This podcast, recorded on my way home from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is just a stream of consciousness reflection on the day. I am humbled to be in community with so many wonderful , talented and devoted educators, both here in Colorado as well as around the world.
I'm teaching several courses for my district next week, including one on blogs and wikis. That makes this video very, very timely. Thanks, Louann, for the pointer.
Ben shares a frustrating experience he's having with a collaborative partnership torn asunder by parental concerns in a different state. Lots to think about here, amidst the perceived parental overreaction, but I'm particularly interested in the comments from students on their collaborative wiki about the issue. They're frustrated -- but are communicating, too, the value of their learning via wiki. One comment in particular struck me as very astute:
Seriously, I never even got a chance to talk to them, and
do you know why? Because I was working and learning and writing! What does that tell you! That tells you that by them not being on here they are being deprived of something they could have learned from. I just hope whoever the parent is that called that attorney something
knows how much they have affected. And that they have deprived an entire class of kids of some of the learning they needed!
Another student is a bit more practical about the situation:
. . . we can still use wikimail and make our own wikispace.
Hmm. After school wiki work?
Ben concludes his post with several excellent questions for moving forward:
The question I kept thinking about after reading this e-mail is, “Who failed?” Was it the teacher who didn’t set up enough rules and guidelines for the students that were written down? Was it the parent who failed to work with the teacher and understand the nature of the collaboration? Or, was it the students who couldn’t grasp the public nature of the internet?
Because of one or a combination of these factors, these students are being shut out of an avenue for self expression and learning. What can we do so that this doesn’t happen to us?
Head on over to his place and share your thoughts.
I've had a quick peek at FunnyMonkey's new flavor of Drupal, soon to be DrupalEd. It's pretty dynamically fantastic, despite the fact that it's in alpha/beta. Here's the annoucement:
In conjunction with our work within the Drupal community and with OpenAcademic, we have brought a site live for people to check out: http://drupaled.alphabetademo.org
The site can function as a blogging platform, a podcasting platform, a wiki, an informal learning space, a course management space, and/or as a replacement for an organizational intranet. Within the site, users can create working groups or communities of practice. The site also supports social bookmarking. The homepage of the site gives a more complete overview of the functionality.
We would like to turn this site into a downloadable installation profile as quickly as possible, so that whoever wants this functionality can grab it and install it. This install profile will be released under the GPL license.
If you want to check the site out, feel free to create an account and play around. If you want to get involved, we'd love your help!
- To start, we'd love to get people's first impressions as they check out the site, What made sense? What was intuitive? What was confusing? We have set up a wiki page for this feedback; your responses will help us tweak the look and feel of the site to make it easier to use. Please, share your thoughts! The more feedback we get, the more tweaking we can do.
- Second, what do people need to know about using the site? We have begun some "Getting Started" documentation that people can build as they work through the site. What functionality do people need to know about as they use the site? This documentation wouldn't need to be technical, but rather should lay out how to use the site from an end-users perspective: ie, click here to do this.
As I envision it, this "Getting Started' documentation will be edited/distilled into a user's manual that will be included in the final install profile. This way, people who are new to Drupal, or new to working in an online environment, will have some guidance to help them get up to speed.
- Third: Spot where it's broken. See a broken link? Let us know about it.
- Fourth: Theming. If there are any graphic artists/designers who want to throw some expertise into making the site look pretty, please let us know by leaving a comment here, or on this post.
- Fifth: Add your name to the contributor list. If you added documentation, provided feedback, or helped get the site live, let the world know. The Contributors List, along with the Getting Started documentation, will ship with the site.
After we have received some input from the community (aka you), we will bring a version of this site live at DrupalEd.org -- in addition to providing a blogging platform for people who would want one, the DrupalEd site could also become a place for educators to get feedback on the non-technical issues of teaching and working online.
As I said, it's pretty dynamic -- but can and will get better as folks share feedback and responses and suggestions and ideas. I'd encourage you to give it a look. Bill's a very responsive guy -- and he's eager for your thoughts. Give it a whirl.
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.
Barbara, can you tell us anything more about the Middlebury College's history department faculty barring the use of Wikipedia as a source in academic work? (I'm sure you're busy -- but any insights or pointers would be much appreciated.) (Thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer.)
David Jakes gets it right when he writes about who should have the ultimate say in who gets to decide whether or not certain schools should have access to particular tools:
The community makes the decision.
Yes, it’s probably the only answer that makes sense-the values, the beliefs, and the moral views that the community holds determines the call. Schools are responsible to the communities they serve, and that responsibility is managed by the board of education. If the school board directs the IT coordinator or the IT staff to block such sites, then I’m good with that. Again, it is my belief that the philosophy of what to block/not block must come from the school board and should not originate from a set of personal beliefs of an IT director or coordinator.
Now, that's not to say that the community shouldn't have all (or at least the best possible) information and opinions from educators and parents and others when it comes time to make such decisions. Or that the community will always be right. But we've got mechanisms in place in our communities to ensure the rights of the minority aren't trampled when these types of decisions get made.
Allowing the community to be involved in such decision making isn't easy, nor does the ideal of everyone coming together to agree on what's best for a group of students always work; nor do the mechanisms always work in our favor, if at all. Responsible and intelligent adults who have the best interests of students in mind often disagree when it comes to what's best for schools. And losing a battle always sucks, no matter what side you're on.
In fact, it'd be far easier if one person in an office somewhere gets to make all of the decisions about what gets into schools and what doesn't. But it'd be wrong, even if I was the person who got to have the final word.
In an abrupt possible topic change, and perhaps the first openly political statement I've made on this blog (I try to be very careful with those, as I'm not a politician), DOPA is a bad piece of legislation that is being debated and decided largely by people who have no interest in dialoguing with those of us in the education community. It's the perfect example of how a "representative" body (i.e. the U.S. House of Representatives) has mistakenly identified a "problem" that isn't and is attempting to craft a solution that ignores the needs and voices of the community that it will affect. Do we need to help children be safe on the Internet? Certainly. Does DOPA help? Nope.
I hope the U.S. Senate does a better job of listening to the voices of our communities and realizes that this is strongly misguided legislation that will solve no problems and will actually create more problems, as "social networks" will move into the underground and we won't be able to help students and parents and families, the communities that we serve, to successfully and safely navigate them.
Whew. It felt good to get that off my chest. So ends the political soapboxing.
I discovered that Geoffrey Chaucer's blog has been added to the fictive blog section of my wiki. This is an impressive text, certainly a labor of love, and well worth five minutes of your precious surfing time. (Not that y'all ever surf the Internet anymore, of course.)
If you know of any other blogs purportedly by people who aren't real, please add them to the list.
I've created a sandbox wiki for ideas that I've gotten from Phil's presentation. I'm calling it a "sandbox" because you can also use it to play around with wiki editing. You'll need to create an account to edit -- but it's really easy to do. Check it out and add your own ideas.
I like to see what's happening at other National Writing Project sites, especially during the summer, when the summer institutes are happening all over the country. Lots of great stuff is occurring in those workshops, and lots of it is trickling out for public consumption via different site blogs. However, I have never been able to find a complete list of blogs from all of the different sites.
So how about let's create one? I've set up a page on my wiki for listing active NWP local site blogs. If you have one, or know about one, would you please add it to the list? I'll compile an OPML file for easy subscription once the list reaches critical mass.
Thanks in advance.
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