In One Place

While I do not believe blogs are going to radically transform education by themselves, I believe what they represent–the ability of everyone to publish–holds significant implications for educators both in production and consumption. In particular, there are three issues and assumptions that need to be dealt with:

One advantage of blogging that is often highlighted is the ease and speed with which people can publish. But speed is not always a positive thing. For instance, in July 2005, well-known blogger David Weinberg posted erroneous information, tried to delete the blog, and discovered that the memory function of blogs had already gone to work, adding the post to his RSS feed and sending out the trackbacks. Weinberger admits that his posting was a misreading on his part partially because he hadn’t done his homework: “So, since I was way wrong, and irresponsibly didn’t do more than glance at the original article, and because deleting the post is unlikely to break any links, I’ve just pulled it.” In this case, speed led to error and a re-reading and reflection would have stopped this from happening.

Kevin Finneran compares the speed of blogging favorably to the “19th century pace of a quarterly journal.” Anyone can publish commentary without having to pass a test to get on the op-ed page of The New York Times. But maybe that “test” is not such a bad thing…even if it a little self-test: is what I am posting factual? Have I given correct credit to my source? What are the possible ramifications of what I am writing? Words have consequences which sometimes can’t, as David Weinberger discovered, be taken back. Educators can help students learn to self-censor, choosing their topics and details carefully as they consider a larger audience.

Making these kinds of choices leads to a second issue related to the use of web publishing tools: privacy. The 7th grade teacher who used blogs had her students make them private. But in Blogger, that only means they are not indexed. They could still be found using a search engine. Thus, there is the potential that the blogs could be read by others. There is blogging software that allows complete password-protected publishing, more appropriate if we plan to use blogs as private journals, taking advantage of the ease of publishing without compromising our students’ privacy.

Ultimately, though, the point of blogs is to publish online, opening your work to public display and comment. Educators can take advantage of the full features of this software by choosing activities that are more public such as current events, one of the original uses of blogs. Students can link to articles or websites of interest, commenting and annotating. In this way, students can safely become part of the larger blogosphere, learning to identify and evaluate sources and participate in online conversations.

That participation is, I believe, the piece of blogging that has the largest implications for educators: learning to engage in civil discourse. How can we disagree without calling names? How can we have productive conversations with people we’ve never met face to face? What does a quality discussion look like?

As weblogs approach their tenth birthday, these online publishing tools, commonly known as blogs, continue to generate conversation and controversy in diverse arenas from journalism to business to education. But a preliminary taxonomy of the types of weblogs shows a complicated picture. Blogs have morphed pretty dramatically from their original use for annotating the web. Politicians use them to raise money. Businesses use them to hawk products. Extroverts use them to share their lives. Communities use htem to organize. In fact, more than one blog commentator has suggested that they are so varied as to defy definition. They share a technology but trying to identify a specific genere called “blogging” is incrasingly impossible.

Educators have also embraced weblogs with English teacher Will Richardson leading the charge. His English students’ blog about The Secret Life of Bees shows off the different facets of weblogs software from posting to commenting to including multimedia, even using the blog to communicate with the author, Sue Monk Kidd.

I am having a tough time getting this paper going so thought maybe a little free from blogging would help get to the heart of what I want to say: We need to refocus the conversation about weblogs from how teachers will use them to why and what students need to know and do in order to navigate and contribute to the blogosphere.

For instance, the article in Learning and Leading (March 2004) that describes how one teacher used blogging technology to revive her use of student journals. That’s great…it’s a perfect use for blogs and one I’ve used myself with my undergraduate pre-service teachers. It solves a problem for the teacher because it eliminates all those notebooks and makes commenting easy. And it may solve a problem for students because the technology is transparent thus focusing their attention more on the actual writing. Students are potentially more facile with keyboard than pencil these days so the ability to type might also help increase students’ writing. Steven Krause, who incorporated blogs into his graduate course, admits that his assignment did not require blogs and could just as easily been accomplished using paper. It is the technical advantages of blogging that he highlights including getting rids of the notebooks, the possibility of linking to relevant materials rather than just citing, and the ability for students to read and comment on each others’ writing, “a task that would be difficult to manage with paper notebooks” ” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2005) Continue reading →

Thinking about the tension that will drive my article:

One of the things Gorman complains about is that we want everything fast. But scholarly research takes time. Yet in a recent article in TechTrends about blogs, they suggest that using RSS and new technologies can make searching easier. But I have to agree with Gorman a bit: it’s easy to accumulate a lot of stuff pretty quickly. But then it has to be read and absorbed.

