(via ebnWL News) I mentioned this course on Weblogs for Alaskan teachers a couple of weeks ago, and after the first week, the reports are pretty interesting:
I selected the term metablognition for this course because I like to think about weblogs as another layer of thinking for teachers and students. There are class discussions, private conferences and conversations, interactions with all types of texts, response journals, all sorts of formal and informal writing assignments that take place in the classroom. What if we were to consider the blog as another part of our classroom brain, another lobe where different elements of our learning and teaching are synthesized, questioned, rejected, combined, altered etc.? Think of it as a digital zone of proximal development.
Yes, yes, yes…blogs and blogging as metaclass or metaschool even. This is what I’ve been moving toward too. Could the Weblog serve as the space where learning from the various disciplines comes together, gets synthesized? I mean, is this departmentalized construct of learning that we impose on our students anything like the way we learn when we get out of school? Could a Weblog space be the place where students make the connections between science and English, social studies and math, etc.?
That’s why I think blogging (v) is potentially different from any writing that we’ve asked students to do, a genre that may have great value in terms of developing all sorts of critical thinking skills, writing skills and information literacy among other things. We teach exposition and research and some other types of analytical writing already, I know. Blogging, however, offers students a chance to a) reflect on what they are writing and thinking as they write and think it, b) carry on writing about a topic over a sustained period of time, maybe a lifetime, c) engage readers and audience in a sustained conversation that then leads to further writing and thinking and d) synthesize disparate learning experiences and understand their collective relationship and relevance. This just seems to me to be closer to the way we learn outside of school, and I see those things sorely lacking anywhere in traditional education.
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