For some reason, today I stumbled upon a couple of “carnivals” which do a regular roundup of whatever submissions the author gets as interesting blog posts in whatever subject his or her own blog is about. I’d taken a look at carnivals before, but today was the first time that I found myself spending some time clicking around. The Education Wonks just posted it’s 37th roundup while Scribblingwoman just put up what looks to be the second “Teaching Carnival” of higher ed bloggers.
I found a couple of things pretty interesting. First, there were links to a great number of edbloggers who I had never seen or read before (which in iteself is always a nice surprise.) Some got my attention more than others, which started me thinking about the emerging genres of edblogging out there that seem to be falling into three pretty distinct camps.
First, there seems to be an edpolicy group that spends a lot of its time writing about NCLB and education funding and teacher contracts. In my own little hierarchy, there’s no doubt that the members of this group are blogging. They’re linking, defending opinions, pushing each other’s thinking. Depending on your political leanings, they can either be encouraging or frustrating, but they are almost always passionate in their writing.
Second, there is the group that primarily narrates life in the classroom. Sometimes inspirational, sometimes harrowing, there’s obviously such a wide diversity of experience and teaching conditions that it’s amazing we expect any of our kids to come out knowing anything close to the same material. Without taking anything away from the efforts of these teachers, they seem to be using blogs to reflectively share their worlds more than using them for blogging. Not saying that isn’t a noble undertaking, just making the distinction.
Finally, there’s the group that focuses on the technology. Obviously, that’s where I’d put this space. It’s a mix of reflective analysis and pretty serious blogging all in an attempt to connect ideas and experiences for others to share and learn from. It’s where I find most of the push for my own learning.
I also think it’s notable that bloggers in the first two groups usually seem to get more in the way of audience participation. And some of the back and forth is really great stuff. But to be honest, I don’t spend very much of my reading time in those spaces. Obviously, I think the technology is what’s transformative here, and I’m most interested in practitioners who are actually using it in their classrooms with their kids. That and there are not enough hours in the day (even with the carnivals.)
Any genres that I’ve missed?
All of which moves me to think more about the ways in which we can ask students to do similar real blog writing in our classrooms.
In the first group, the internal union discussions are a significant subgenre, as defined by the current contract debate within the UFT in New York. The more general ed policy blogs are pretty hopeless.
I still say it is pointless to contend that the second group is not “blogging.” Also, these blogs are near relatives of things like the LiveJournal “first year teacher” forums, which are morbidly interesting in themselves.
I’m most interested in the still quite small number of people doing “Will Richardson(TM) ‘real blogging'” in #2, like Tim Fredrick: http://timfredrick.typepad.com/timfredrick/
Nice start to a taxonomy of educational blogs. I would argue, however, that “technology” is a cultural artifact; that is, the technology is a product of some activity (or activities). I’m not sure if it’s the technology that’s necessary transformative: as you point out, there are a number of blogs out there that aren’t such great examples of critical thinking. Maybe the high quality of the blogs in your third genre are due not to the technology itself, but the high standards you set for yourself and the high standards of this cohort in general?
Classification systems in general are pretty tricky things to wrangle with. While they are very useful structures for thinking and discussing, it is difficult to capture processes and it is easy to become judgemental with them. In my mind, learning is a process and a journey. Blogs, even the not-so-great examples, are opportunities to become more reflective, critical, and aware of one’s place in the wider world.
I’m glad you’re bringing these ideas to light to push educators to become better models of practice for learners.
I think what I’m saying is that the technology is potentially transformative when employed in ways that facilitate critical reading, thinking and writing skills. I’ll go back to the “what can I do with a blog that I can’t do with any other writing tool” standard which, to me at least, is a) link to sources of my thinking and writing, b) disseminate my thinking and writing to potentially large audiences, and c) to some extent, engage readers in converstaions about my thinking and writing (though I could probably do this with paper just not on as large a scale, potentially.) And I think all three of those are requirements for blogging (v). I’ll go back to Weinberger (again) and his idea that the value of the text now becomes what it links to, not what it contains. If you’re not linking, you’re not using the tool to its potential. Doesn’t make it wrong or not worthwhile effort. Just doesn’t make it blogging. (Hear Tom sigh…)