Bud the Teacher

I'm Gone

   It's time, if you haven't already, to update your feeds and your links.  This blog will close in a few weeks.  Then it'll be gone.  But don't worry, I'm up and running at the new blog, and everything's still there. 

  So here's the new blog:

  http://budtheteacher.com/blog

  And here's the right feed to be subscribed to:

 

http://feeds.feedburner.com/budtheteacher

  Come join me!

Moving

   It seems like it's time.  Time to move this blog home with all the other tools and sites and whatnot that I've accumulated on this long, strange trip of the last few years.   If you're subscribed through my feedburner feed, you shouldn't notice a change, at least on the subscription side.  If you're not, perhaps you should change your subscription, as you will no longer receive any posts from me.   Then again, maybe you're okay with that.  I'll keep the Typepad space running for a month or two, just in case you're a little behind in your reading.  The good news is that it's so easy to move a blog - all of the last three years of posts and comments and conversation is sitting over on the "new" blog.  Hope to see you there, too.

Here's the feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/budtheteacher

See you on the other side. 

The Death of Blogging is Greatly Exaggerated

    I don't think for a moment that blogging is going away.  In fact, I'm surprised by how quickly some folks seem to embrace that.  (I wonder if it's because blogging is hard.  I'd like to give up plenty of hard things - but I won't because they're good for me.)    Ryan Bretag writes that, unless "blogs evolve" then they'll drift away.  I don't agree with him.  In fact, in the spirit of constructive debate, and because I've got lots swirling around in my head at the moment, I'm happy to provide the constructive criticism that Ryan was seeking in his post. 

    In his piece, Ryan argues, on one front, that blogging is dying because we as a blogging community were never able to all agree on goals and objectives:

There are times when I ponder what the goal is for the edublogger community. Obviously, there will be those that immediately move to the power of blogging is that it is about the individual; it is about whatever that person wants it to be about. While this is true, I would hope the end goal for edubloggers is improving education and that the goal of individual blogs or community blogs will focus on how they are helping to achieve this larger community goal.   

    There are multiple problems here.  The same assumptions that inform Ryan's argument above are present in many of the important and interesting conversations taking place within my personal learning network now and in the past.  Mostly, the assumption that's troubling me so much is that there's one group (community - whatever) out there that exists for educational conversation via electronic media, and that we should all try to engage and involve everyone in that one (fallacious) group so that we're all friends and reading and commenting each other.  And that we'll all agree on where that group should go, when they should meet, and what we'll all do when we get there.  Or that we ever agreed in the first place.

    Ain't going to happen.  Not now, not ever.  Never did happen, in fact.  We all construct our blogrolls, our Twitter friends, or our other social networking relationships for our benefit and to meet our own unique needs.  That leads some folks to add everyone as a friend.  Others, no one.  And whichever way you want to go is fine for you - but please don't require that I or anyone else goes with your system to meet our own needs. 

    However folks decide whom to add as a friend, a trusted source, or whatever, dictates to some degree which bits of the "conversation(s)" one receives.  (And maybe it's not even a "conversation" in the sense of the word that we're all most familiar with.  Bakhtin's a good guy to get cozy with to follow this conversational, or dialogic, view of blogging.  If there is such a thing.  Yet.  I'm still wrapping my head around this stuff - have been for a while.)  So context itself gets funky in a network situation, leading to instances where, in my friend group, something would be totally okay, flattering, in fact, and in another, the same act would be a serious social violation.  And different readers, responding to different network contexts (because every one of our networks is unique), will react differently to the "same" information.   Add in the fact that a piece of my network exists inside of a piece of yours,  or vice versa, or used to, or soon will, and things get messy pretty quickly. 

    Despite the fact that this makes for some seriously complex audience(s) analysis every time one puts fingers to keyboard (or at least, I hope that it does for you - sure does for me), I hope it's pretty clear that there is no such thing as "one" edublogosphere.  I used to think that perhaps there was - probably before I started blogging in 2005 - but there're too many of  "us" and so it becomes more than impossible to keep track of it all.  That's a good thing, once we recognize the reality.

    It's actually dangerous to believe that we can stay on top of all of the information.  Some do better than others, of course, but I don't know that there's any one person that's got all of the necessary information for world domination at their fingertips.  (Sorry, Steve. - And that's a reference to an inside joke that you'd only understand if you'd been reading Steve Dembo's Twitter stream for the last several months.) One stance I'd urge folks to consider, if they haven't already, is that we can and should accept that there's plenty we're going to miss, lots of it quite good, but that we're doing no one a service by trying to read everything or make declarations about the "proper social norms" of the "edublogosphere."  Since there's not "one" and we're all a little bit different, then lots of the "we musts" only make sense in particular contexts. 

    And there're plenty of contexts to go around. 

    Other people, smarter people than myself, have attempted to explain this before.  Stephen Downes, for one, continues to be helpful to my understanding of just how wicked complex such a simple act, that of blogging, is.

