summer and train all the Social Studies teachers how to use the articulation site we’ve been building. (It needs a little sprucing up, I know.) And our work on our Website continues which, when completed, will hopefully get even more teachers involved. It’s a slower process than I would have liked, but it’s moving forward, and that’s what’s important at this juncture.
—–

I just realized I never got around to adding this often linked article at the Online Journalism Review which is really an interview with Dr. Kaye Trammel, Alex Halavais, Jill Walker and Cori Dauber.

Are Weblogs a passing fad or a revolutionary new form of communication and publishing? That’s still an open question, but the presence of blogs in the academic environment makes it more likely that they’ll survive and thrive in the long term. Educational types aren’t just using blogs to teach or spread their research. They are turning their research lens on Weblogs themselves, whether the context is within schools of law, journalism, communication or library science.

Note: Kaye sent along this link to a wiki page for further discussion.
—–

(via Rick Barter)

Webfolios may have the most significant effect on education since the introduction of formal schooling. When fully matured and implemented by capable professional educators throughout every discipline in an educational institution, webfolios promise a viable alternative to current, high-stakes testing, which focuses education on test-taking rather than teaching and learning.

I’m glad Frank Field types fast as he “transcribed” this exchange:

Will Richardson, high school IT: This is an education issue for me. How to teach this to kids? What sort of strategic teaching is needed to get these ideas across. The freedom/information literacy/information creativity thing – how to sort it, filter it and teach it

Larry Lessig: This is about bringing together the producer and the consumer. Learning how, in the context of a film, is show how presentation changes the meaning of the facts presented. Teaching kids how to understand the content of media in new ways

“By participating, they get to see what’s “inside” of creativity; learning how this stuff really works. It’s not truth, it’s what is presented. That teaches something crucially important for participating in modern society; how to tell the truth; how to acculturate what the truth is.
”
—Larry Lessig

By participating, they get to see what’s “inside” of creativity; learning how this stuff really works. It’s not truth, it’s what is presented. That teaches something crucially important for participating in modern society; how to tell the truth; how to acculturate what the truth is.

Participation in the construction of the truth.

Right now, most of what kids do in blogs and other things, people will say it’s illegal – and that’s a problem

Terry Fisher: I agree, but I have another point.

The primary way that educational materials are distributed to kids is in the form of hardbound books made by major publishers; established by school boards/districts. There are disadvantages to this mechanism – expensive, and a disincentive to update; got to buy the expensive update – finally, it’s poor for disabled students

There exists a narrow provision that allows for conversion into media suitable for students with handicaps (braille, read aloud, etc). And there are companies that capitalize on this – they buy the textbook, and convert –usually with a digital intermediate form

SO there’s an initiative afoot to facilitate the more rapid distribution by standardizing and liberalizing the digitizing of the material – via a standard XML markup system.

OK – sounds good; but if you’re doing that, why doesn’t everyone get the advantages of digital formats? In digital form, the upgrades are now available; other advantages.

Income problem for hardware, but can be overcome. Will the publishers go along?

They see some advantages, but some threats. Unencrypted content, p2p corrosion. Not so bad; but a bigger one is this. Once the idea that books should be digital, the idea that a SINGLE book is the way to learn a subject weakens – a collection of several pieces would be a better way to assemble the necessary pieces. Publishers fear this

Why? Because of the collapse of the idea that a single source is the way to teach – educationally liberating, but upsets the industry.

Will: WikiText is a site that let’s teachers do this kind of thing (Note: I meant to say WikiBooks.)

Yochai Benckler: Turning this into a teaching tool, the teachers will learn this technology; and possibly this way of working

Celebrating free software is no more a criticism of writing software, than blogging is a criticism of professions journalism

Ken Smith posts about Indiana University’s conversations concerning Weblog hosting, and in the middle of it makes an interesting point when he says “weblogs should last longer than a semester, but it’s not currently the university’s job to host outside of a course.”

