I’d like to introduce you to our newest family member. Genesis Skye Markwell was born on September 11, 2003 at 6:02 AM weighing in at 8 lbs. 4 ounces. I left work Wednesday night and just got back today! I am one proud grandmother!!!
My weblog has been down since last week. I’ll post later about weblog withdrawal!!
Today has been a busy one. Laptop workshops and other learning sessions. I did want to share a couple of readings that were good.
I really enjoy reading Stuart Henshall’s Unbound Spiral. His post, the Changing Face of Blogs, was interesting. One excerpt:
“As an individual being part of a blogging community is something I desire. In the life before blogging I had many colleagues almost none of which currently blog. While I’ve not asked them much… few have ever asked me about my blogging. It why it is so enlightening and enriching to make contact with other bloggers who see the potential. The free flowing implicit connections are not institutionalized and yet my desire remains for more explicit connections that force me to “raise the bar”. I feel there is a merry dance in there. Few blogger that I really know or correspond with have been blogging longer than two years. We are thus a mass of loose ties… weakly joined. The potential for collective action is enormous.”
Grame’s (pronounced Graham) Nowhere (Now Here) gives you 8 Reasons you should blog even if no one reads it!
Here they are…
1) Because it just darn fun 
2) Because you are writing everyday instead of just talking about it. This discipline will improve your writing skills which may lead to bigger and better things. Remember you learn to write by writing not talking about it. How do you write a book? One word at a time! You are that much closer!!!
3) Because as you “blog your world” you are learning the discipline of “seeing”. You are capturing life, seeing the moment, reflecting on it and enjoying it.
4) You are saving the world, by not using paper which kills trees!
5) You are using your “fine motor skills” which keep certain parts of you brain “alive” as you get older and help prevent such diseases as Alzheimer¢â¡Ás (yes really!).
7) You are recording your life which will be very useful in case you get Alzheimer’s.
I use my own blog as a resource for information. Visiting a friend and want to show them some of your photos? Just pull up your blog. I was speaking for a group and needed a quote. I just pulled up my blog! I carry less knowing I can access it through my blog. Less is more.
So blog your heart out!!!
P.S. Did anyone read this?
I sent the author a comment and told him how much I enjoyed his reasons!
Will’s post on Privacy, Security, Protection is so important. I understand and share his concerns. It would be soooo nice if all we had to concentrate on was the reading, writing, and thinking part. Isn’t that what teachers are to do? Teach…..of course, we all know how many things get in front of that part of our job. I’ll save that post for another day.
I do know as a parent I want to be the one who says what my child can or cannot do on the Internet, but many times parents just say no out of fear from all the things they’ve heard about that may or may not have happened on the Internet. It takes an incredible amount of time on the school’s part to explain all of this, and we certainly can’t give them an iron clad seal that something inappropriate won’t happen. So far I have not had any incidents. Have any of you?
We have to do a really good job of explaining and we need to get more people on board with us to help in that area. The best part of weblogs are the openness, sharing, and collaborating. The joy and anticipation of getting a response from someone is so motivating. Take that away and we will lose a lot. Yes, we can have audiences within our arena but now more than ever we have to open our doors to the outside world. We have to develop global citizens.
Perhaps we need to start in most places with a single class weblog. The teacher can oversee this a lot easier than trying to oversee 20-30 student weblogs. We need to send letters home outlining our “weblogging projects” and give parents some ownership in this process, too. I have to say again that the openness is what makes weblogs so terrific for use in education. We’re no longer contained within four walls. Student’s writing is out there and causes others to react. Wow! You just can’t get that kind of ownership so easily in the classroom. Students have that real audience and the responses are what motivate them. The good that comes from exposing students writing and work to a larger audience outweighs the risk.
via <BlogDex>
Emerging Alternatives Blogworld by Matt Welch is a good article in the Columbia Journalism Review.
A few excerpts……..
Blogging technology has, for the first time in history, given the average Jane the ability to write, edit, design, and publish her own editorial product ¢ to be read and responded to by millions of people, potentially ¢ for around $0 to $200 a year. It has begun to deliver on some of the wild promises about the Internet that were heard in the 1990s. Never before have so many passionate outsiders ¢ hundreds of thousands, at minimum ¢ stormed the ramparts of professional journalism.
Is journalism being produced by blogs, is it interesting, and how should journalists react to it? The answers, by my lights, are “yes,” “yes,” and “in many ways.”
For those with time to notice, blogs are also a great cheap farm system for talent. You’ve got tens of thousands of potential columnists writing for free, fueled by passion, operating in a free market where the cream rises quickly.
Best of all, perhaps, the phenomenon is simply entertaining. When do you last recall reading some writer and thinking “damn, he sure looks like he’s having fun”? It’s what buttoned-down reporters thought of their long-haired brethren back in the 1960s. The 2003 version may not be so immediately identifiable on sight ¢ and that may be the most promising development of all.
It’s a really good overview of blogging.
Then I came across this:
Blogging Works Workshops (for Business)
Check out the price for workshops. No comment on this site.
via <Stand Up Eight>
“I’m experimenting a bit with weblogs in a Japanese culture class I’m teaching this semester. It is a writing-intensive course, and I’m having my students submit their papers to their individual weblogs. Each is then also responsible for using the comments section of a peer’s paper to start a discussion about the topics in the paper. We maintain a class weblog that is used for announcements and general class discussion. The class is small (11 students), so I have been doing everything (account creation, blogroll creation, etc.) manually. With a larger class the setup would be intimidating for me, and I’m fairly technical. Even the class of 11 would be too much work, at this stage, for most faculty. I want to get a feel for the issues involved with using weblogs as the primary mechanism for writing.”
Nice post from Dale Pike. More and more projects keep popping up every day. I’m looking forward to getting feedback about the issues involved with using weblogs as the primary mechanism for writing.
Check out Will/s Manila Procedures Manual- I swear, I don’t know how he does it. He keeps creating and producing and all of it is so worthwhile. Great work, Will! I had started work on Manila Medic, just have a little done but boy is this going to speed up the process. Thanks for sharing. I plan to look at his document more carefully in the morning. I did a quick once over and it looked top notch! Tonight’s my late night at work and I am ready to close up shop!
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Tonight is my night to work late so I have been busy trying to put together a simple workshop to convince the faculty here of the merits of having wireless laptops in their classrooms.
I decided to put it together on a weblog so I could use it again, if needed.
Like I said, the night is late and I will look at this again tomorrow but if any of you have any suggestions or know of other sites or points I could make, please help! I feel like I need something else to add some joy!
Also, I have been fighting with Manila tonight. It is doing strange things like refusing to make small letters, adding bullets in strange spaces, and so forth. Nothing like a good skirmish with Manila, huh?
Today I had an overview session with the “Literature Circles” group. I used my Weblog Workshop and browsed through parts of it, showing them examples and discussing possibilities. Then we zeroed in on the Literature Circles weblog and the sample one Lynne Jordan and I are doing. It is so nice to have the time to give an overview before actually teaching the “how-to’s”. Now this group has time to think about it and check out the samples before we start building the EduBlogs. We are going to put them in groups of 4 or 5 and let them select their own book. The students asked good questions. They were very interested in the comments part and wanted to know what was expected of them. I’m thinking that it might be helpful for them if we write up some guidelines in this area but I want them to be creative and sometimes handouts stifle that! Lynne and I are thinking this through some more.
Some were even thinking of possibilities for students. One student said her classroom teacher is very interested in what they will be doing - great! This is a terrific group with an excellent teacher. I’ll be meeting with them again on September 16th.