    But I certainly don't get it.  At all.  I'm still fumbling along, as best as I can - and that's a good thing.

    This will sound horribly selfish, and I'm overstating it just a bit for emphasis, so I hope it's taken with the grain of salt that it deserves - but I'm not writing or reading or thinking for the benefit of all mankind, no matter how selflessly I say otherwise.  I'm doing it for me, for my personal learning and attempt at understanding.  Now, there's a certain benefit for others if I'm able to better teach, to better serve my students, or the grown ups with whom I work.  But they are not the primary beneficiaries of my labors. 
    I am.   
    Like I said - that sounds selfish, and there's certainly a large piece of me who works in this space because I believe in the value of sharing and collaboration.  Heck, I'm a teacher because I believe that education helps to make a difference in peoples' lives.  The paradox of  "the edublogosphere" is that sometimes, the best thing I can do to build community/group/network capacity  is to serve me, myself and I and trust that such self-service will be of use to others.  I've seen time and time again that it can be. 
     (I've also seen that Ryan's probably right about folks' desire to be in agreement with people rather than in conflict about ideas, but that's another blog post.) 

   

Oops

    Oops.  Yesterday, as I began to compose a post on a great day of thinking and planning and discussion, I accidentally hit send instead of "save to draft." 
    I regret the error.  Sorry 'bout that.  A full post will follow soon.

A Small Victory

   

Good news from my hometown school district.  Jason writes:

I'm actually sitting at my computer at school writing this post.

My district FINALLY decided to unblock Blogger for educational purposes.  They used my TOK blog as evidence for its usefulness and they finally agreed... so now you are free as PSD teachers to utilize it in your classroom... and please do. The more of us that stand up and show how we can properly use blogger for students and teachers alike, the more likely that they will see it as a step forward in our use of technology.

   Congratulations, Jason.  Well done.

Framing Blogging - Making Connections

    One of my great frustrations lately as a teacher is that I am not having more success teaching blogging, as in blogging the verb ala Will Richardson, to my students.    The value of blogging, as I've come to learn, is in the way that it requires that I interact with source material, either another blogger or any other text that I can find to quote and think about.  That interaction with sources is what I think is so, so, so essential in the education of students.  If we are to teach students to teach themselves, we must focus our efforts on areas of basic communication and areas of interacting with other information.  I know that statement is probably preaching to the choir, but maybe not. 
    Lots of the "successful" uses of blogs out there are those that aren't really about interacting with sources.  Posting homework online, unless the homework is source-specific, isn't blogging, although it is a step in the right direction. 

    I've had some small successes here and there, but I'm finding it funny and sad that I am unable to successfully share the one best learning tool in my personal arsenal with the students that I work with.
  I could bemoan that the problem isn't with me, or with my methods, it's with the community/school/students/parents/etc.  But what good does that do?  Such excuses would make me feel better, but they wouldn't be me teaching -- they'd be me giving up.  As I step back from day to day writing instruction while my very able student teacher steps up, I'm thinking again about how to teach blogging rather than writing with blogs. 
    For two different quarters in two different school years, I have been attempting to better incorporate blogging into my speech course, English 10B, a standard course for students in the tenth grade in my district.    I figured then, and still think now, that using a blog as both a research log as well as a tool for reflection while preparing for a speech was a good idea.  To that end, I encouraged students to write three kinds of posts.   I'll admit that we all got a little stuck as we learned how to navigate between our own blogs and the blogs of our classmates.  We used Bloglines as our aggregator and Blogger as our blogging tool.  Too much software.  Elgg has mostly solved that problem, as it serves as both blog and aggregator.  Too cool. 

    While I was pleased that my students began to tentatively share their ideas with the world, I felt that my instruction was not as thorough as it might have been.  I understood that one of the powers of blogging is the ability to connect to the writing of others in some pretty tangible ways.  But I don't know that I communicated that to my students as successfully as I would have liked.

    This isn't a post about tools.  It's a post about content.  But the tools and the content are beginning to, or have always been, running together and affecting the other.  My students, or me, or you, or anyone can't learn how to write connectively without first learning how to make those connections.  I'm not an expert, but I think it makes sense to try to articulate the different types of links that are possible in a blog post.  I recognize that such a list is limiting, but I need to wrap my brain around these ideas a little bit.  (Here's a wiki version of my list, which is by no means complete.  Feel free to make it better.)  I see several different types of linking that I should be explicitly teaching:

1.  Connecting to locations.  The simplest of links.  When we write, we might write about specific places, people or events.  Often, those events or places have websites.  A very basic form of connective writing, then, would include creating links to those places.  (Ex. I like the Denver Broncos; Bob Ross was a great artist.)

2.  Connecting to ideas.  This is a basic citation.  Alan Levine calls it a linktribution.   One of my pet peeves about teaching blogging and hyperlinking is that so often, people will link to the parent page of a website rather than the page where they got their specific information.  The best part about linking to specific information is that it's very transparent.  I can trust you as a writer right away if I can see that your links are accurate and that the quotes that you use are reproduced accurately. 