I think about that often, whether or not we at the high school level could ever entertain the idea of giving our students a general Weblog space that isn’t course related but can be used for whatever “appropriate” uses a student might have. (We’d have to rewrite our AUP, obviously.) The blog as e-portfolio thing has been turning in my brain for a long time, but wouldn’t it be cool to just say “yeah, this Weblog is for your portfolio, but it’s also for whatever else you want to use it for, and you’ve got it for as long as you are a student here.”

(via J.D. Lasica) Great post by Kevin Drum (one of the first bloggers for hire) on what Weblogs do well. It does a good job of getting to the flexibility of the medium and points out some stark contrasts to print.

Blog posts can be any length. If a thought only deserves a couple of sentences, that’s what it gets. If it deserves a thousand words, it can get that too. When was the last time you saw a 200-word op-ed or a 20-minute segment on the evening news?

—–

Anne brings up a key point about giving students more time to write.

I read somewhere recently that American schools are not giving students much time to write. Something like 69% of fourth grade teachers reported spending ninety minutes or less per week on writing activities. The time is even less as you go up in the grades. So maybe that’s reason enough. Let weblogs be the place for students to write on a frequent basis. That way we’ll be making writing a priority instead of just talking about it.

I really think that if we gave kids blog space early on and asked the to use it as a place to post their best practices and their reflections on learning and life the postive effects would be downright stunning. Everything in life is practice. In my few Zen moments, I remember this. And I used to tell my students this too. If you want to get better at running you have to run. Same with kissing and cooking and writing. (And, um, blogging too…)

Coupled with the Blogs and RSS Webquest from a couple of days ago, George Siemens’ presentation The Art of Blogging makes this a blue ribbon week for blog education. No doubt this is indicative of more and more interest in Weblogs and a greater number of teachers who are using these technologies. It’s really fun to watch.

Some of the highlights:

Most important point for educators/trainers to understand:
Learning is not simply a content consumption process. Learning is also a content creation process. This can’t happen if the flow of knowledge is one way.

It’s amazing how much more that whole constructivist concept has been coming up in my discussions with teachers these days. The ability of students to contribute to the body of knowledge by using Weblogs is one of their key strengths.

Reality

RSS will be bigger than blogging
Not everyone is a blogger
Everyone is a potential RSS subscriber
Personal blogging and work may not always be wise
How does this translate into learning, personal knowledge management, knowledge sharing, conversations???

Instructors can engage learners…and introduce learners to others in the field (i.e. tap learners into a learning pipeline that lasts beyond a “course”)
Learners can develop own reputation (eportfolio)
Institutions can share knowledge via simple, social tools

That distinction in the potentials of blogging and RSS is obviously important. And as I’ve been trying to work through all of this blogging stuff, always in the background is the literacy aspect of these technologies. In the light of what we see coming down the pike, we need to reassess how we teach kids to find and manage information. And secondly, I love that concept of learners developing their own reputations. I’ve got to make some time to develop that idea for my school.

This is all great stuff and just gets me more and more energized about the potentials here.
—–

Peter Ford, who has been blogging in schools longer than most of us, reposts an essay from his “early” days on the effects of Weblogs in schools that is certainly must reading for any educator users. He highlights the effects of serendipitous collaboration, the evolution of online community, and the effects of audience, among many other topics. I’ll just pull out a few lines that I find particularly interesting, but it doesn’t give the entire work justice.

Critics often slate the simplicity of weblogs, and dismiss them as ‘merely vanity’. Yet it is precisely these two factors that are the keys to their potential. Children are vain, just like adults. They desire and require an audience for their thoughts and achievements. Every teaching college in the world extols the virtues of providing students with an audience.

The simple, intuitive nature of weblogs is precisely what is required to allow students to express themselves on their own terms. Children’s involvement with websites has to add up to more than a posting of a few pieces of their work on a third person’s static web-site for a virtually non-existent world to see. There is little ownership in that.

