EduBlog Insights

Doug’s Online Journal is the story of his first year as a high school teacher. He writes eloquently on his feelings about commencement and the end of the year. On his Pomp and Circumstance post he shares the following:

I think I was just feeling proud. I only had the privilege of teaching about sixty of our three hundred or so seniors, but I still felt myself bursting with pride that I had contributed somehow to their lives, even if it was only for one small part of one semester. Truly the greatest gift, to see them walk across that stage.

Since this was my own graduation, in a way, from this high school community, maybe this is the right place to make a few thank-you’s. Most of them will never read this, but sending positive thoughts out into the ether never hurt anyone, so here goes:

1.) To every student that made a point of telling me how sorry they were for what has happened, or how much they enjoyed my class, or how they thought I should definitely keep teaching, or wanting to know what they could do to help. Thank you. You’ve shown class and respect and compassion that outshines many adults in this world. Keep making moves like that.

2.) To every teacher who stopped me in the hall, put their hand on my shoulder, and told me how frustrated they were with my situation. Close friends, new acquaintances, and some who I barely got a chance to know. I truly appreciated each and every word of support and encouragement. They will not be forgotten.

3.) To everyone in my circle of friends and family who has listened to me talk about this same subject for the last six weeks. Your patience, understanding, gentleness, honesty, and quiet challenges to me have made a world of difference. Thank you for being the most important people in my life.

4.) To Corey, who has not gone unharmed in this process, but who has shown nothing but love and compassion to me. You have been my rock. I would never have made it this far without you, and I thank God every day for the gift of your presence in my life.

5.) And finally, to the anonymous student and her family who sent me a lovely bouquet of flowers and a thoughtful note of appreciation on my last day of school. You made my year. Thank you so much.

I love this kind of sharing, available for all to read. It is so good to share the warm moments that we all have experienced. Where else but on weblogs could we share the learning jouneys in such a quick, easy, open-to-all format?

I’m putting the final touches on my NECC concurrent session, Weblogs in Education: The Possibilities Are Limitless! I’ll be presenting with Sandy Peters.

I work all next week. Then I’m taking off a week early for a “much-looked forward to” vacation prior to the conference.  The conference is going to be fun. I hope lots of you are going. I plan to use some student video clips. I thought you might enjoy the blogging rap my Wrinkles’ students created. I’ll also be participating in a NECC 2004:Blogs@School workshop with Tim Lauer, Will Richardson, Steve Burt and Tom Hoffman. They’ll be a whole of blogging going on! Yep, weblogs are off the chart!

I think first of the needs we have in education today and I don’t think anyone would quarrel with the pressing need for more writing from students in our classrooms. It blows my mind that what often times gets left out is actual time for reading and actual time for writing and that’s not even mentioning thinking. Weblogs give us the opportunity to combine all this. I think they can easily be fused into the actual day of instruction. What is needed with the weblogs is time for dialogue, sharing ideas, collaboration, peer help, and a teacher right there in the mix participating with them. We need to restructure our learning environment. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate project. Every student does not have to blog every day but what we need is a class focusing on what they are learning, making connections from that learning to what is going on in the real world, and then problem solving or thinking how they can be a part of the solutions for our future. Why not quick writes each day on one aspect of what they learned on any given day? Then choose a few students to post on a blog. If we could get more teachers to start exploring writing on weblogs in this fashion  or in a similar way that focuses on purposeful engagement, we could build an awesome learning community of students. We can’t build a community like this through other avenues. Weblogs can engage students in a purposeful practice of writing that could promote deeper learning and that learning could be available to a much greater audience. It’s not the weblogs but it is how we adapt our instructional methods to cause this kind of learning through weblogs. Let’s start thinking of ways to get our students’ voices heard and ways we as teachers can model the effective educational use of weblogs for our students. Make it a priority. It’s time to get more students in the mix. 

This article tells how the Associated Student Government leaders launched a blog in an attempt to lower barriers to student input on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus in Illinois. Nathan Whittemore thought of the idea after attending the Iowa Democratic caucuses in January.

The blog has received hundreds of hits in its first few days. Students can ask questions and make comments and criticisims.

Here are the blog guidelines:

Please respect these guidelines. If they are disregarded, we may have to require you to log in to post comments.

1. No personal attacks. Criticise the people’s work, attitude, ideas, platforms, the organization, committies etc, but don’t use personal insults.

The blog has received hundreds of hits in its first few days. Students can ask questions and make comments and criticisims.

Research Buzz led me to a post on Library Stuff, who noticed that there’s now an unofficial Ask Jeeves Weblog. Then the learning continued as I read another Library Stuff post about a few weblog research papers. These peer-reviewed papers on weblogs are from the International Symposium on Online Journalism held this past April. Papers include:

• Online Journalism in Spain: Models, Business and Formats. A Vision

• You’ve Got My Attention, Please Don’t Repeat Yourself!

• Blog, Blog, Blog: Experiences with web logs in journalism classes

• When the Audience is the Producer: The Art of the Collaborative Weblog

• Weblogs and the Search for User-Driven Ethical Models

• You’ve Got News: A Permission-Marketing Model using Sponsored Electronic Newsletters

• Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource

• Traveling without moving: Foreign news and boundary-crossing in Cyberspace

• Redefining Multimedia Toward a More Packaged Journalism Online

• Examining the media agenda: How traditional and online media presented the 2000 and 2004 presidential primaries
  

There are excellent summaries on the symposium site about the author, where they are from, and the purpose of the papers. I will read all of these in time, but I did read the one on weblogs in journalism classes. The synopsis on the site reads:

by Eric M. Wiltse, Senior Lecturer, University of Wyoming
This ethnographic educational evaluation examines how students create Web logs or blogs and how blogs can help students learn about journalism topics. Data analysis revealed three themes: technical problems, interaction, and writing style. Students learned to create blogs through modeling and social interaction. Blogs helped students learn about web design and current events. Writing in blogs helped students focus on class presentations. Results support social-cognitive learning theory.