Bud the Teacher

The Podcast: A Project of Projects

   

Tonight's short offering is a thought or two about an idea I had today.  Aggregating content is nothing new - but makes sense when you need a "new" project.  We could all use a few more connections to the good work we're up to.  Would love to hear your thoughts, or anything you're up to in this vein.  Enjoy.

A Blast from Someone Else's Past

    A little while back, Dean mentioned a tweet I made that got him thinking.  I'm still thinking - about what's already out there and what we can learn from it, instead of racing forward to the next new thing in a hurry.  I feel myself skating from content to content and application to application - without enough time to process, to understand.  To learn.  Frustrated with myself, I'm finding myself deep in the archives of bloggers that I trust and respect at the moment, looking for  .  .  .  well, I'm not sure what, but I think it's important.  I've much more to say about that - but in the meantime, here's a blast from someone else's past.  I found this line delicious:

I’ve got weblog fever in a bad way, and I know JUST enough about making them work to make them dangerously intriguing.

The author?  Will Richardson.  August 2002. 

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.) 

   

A Belated Answer

    About a week ago, Brian posted:

Paul Hamilton  left this comment on my last post:

This week, I did a workshop for classroom teachers on using blogging in the classroom as one UDL approach for ALL learners. There were questions about the quality of posted student writing. So, here are my questions to you. Do you approve and/or edit every student post? How much editing do you do? How time consuming is the process? (I notice that you were working at it on a Friday evening!) Do you have any related tips for teachers who are holding back out of concerns in this area?

Since I'm not sure about the statute of limitations on blog responses, I'm going to answer now, as I was asked at the end of the post. 

    I've run blogs where I approve everything and others where my students had all the control of what got published and when.  I always approved material for our student newspaper (now defunct, sigh), in part because I wanted an opportunity to do revision and editing with each student, and in part because I thought the professional nature of the newspaper made sense for such controls.  When I taught speech via blogs, I was willing to let my students decide what they published and when.  We discussed appropriate behavior as well as that if they weren't sure about whether or not to publish , they could certainly seek the advice of their fellow students or their teacher.  Since their blogs were more for reporting research than they were for formal presentation, I tended to cut the students some leeway when it came to the "rules."  If it was readable, and approaching formal English (or, if you prefer, "acceptable public voice,"), then I let it go. 
    In two years of blogging with students, I asked one student to change a piece, once, and even he agreed, after re-reading, that he shouldn't have hit "publish" in the first place - but that he was frustrated when he made the post.
    The time involved with editing is much the same as with not editing.  I think it's irresponsible for a teacher to require writing and then to not read that writing.  (I don't mean read every word; teachers, though, should at least skim every post a student makes, for a number of reasons.)  So whether or not a teacher is editing prior to publication, or is reading after publication, the time factor is still there.  I would argue for making the time spent editing a student's work with a student a learning experience, akin to a writing conference.
     The trick, when editing, is to help the writer to become a better writer - and not to mask their student voice with your own teacher voice.  I struggle with that one every time I work with a student in a conference. I don't think we should edit every word or sentence for grammar and proper punctuation - but we should attend to egregious errors.  Your own judgment will help you to determine what "egregious" means for your students. 
    I hope this is helpful, even if it's a bit late.  You asked a great set of questions, Paul.  Thanks, Brian, for allowing me to take a crack at them. 

Hyperlinked Print. Sort of.

   This month's English Journal is a themed issue on New Literacies.  I'm pleased that a hyperlinked version of our column, entitled "Linkin' (B)Logs: A New Literacy of Hyperlinks" is available for free via the EJ website.  Regular readers of the blog will have seen much of the content before, as some of it originally appeared here, but hey, now it's in print, so it's an important text for scholarly perusal, as opposed to just a blog post. 

  Enjoy. 

Been Listening to . . .

    The runaway podcast of my summer and soon-to-be-fall is WNYC's Radiolab.  The podcast, a fabulous collection of fun at an editing board mixed in with science and philosophy (or maybe it's the other way around), has been a must listen whenever it appears in my aggregator.  I love how the show's producers blend interview with narrative to make an enjoyable listen out of sometimes dry, but fascinating information.  There are digital storytelling lessons here, I think. 
   This week's show should be downright required listening.  Here's the description:

Forensics, archeology, genealogy, and genetics are devoted to figuring out what really happened. In this hour, we hear surprising stories of playing detective, and find that what really happened in the past is not always what you'd expect. We start at a trash dump in Egypt, where we find Jesus, Satan, sissies, and porn. Next, the mystery of how hundreds of old letters written to the same woman were discovered on the side of Route 101. And lastly, a blood sampling tour of Asia reveals a prolific baby-maker and a potential world conqueror.

The old letters story, my favorite this week, involves a teacher, serendipity, and some intriguing creative writing.  What podcasts are you loving that I should know about? 

King on Rowling: The kids are alright

    This is a little less timely than I would have liked, but I've been working through quite a hefty "to read" pile.  (You can check out my online "toread" pile, if you'd like - if anything on there's no good, let me know so I can save myself the trouble!)
    I've quite enjoyed reading and re-reading Stephen King's piece "The last word on Harry Potter" from Entertainment Weekly, where he writes a regular column on pop culture.  In the piece, he speaks to the successes of J.K. Rowling's series as well as her strengths as a writer.  (One big one, according to King, is she allowed her characters to get older.)  He also writes about how strong many kids' reading habits actually seem to be, and closes beautifully:

But reading was never dead with the kids. Au contraire, right now it's probably healthier than the adult version, which has to cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious ''literary novels'' each year. While the bigheads have been predicting (and bemoaning) the postliterate society, the kids have been supplementing their Potter with the narratives of Lemony Snicket, the adventures of teenage mastermind Artemis Fowl, Philip Pullman's challenging His Dark Materials trilogy, the Alex Rider adventures, Peter Abrahams' superb Ingrid Levin-Hill mysteries, the stories of those amazing traveling blue jeans. And of course we must not forget the unsinkable (if sometimes smelly) Captain Underpants. Also, how about a tip of the old tiara to R.L. Stine, Jo Rowling's jovial John the Baptist?

I began by quoting Shakespeare; I'll close with the Who: The kids are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story (important) and do it without talking down (more important) or resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they'll kill the damn thing.

Worth your time.

The Podcast: I'm Learnin'

    In this podcast, I manage to define a network as a group (gulp - forgive the error) while attempting to explain some of what's been on my mind as I've been getting used to my new job.  Yeah, that theme's getting a little old around here - but I think it's going to be that way for a while.   Feel free to let me have it in the comments. 

Blast from my Past

    Turns out my first ever scholarly publication, an article on book clubs and preservice teachers that I co-wrote with my friend and teacher Cindy, is available for free online for a short time.  She taught me to write for journals; I'm teaching her to blog.  I think I came out ahead in the deal.

Questions on Collaboration

    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.