An awareness of audience is one of the underlying principles across the whole curriculum, yet so often students have to make do with an imaginary audience, or one limited to the teacher and any random individuals who might peruse a classroom display. With weblogs the audience is real and is, in most cases, large. The average Year Six weblog was read between four and ten thousand times in the first year. The class weblog accumulated almost treble that number of reads over the same period. Even if the amount of reads by the student himself is subtracted from this total, the size of the audience remains impressive, and motivating.

Equipping students with this sense of responsibility to research and report accurately has always been a priority in schools. It is, however, fast becoming a life skill and not just a purely academic one. Children are becoming much more than just handlers of other people’s information. They are active researchers and providers of information that could affect the knowledge base of others

Similarly, I would add, in using Weblogs they become editors and decision makers about information as well. The power of the technology is the way in which it allows students (and adults) to be active participants in the process, not just passive readers or writers without reach.

Other weblogs such as our Tudor Exploration weblog are set up as news-sites and students can post their own stories and interesting links to material they have found during their own research. This has proved genuinely helpful to me as the teacher. Not only does it provide my student with a sense of ownership of a topic, but points me to some excellent source material that I can use in subsequent sessions.

This process of students teaching students is commonplace in the weblogging environment. When a child discovers a new blogging skill, inserting a background or creating an online survey, then there are always peers who want to share and apply those skills themselves. I have seen this process in action dozens of times

The simple nature of weblogging means that it can immediately make an impact. Teachers start to think about how they can use weblog to complement their own subject expertise and start to explore ways of using the internet for themselves. Skills that are often hidden behind a closed classroom door become visible online for others to benefit from. It helps foster a climate of collaboration.

There is much more here, and from the “blogvangelism” standpoint, Peter’s essay is
a wonderful resource.
—–

Terry sent along this link that talks about the problems with implementing the “distributed content creation model” that I’m trying to put into place here. And in case you’re wondering, it’s going pretty slowly here. Maybe if I’d read this beforehand:

So how come nobody actually uses these systems once they’re in place? The answer is easy: People don’t like to change the way they work, particularly knowledge workers. Knowledge workers spend years building strategies to accomplish their jobs, practices that likely date back to study skills acquired during their education. So changing those processes — no matter how valid the provided technical solution — is nearly impossible. Users will rebel, even after substantial training.

Now the same could be said of students, who by all accounts are knowledge workers (I would hope.) I’ve been mulling over the blog as e-portfolio idea again and the more I dig into it, the more disruptive it seems. All the more reason to forge ahead.

The article goes on to say:

Put editors in charge. You need an editorial staff in place to make the content on your site as interesting and consistent as it can be. That staff may just be one executive editor, but nothing should go online without that person’s approval. As your Web strategy grows, so too should that staff.

And I have a feeling that’s where this might end up. I have a meeting about the Website with the Superintendent tomorrow where I might pitch the idea of incentivising departmental editors to update and produce content. And by the way, here are my latest departmental Weblog banners. I’m really loving this stuff…
—–

Article about the Weblogging program set up by a student at Reed College in Oregon where any student who wants one can have one. He’s got 147 going right now. An interesting read that gets to both sides of college level use of blogs and points to a number of other heretofore unknown colleges that are starting to use them, one even for recruitment purposes!

Blogging is a relatively small but quickly growing phenomenon in the world of Internet users, and, like other online technologies, it is slowly invading college life. Professors are using blogs to teach and publish. College administrators use the diaries to recruit. Students use them to learn, to opine (and whine), and to network. In the Reed case, blogging has led to a student community beyond the borders of the campus, a community that Reed administrators can’t control but can peek at.

—–

They’re hip. Influential. Out there. By one estimate, there are 2 million of them posted on the Internet around the world talking about everything from knitting patterns to the war in Iraq. But as blogs – or personal weblogs – move into the limelight, they’re also coming under closer scrutiny. And the conclusions are in some ways sobering.