I’m trying a blog experiment to see how well this technology helps me write a paper. For now, I’m in the formulating mode, collecting articles, quotes, and ideas that may or may not make it into the final paper. Here’s the first one from Michael Gorman, the infamous president of the ALA who found himself the object of scorn when he wrote an op-ed piece in the LA Times about Google’s plan to digitize everything. He continued to be unrepentant when he responded to the attacks in Library Journal on February 15, 2005. He points to the often uncivil debate. Hmm…and the Washington Post just had that interesting caper with anonymous commenting. So, for educators living in a world of instantaneous, push-button publishing to literally billions of people, what do we need to be teaching our kids about writing? But even more, about civil debate?

I have a paper to write for my online teaching and learning class and am particularly interested in the use of weblogs. But I can’t figure out the angle. When you type weblogs into ERIC (http://eric.ed.gov), you get 16 results ranging from articles in practitioners journals to a long presentation from AERA to articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ll start with a lit review, of course, and then review the issues: privacy and truth. I think there is also a larger issue of technology in general. One article I read discussed the way that blogs were going to revolutionize writing, taking students from made up classroom research activities to more real world assignments. Really? A technology can do that? I think that is the teacher’s responsibility. The technology can help us store our thoughts, track our research, and otherwise support our learning, but it is not going to change how we teach unless a teacher makes a specific decision to do so.

So how did I miss Web 2.0? I’ve seen bits and pieces (Library Thing counts, right?) but didn’t quite get the whole concept. Then, this evening, as I looked for something completely different, I ended up at elearningpost.com and couldn’t resist the Web 2.0 link. It went out to listible.com, and I was hooked. And from that list, I couldn’t resist Remember the Milk.

See you! I’m off to have fun with to do lists!

All of a sudden my tag cloud isn’t working and it occured to me that I just don’t blog enough. And probably don’t tag enough either. Too busy…although this would be a good venue to try out the short papers for my instructional strategies class.

Yup…I was right…I blogged and tagged and the cloud has reappeared.

I have been thinking about the idea of outcomes-based education: we make a list of desired outcomes and students do whatever it takes to meet them. In non-technology days that meant that they could listen to the teacher and read the textbook as part of a large group of students.. I googled “outcomes based education” and found the Bundaberg Curriculum Exchange, which said: “Lessons can now be directed towards assisting students in developing specific identified outcomes (per syllabus) utilizing whatever context we believe best suites outcome development and student interest.”

Think about the power of that statement…we have the ability to truly reach every student in the way that suits them and the content most effectively. We might incorporate online elements or a print textbook or a video…the list is ever expanding as technology changes. What frustrates me is when someone asks the question, “Is online learning going to replace schools?” It isn’t an either/or question…schools will incorporate online learning to some extent, many of them already have. Technology should expand our choices not limit them.

One last holiday before the semester begins…puttering around the house and computer. Finally decided to work on Noter, my bibliography/notetaking software. I would like the author/keyword lists to be pull down menus rather than checklists when you enter a resource. I got the pull down menus implemented pretty easily (that’s just html) but they weren’t actually writing to the database. I think I know why it isn’t working: since there can be more than one author or keyword for a resource, they are linked to the resource through a keyword and author lookup table. Evidently, at some point I learned how to get a checklist to write to the database. But that code didn’t seem to work when I switched to a pull down menu.

So I went to a backup on DVD. But I wasn’t sure which one…I hadn’t made lists of what folders were on each DVD that I burned recently as a major archiving project. I needed to print the window but wasn’t sure how to do it. I poked briefly around the web, discovered the Automator (which I’ve seen on my computer but never used), couldn’t figure it out exactly, went on the web and watched about 30 seconds of the demo movie at Apple, and a few minutes later was printing the folder window for my backup.

What’s the point? I still have lots of learning to do about php/MySQL. I rely heavily on other people when it comes to programming. I think learning can be plotted on a continuum: basic facts (bottom up processing) leads to conceptual and critical understandings (top down processing). But I don’t think it’s a linear continuum, if that’s possible? I am somewhere in the middle of the continuum: my husband was trying to explain the logic of the code and all I wanted was the code. Surely someone else has implemented this and I know enough about databases so I can make use of already written code, just substituting my table and field names.

My quick detour to learn how to use the Automator provides another lesson about learning: sometimes it happens just-in-time…we can’t possibly prepare completely and know everything we’ll need to know before we go into a project. If you had to learn every nuance of your computer before you actually used it, you would never do anything. What you do need to know is how to find out if and how you can do something. I don’t think we do enough to educate people to navigate the help screens built into software and the resources available to help online.