(via OL Daily) I love Stephen Downes’ take on the New York Times ed blogging article:
With a new school year approaching in the northern hemisphere the blog phenomenon is about to go mainstream with not thousands but tens of thousands of teachers using them in their classes. New experts will be annoited by the press, academic studies will be conducted, and the inevitable backlash will be in full force as writers will complain about the poor grammar and trivial topic selection of the average student blog.
I’ll wait to see if blogging actually hits the mainstream to that extent, but let there be no doubt that as more teachers turn to blogs, the standards for their use will become increasingly more challenging. The transparency that Weblogs offer means that not only can we celebrate our students’ learning and thinking and our own teaching more widely, we also have to be ready when people start to realize that we’re all far from perfect. (Shocking!)
Obviously, this is what scares many away from using Weblogs in class. Ironically, however, my experience so far has been that parents who actually read classroom blogs give more weight to being able to see their children’s work and follow along with the curriculum than the inevitable imperfections of the work that is published. But I agree that those outside observers who have no real stake in the outcome will be more inclined to highlight the flaws rather than debate the merits. (Oh, and by the way Stephen, you spelled “annointed” wrong.)
Too bad, but if current politics is any indication, it’s not surprising.
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