A pretty interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor that discusses the “vision” of Dave Winer, the bloggers as journalists discussion, and includes a shout out for Blogger Con II. (By the way, how is Dave gonna fit 400 people into a room that holds 100???)
—–

Just wanted to note some useful summaries by Samantha Blackmon about one of the blog panels at 4Cs last week. I really think it’s interesting, now that there seems to be more and more data to work with, the similar themes that seem to be running through edblogger minds. Seems like public and private posting is at the head of the list. Here’s a part of her description of Terra Williams’ part of the presentation:

When her students maintain both personal blogs and post to the class community blog she finds that their perception of audience differs between the blogs. Student posts to the community blog tend to be more formal and on topic than they are on their personal blogs. Terra made the argument that blogs and blog post titles make students more rhetorically sensitive because they find that they have to be more sound if they want to get their points across quickly and succinctly while still drawing people in to read the blog on a regular basis. Her view of the blog as an extension of the classroom space gets strengthened by the fact that she finds that students posting to the community blog use external links to illustrate their point more often than they do on their personal blogs.

And from Charlie Lowe’s part:

There was even talk of how to get more teachers to blog. Teachers have to stop thinking of blogs as extra work, allow expression of the personal along with the academic, and allow themselves to provide examples of teachers as writers.

I couldn’t agree more. I wish there were at least a couple of people at my school who would take up this exercise, especially the composition teachers. I know the time commitment involved with teaching 60 kids how to write, but teachers writing is almost as important as students writing. I know…maybe we should reduce the schedules of teachers that blog… Yeah. Right.
—–

Here’s an online course “for Alaskan teachers [that]was developed and sponsored by the Alaska State Writing Consortium in partnership with the University of Alaska Southeast.” Looks like a pretty good introduction to the use of Weblogs across disciplines aimed specifically at K-12 teachers. Just another indication that this is starting to trickle down more and more.

I especially like the “Critical Questions, Planning the Implementation”
section which should be required reading for anyone thinking about using blogs. I especially like number 8:

1. How will the writing be structured? Will students respond to a topic, a question, a text? How will they respond to each other?

2. To what degree will this writing be public? Will you use this writing as a foundation for other more formal types of writing?

3. What are your expectations for the student writing? Will the posts be „free writes‰ without considerations for correctness? Or, do you expect students to use spell checkers, to proofread their writing, to take a look at each others work before they post?

4. What will your role be in the conversation? Are you going to respond occasionally to the student writing? Will you reserve the right to remove offensive or inappropriate posts?

5. How will you facilitate access to the weblog? Will students be expected to find computers with internet access on their own? Will you take them to a computer lab once each week? Is there a computer in the room they can use? If you expect students to find access outside of class, will this be equitable for students that don‚t have computers at home?

6. What role will the weblog play in your classroom? Will you bring exerpts from the weblog into class for discussion? If so, in what ways will you analyze the writing?

7. In terms of collaboration, will this weblog only be for your class? Will you invite older/younger students to participate? What about content „experts‰ with knowledge about your particular area of interest?

8. Have you considered the notion of student ethnographers, or researchers to examine the weblog with you as it unfolds? What do students think about this activity? What do they say about how it influences their learning about the content in your course, as well as their ability to write and to collaborate with others?

9. How will you assess the student writing? Will students be graded at all? Will their grade be based on participation? Or, will you create a scoring guide or rubric to assesss the quality of the writing?

A very good resource for anyone thinking of doing some blogvangelism at their schools.

Derek Mueller, who teaches composition at Park University has been using Weblogs in his class, and he gives this description of blogging in his standards document:

The purposes for writing in the weblog are varied. First, it is an expressive venue, publicly readable, which is interactive because of the possibility of comment, interchange and dialogue. Ideas expressed in the weblog should be carefully thought out. In other words, because this is asynchronous writing, there is no reason to “hurry” through the writing process. The writing should reflect you efforts to connect your own ideas to new information, new understandings, and new ways of thinking about your own ideological perspective. It’s a space for making sense of the assigned reading and related texts, together, by sharing ideas and views and by making sense of difficult concepts. Rather than becoming a pundit, you should use the blog space this semester for exercising your ability to make connections with the ideas of others–people from class and from texts on the Internet that inform you, complicate your thinking, or expand your understanding of new, interesting ideas.