3.  Connecting to self.  Sometimes the best ideas that we can find are ones that we had in the past.  The advantage to keeping and archiving a blog is that you can almost literally travel back in time to visit with the old you.  One way to connect with the old you is to quote yourself and respond. 

4.  Connecting for attention.  When students are writing for specific audiences, they sometimes need to get the attention of the folks that they are writing for.  One way to do so in an online environment is to include a link to a site or blog or wiki or something that their intended audience might be keeping an eye on.  When the audience searches for references to the link the writer uses, then that writer will discover the piece of writing.  Most bloggers that I know are aware of this, and they maintain an RSS feed (or several) of searches for specific links or terms that relate to them.  For example, I use Technorati to provide me with an RSS feed of any reference to the URL of this blog.   When someone writes about, and links back to,  something that's been posted on my blog, I find out about it and can go check it out.

    This is certainly first draft thinking; please keep that in mind.  How are you teaching your students to link?  What have I missed?  Is there a better list out there?  Again, here's the link to the wiki version of this list -- help me improve it.  I'm eager for some feedback, as well as conversation, about how to teach blogging and not writing with blogs. 

Footnotes? Me?

    I never thought I'd say/write this, but I'm finding that I need a way to create footnotes in a blog entry.  I use Typepad.  Does anyone know of how/where I can create footnotes, preferably linkable ones, inside of my blog?
  I'm writing a big post, and I need the ability to annotate it.  Suggestions?

Turning Two

   

Happy blogday to me.
    Happy blogday to me.
    Happy blogday, dear Budtheteacher.typepad.com,
    Happy blogday to me.

UnBlogging Blogger

    Google's adding new privacy features to Blogger:

Google Inc. has released a new version of its Blogger service, adding privacy settings that restrict readership to a predetermined audience.

Users can choose to have blogs accessible to anyone or just to themselves.

Or they can list the e-mail addresses of the people they want to let in. Those readers would need to register for a free Google     (nasdaq:       GOOG -        news     -            people     ) account - the same used for its Gmail and other services - and would sign in with their regular Google passwords.

    As others have suggested, the ability to control the audience of a blog will probably increase schools' use of blogs.  That control will also destroy some of the reason for creating a blog in the first place.  Certainly, a limited public audience is better than no public audience when it comes to writing and learning.  But I wonder how limited some of those "audiences" will be.

Yarn. Again.

    Thanks for those of you who made suggestions, both on and offline about how I should handle Saturday's blogging workshop.
    Turns out, I ended up using the yarn again. What is it about yarn and blogs? 
     Let me explain. 
    After a quick introduction, I asked all of the participants to raise their hands if they had done something interesting in their classrooms in the last 30 days.  Not surprisingly, every hand went up.  I then asked someone to briefly tell us what they did.  After my volunteer went, I handed her the end of a skein of yarn and asked anyone who was interesting in learning more about what she had to say to raise their hands.  I then instructed the volunteer to hang on to one end of yarn and to toss the skein to someone with their hand up.   That new "volunteer" then shared, and we repeated the process, grabbing the yarn and tossing it along to others who were interested in what was going on in our respective classrooms. 
    It didn't take long for us to notice two things (as I expected):
1.  Pretty much everybody in the room was doing something pretty darn interesting.
2.  We were all invested/interested in/curious to know more about each others' classrooms.

    The reason for the yarn?  I wanted people to see the connections that they have to their colleagues -- connections of interest, of investment, concern and curiosity.  The yarn was a tangled mess of connection that was a strong visual suggestion of the network that forms when teachers begin to blog and to share their work online.
    Participants wanted me to show then how to blog and podcast with their students -- I rejected that idea.  The best only way to learn how to create learning networks with students is to create a personal learning network yourself.  Once that happens, let's work together to create experiences for students.  (In fact, there was talk of doing some long-term training around technology, but that's a story for later.)
    As we worked for the rest of the afternoon, reading about learning (good timing, Will!), creating blogs via Blogger and subscribing to each other via Bloglines, the yarn network was there, and we all felt gentle tugs as we typed or when we tried to cross the room to ask a question.  (Actually, I tripped over the network at one point, and just about hurt myself.)  At the end of the day, I asked every participant to share one goal that they had for their blog over the next several months.  Many said that they'd be blogging and reading blogs in their aggregator once a week for the next few months.  I thought that was a reasonable goal.
    It sounds hokey, but the heart of the matter is that, with blogs and feeds and the connections we're making, we're really connecting with other people (and their ideas and experiences) in ways that just weren't as easy, or as possible, a few short years ago.  Adding pictures, video, and audio boost the connection.   
    That's why the Read/Write Web is important, because of how it allows us to build relationships and share ideas and solve problems.  And that's why we should be teaching (in/through) it.
    If you'd like to meet our new bloggers, head over to the CSUWP blog and check out the links to Active CSUWP Teacher Blogs.  Some are new -- some have been blogging for a little while now.