I think that’s a pretty good description of the Weblog process and fits pretty nicely with the recent discussions about the connections between reading and blogging. And on his own site he adds this nugget about Weblogs in general:

Blogs turn narrow conceptions of reading and writing as private, independent, and isolationist upside down in favor of an extracurricular literacy network–a connected arena of extraspatial (beyond the walls we meet between) contact and community.

—–

I’m still muddling through this whole “can K-12 students REALLY blog?” question, and Ken Smith at Indiana University has some great posts this week about student blogging that get the crux of many of my issues and difficulties. His reflections on the 4Cs conference are well worth the read, but I want to note one comment that I find particularly relevant to what I’ve been experiencing:

I have a hunch that half the problem with student blogs is a problem with audience, but not the problem mentioned in conference papers. It’s just that there is, for all practical purposes, no audience for a new blog, and only a skilled writer knows how to write with no audience (and even skilled writers are sometimes defeated by that prospect for months or years). If you have no clear project, no clear audience, no clear purpose, what can you write about except how bad the dorm food is?

That audience piece of it is surely one of the biggest benefits of Weblogs, on one hand. But on the other, students don’t (can’t?) experience audience the way that we do when we blog. For them it’s more or less constructed, not earned. And my frustration these days is I don’t see a way to making it more real for them right now. In some part, that’s a problem with the software which won’t allow for public and private posting. Peter Nguyen, in a long comment (also well worth the read) to an earlier post, says:

The social climate that students experience in the real world transitions to the blog world so easily, especially to new bloggers. Getting the students to write, collaborate, and build a sense of community will take time and we must allow them to slowly define and build trust in that community. In doing so, students will eventually start to OWN their blog, have faith in the medium, and build that community and collaboration writers desperately need.

He suggests that choosing what to make public can build that trust more effectively, and I tend to agree. I sincerely hope that Manila 9.0.1 has that capability.

Ken’s post today is even more thought-provoking. He links to a post by Richard Long of 2River that asks a number of fundamental questions:

Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I’m not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They’re using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I’m not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts?

Ken talks about his own struggles, noting that his student sites were “not quite weblogs as you would see them in the wild, and not all the students could see the opportunities the genre offered them. Those that could see it wrote the most blog-like sites.” He has a pretty intriguing observation:

The more you recognize what you see on the web page from some other genre or some other place, the less the thing is a weblog. Or maybe: …the less the thing is taking advantage of being a weblog. And that is all the more true of wikis, I’d say. A next step would be to talk about what we take advantage of when we write blogs or wikis, then. We should be able to name what all the features of a blog or wiki really accomplish, then.

I think that’s where I have to go with this to clarify my own thinking. What exactly can Web logs provide my students, and what can’t they?

A couple of pretty interesting reads on just why it is people do this stuff. The first, titled “‘I’m Blogging This’ A Closer Look at Why People Blog” (via Lilia) is a comprehensive look at what blogs are, who uses them and, of course, why. Much of it resonates, and much of it has implications for Weblog use in the classroom. For instance:

For bloggers who think by writing, blogging provides two vital advantages: an audience to help shape the writing and an archive of posts, some of which may be valuable in the future. Personal webpages often perform in a similar way, but the audience is far less defined. In our study, bloggers had “regulars” who they knew were reading their posts. The writing could be directed at them, solving one of the key problems of any writing, i.e., knowing who to write for. The fact of having an audience would keep the writing moving along, as the author knew that people were anticipating new posts.

And,

Most bloggers are acutely aware of audience, even in flagrantly confessional blogs, calibrating what they will and will not reveal. Many bloggers explained that they have a kind of personal code of ethics that dictates what goes into their blogs, such as never criticizing friends or expressing political opinions that are openly inflammatory. Not that bloggers eschew controversy-quite the opposite-but they typically express themselves in light of their audience.

In one example, an instructor was able to create a community of learners:

Rob required students to conduct field studies on topics related to the use of computer-mediated communication within communities and to write weekly blog postings on assigned topics, as well as to read and comment on other students’ blogs. He hoped these assignments would “facilitate the building of the learning community by getting [students] in conversation with each other electronically.” And that is what happened. The students found that maintaining blogs and reading their classmates’ blogs created a sense of community that would have not been generated within a conventional classroom setting.

But another instructor was not:

Although the blog had many visitors, even some from the local press who wrote a story about the site, few commented on the posts. The blog functioned primarily as a website. Colleen noted that students did not feel moved, on their own, to comment, and without a course requirement calling for them to do so, they chose not to. As with other electronic media, blogs in themselves are not sufficient to build community.

And something to show my creative writing teachers:

The most authentic, grass-roots blogging community we studied was that of the poetry bloggers.

The second read is at Crooked Timber and it’s a collection of responses to the following questions:

If you’re an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you’re an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven’t done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs?

Some really interesting responses, and quite a few references to the issues of privacy and anonymity. I found this one to be especially relevant, but there are many others:

The newest twist for me is that I’ve begun to incorporate blogging into my pedagogy, and have students keeping weblogs. In discussions with students about why so many (at least on our campus) are so uncomfortable with blogging and resistant, we had some provocative conversations about accountability – not everyone wants their words published online where anyone can see and you are held accountable for what you say. After that, I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and allowed the interactive editor at our local newspaper to link my blog, with my real name, on his page of “local bloggers.”

A couple of other links to composition related blogging that add to the Weblogs for composition discussion. First, Charlie Lowe at Kairosnews has put up a presentation he’s doing at 4Cs next week titled “Weblogs as a Personal Knowledge Publishing Tool for Scholars and Practitioners.” Under the writing part, he lists:

Easy self-publishing tool available to anyone with Internet access.

Enables publishing of snippets, less developed ideas, or drafts of works
in progress.

A narrative of the development of a writer’s ideas and memes which can make the invention process more visible.

Informal writing. Can be playful or conversational in tone.

Foregrounds the intertextuality of writing.

Invites/encourages peer response through comment postings on site and the posts of others on their weblogs.

Favors a collaborative, social constructionist epistemology in which writing is less of a solitary act.

As a journal which can receive feedback and response, can make keeping a
journal more engaging and encourages daily writing.

Does not have to be conceived of as additional work. Invites the writer to share texts that they are or should be writing already.

Allows expression of the personal alongside academic interests.

Can be used to provide an example of the teacher-as-writer to students.

The last is something that I think is extremely important but also one that I’ve struggled to have happen with teachers who implement Weblogs. And, it makes me wonder if I should have pointed my students to my own writing here (or elsewhere) a bit more. All in all, the presentation is a great resource and is among the best I’ve seen in terms of articulating the benefits of blogging.

The second comes via Peter Ford who is participating in a research project called Web Journals in Language Education which looks to be a two and a half year study into the effects of Weblogs in the classroom. Very cool. The expected outcomes:

To popularise web logs as a medium for collaborative language writing.

To produce a publication discussing the theoretical rationale of the project, its realisation and outcomes, and cite examples of good collaborative writing practice.

To publish an open-source language-independent content-management platform which is reusable and easily installed and configured even by someone with minimal technical expertise.

To publish a corpus of writings created by students during the course of the project using the collaborative publishing platform.

The whole project looks really interesting and well put together. I just don’t know if I can wait until 2007 for the results!

Lilia Efimova has a great post about the dynamics of comments and conversations in Weblogs.

Conversations are different from publishing, they require listening to others, require investment of attention and energy. My morning check is my way to find out who is talking to me and what they are saying. I don’t do it to find our how famous I am, this is just a very human thirst for a feedback and my respect to those who spend time answering my questions, finding flaws in my arguments or developing my ideas in new directions… So, coming to my original question. I guess some of our conversations die because we do not spend enough energy listening and replying back. In this respect weblog conversations are not much different from all other conversations.

In the post she talks about using Technorati extensively to find other people who are linking and continuing the conversations that she either starts or adds to on her site. And she alludes to her other efforts to find those who are reading and commenting about her posts. Sounds similar to what I’ve been doing.

But to be honest, I hardly ever use Technorati. So I decided to dive into it a bit more today to see if there were some others out there linking and talking that weren’t showing up on my logs or in trackback (which doesn’t seem to catch most anyway.) Cool thing is I found at least 10 posts that I didn’t know about that were linking back here, and some of it was pretty interesting. It’s not something to add to the list of requirements for EdCMS, but it would be nice if there was a better way of tracking the important conversations that Lilia refers to.
—–

Michael Brewster, a fellow high school journalism teacher from Las Vegas, sent me this link to a story one of his former students wrote for the Las Vegas Review Journal about high schoolers blogging. She asks the burning question “So, why would anyone want to put something so personal on the Internet for everyone, even strangers, to read?”

Several students, such as Durango High School sophomores Daniel Castrillo and Jennifer Nadler, keep journals so their friends can know about things going on in their lives. Las Vegas High School senior Kristin Miller works along those same lines. Miller says she uses her journal for venting and “so my friends don’t always have to ask me `What’s up?’ “

It’s fun to see your kids’ names in print…
—–

Some pretty interesting findings about those of us who create content online. Aside from the connection, I’m like a poster boy for this stuff. Personally, I’m amazed at that 2% statistic, which just goes to show how skewed my reality is. I just cannot imagine (nor can I scarcely remember) what my newsgathering and info collecting life would be like without Weblogs and RSS and Furl and Bloglines, which is either a sad commentary on my existence or a reminder that we’re all still way out in front of the curve. Whichever, I still find it all pretty intruiging and useful. Here are some gleanings from the report:

In this survey, we found that a mere 2% of Internet users in this survey reported writing a weblog or online diary. Earlier surveys and a follow up check in early 2004 indicate that between 2% and 7% of Internet users publish a ‘blog. Within this tiny group, only about 10% report updating their blog daily. Most weblog writers update their blogs once a week or less often.

Even though only a small number of Internet users are writing blogs, a slightly larger number of Net users are visiting them. Eleven percent of Internet users report visiting blogs written by others. And of these blog readers, a third report posting to or commenting on the blog entries that they have read.

Blog readers most frequently visit the online diaries of friends (56% have done so), strangers (46% have visited the blogs of people they have never met) and family members (a quarter report visiting family blogs).

Whether or not they have created original content to the Internet world, a greater percentage (though still not an overwhelming number of users) make content available online. One in five Internet users report posting photographs to the net, and 17% of Internet users have posted writing. Just about 5% of Internet users have posted artwork, audio files or video files to the Internet.

Content creators are also disproportionately likely to be students—20% of all content creators are full-time or part-time students.

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(via OL Daily) In my Manila workshops this week we spent quite a bit of time on gems, something that hadn’t really sparked too much interest past the normal nodding of heads in the past. But this week for some reason, gems were big. (For the unManila initiated, gems are what Manila calls files like documents or .pdfs or PowerPoint presentations that you can upload to the server and then link to.) One of the questions went something like “so if I post my presentation as a gem, my colleagues can get it and use it too?” It had LOR written all over it. That’s one of the reasons I found this article interesting, especially this quote:

Blogs, and RSS in particular, exhibit a feature which is critical to future development of distributed systems, i.e. the ability to provide a unique address for an information or learning object…the discrete addressability of information objects.

I’d never really thought of it that way, but when you consider how easy it is now to upload and point to basically any file type, the potential for group archiving of lessons and best practices really is very easy. And then if you Furl it and send out an RSS feed to a site that collects similar feeds from all over… Oy…another thing to add to my list.
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Rick Barter’s comment on yesterday’s post led me to do some digging at his Conners Emerson School site and I found some really valuable resources. It’s great to see other educators thinking through this stuff to the degree Rick and his colleagues are. For instance, this page starts with

One of the challenges for this grade 8 project was the setup. We had to consider many factors such as:

It goes on to run through many of the relevant questions we have to answer about student blogging and how they are approaching the answers. For instance,

“we want discussion enabled, but not membership There is just a bit too much risk in opening this up to uncontrolled public comment.”

And so they set all of their members up manually and close it off to outsiders. There’s much more too. (He even has them using Bloglines to keep track of posts.) Aside from logistics, check out the Grade 5 Poetry Journal, the teacher sites, and the list of student blogs which are just getting started.

The best part of this is that the schools we’re finding are using Manila! I’m going to try to catch up with Michael Breidenstein from Rock Island later today and pick his brain. I’ll blog it for future reference.
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Kaye Trammell co-authored this article in THE Journal about using Weblogs in education, and it does a pretty good job of grounding the use of Weblogs in educational theory. (Yes, we’re at the point, thank god, where the words Weblog and Vygotsky come in the same paragraph!) A couple of quotes:

In this day and age of constructivist pedagogy – focusing on the students’ meaning making – using technology to deliver content should also be seen as using technology to help students create content. Blogs allow students to take ownership of their learning and publish authentic artifacts containing their thoughts and understandings. Blogs also provide a way for students to individualize their content; thus, help us rethink using technology to deliver content.

And:

The use of blogs increases student interest and ownership in learning. Technology has been cited as a motivating tool because of its newness. Blogs are novel to students not only because they are a newer technology, but also because students are blogging about topics that are important to them. Students direct their own learning while receiving input and feedback from others. They also take ownership of their learning in the blogging activities by actively searching for information.

While I think this is a pretty good description of the potential benefits of Weblogs and blogging for students, I can’t help feeling that it’s different for the K-12 world in terms of what they can and can’t do from personal writing standpoint. I had a lengthy meeting with my superintendent yesterday that I’m letting settle before I write about it, but it’s obvious that there are real concerns about the content students produce in terms of appropriateness and the way it reflects on the school.

A couple more links and thoughts about yesterday’s post. I got an e-mail from Susan Hunsburger in Chicago whose second grade class is keeping track of their classroom experiences using a Weblog. I love the tagline: “We are second graders. This is our journal about the happenings in room 209.” Now this isn’t rocket science, but think of how those parents who are interested in what’s happening in their children’s classes might be getting from this? And what about those kids who can easily go back and revisit the things they learned about Native Americans or “Meat we can Eat,” or why people hunt?

One of the things that has always amazed me about teaching is how relatively little parents really show an interest in what’s being taught to their children and what their children are learning in school. I know, I know…it takes a lot of effort. It does. My daughter’s first grade teacher doesn’t want me calling every week to check out the curriculum, and so I try to glean what I can by what Tess brings home in her backpack and the “homework” that she has. But damn, wouldn’t I be a much more involved and interested parent if I had an RSS feed of what her class was doing and another one of her work? I mean just think about that. When she gets into high school and starts studying the Holocaust or algebra or, god forbid, sex, wouldn’t it be a good thing if I could follow along and reinforce or challenge what she’s studying without having to feel like I’m bugging everyone to do so? (Ok…maybe not. This could obviously be a dangerous tool that might require a permit of some type.)

Now I know this is a long way off. Schools have a way of not really wanting parents to get involved too closely because everyone has an opinion about what to teach and how to teach it. But I can’t help thinking that ultimately this type of transparency would help kids learn, get parents and family more involved, and make teaching better. It is, after all, about responsibility and accountability, and what better way to challenge our teachers then to ask them to publish their and their students work. Hmmm…

And to continue the learning log aspect, I can’t remember where I got the link, but here’s another example of how Weblogs as notebook can facilitate learning. Jacqueline is obviously blogging her class. Now add a bit of reflection and synthesis like I was writing about before and…
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