EduBlog Insights

This doesn’t come from a weblog but I hope Traci Carpenter will create one because I like the sound of her voice! The July 12th issue of Newsweek featured an essay, “I Cannot Be Charted” by Carpenter, a senior at Michigan State University. She was the winner of an essay contest for college journalists sponsored by Newsweek and MTVU, MTV’s college channel. She eloquently explains the youth vote.

I talk with a lot of the students on campus here at Georgia State and much of what she says, I’ve heard in one form or another from the students here. I don’t find them to be uninterested or uninformed, but they really do sense a lack of true caring from the politicians of today. Many have become jaded at a very early age.

Listen to some of Traci’s words:

“Everyone has a theory as to why I don’t vote, but no one really asks me.

I am neither lazy nor apathetic. I’m confused and frustrated.

I cannot be accurately represented by percentages and statistics. I cannot be graphed and charted. I am not a Democrat, Republican or other. I’m a mixed bag of experiences and influences, and no one can predict how I will vote when I do vote.

I don’t know the difference between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry because they don’t take time out from kissing babies and the behinds of corporate executives to tell me. Anyway sex scandals, wars based on false pretenses and broken promises have left me cynical about all politicans.”

I really connected to much that CEO Craig Barrett of Intel said in his keynote speech at NECC. Then today I ran across this blog, Sifry’s Alerts. David Sifry is the founder and CEO of Technorati. I don’t believe any other medium  gives us this up close and personal view of the thinking of CEOs and others quite like blogs do. On his post, Technorati tracks 3 million blogs, he provides the following snippets:

We’re currently seeing anywhere from 8,000-17,000 new weblogs created every single day. On an average weekday, we’re seeing over 15,000 new weblogs created per day. That means that a new weblog is created somewhere in the world every 5.8 seconds.

The number of conversations are increasing. We’re seeing over 275,000 individual posts every day. That means that on average, more than 3 blogs are updated every second.

One of the things that drives me personally is that weblogs are turning us all into producers, creators, and participants in our society, not just consumers. A Forrester Research report asked Internet users which activities they were spending less time doing in order to spend time at their computers. 78% of the people polled said that they gave up television viewing. A study from The Georgia Institute of Technology’s Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center showed a clear shift in media habits with more than one third of respondents saying that they “use the Web instead of watching TV on a daily basis.”

Now for my Independence Day message: We’re connecting with each other, we’re talking to each other, finding people of similar interests, and we’re having conversations. My dear hope is that this is the beginning of a rebirth of civics in America. Much in the same way that email revived the lost art of letter writing, Blogs are reviving the lost art of civilized civic dialogue - of argument, of well reasoned thought and response. And 3 million people (heck, even if you only assume that it is only 1.65 Million people, given the current abandonment rate) participating in worldwide civic discourse puts hope into my heart.

Aha! Another CEO to connect to! It really gives you new perspectives when you can be a part of the open dialogue from so many different voices. I don’t think we have a complete grasp of how the open nature of weblogs and all the different dialogues are going to shape our future. I know a lot of people still are not into these “conversations” and I also know that we have yet to harness the true power of it in our classrooms, but more and more each day I realize that the main reason I’m blogging is to learn. In addition, I want  to enable our students to have a voice in this journey and learn right along with us. The focus of learning with technology through reading, writing, responding and reflecting on weblogs gives me hope.

David Sifry also posted this update:

Update: Mary Hodder points out that not all blogs that are inactive are abandoned. In a private IM, she wrote that “people use them for very different reasons.. archive for annual event..conferences or vacations or whatever, that happen periodically and months may go by with little posting, but the postings are important and need to be searched.. until the next trip or event..”

This is something we need to mention as we discuss weblogs. All of the collaborations, journeys of learning that span a school year, or course, or project in education are excellent models to leave “unattended” so that others can benefit from the process. Some of my best learning has taken place on these “inactive but in my view, not abandoned, weblogs.”

I didn’t know it could be so much fun meeting with a principal. Seriously, I really have great respect for principals of schools. A good principal can really be a change agent in our schools but they are faced with so many challenges…demands of time, knowledge, organizational skills plus a thousand interruptions during a school day that require quick thinking and flexibility. The job can take a toll on even the most creative and strong leaders. I am amazed and thankful that we continue to have so many willing to take on this job. Thanks Tim! Thanks Joe! I’ve been fortunate to work under some really visionary principals who shaped my thinking and learning paths over the years. Good principals know how to assemble a team with a mission of making a difference in students’ lives. 

Yesterday I had a brainstorming session with Joyce Hooper, the principal of J.H.House Elementary School. She is one of those visionary principals. I left the school the year she took the job and while I haven’t had the good fortune of working for her, I have had the opportunity to bring weblogs to her school on a small scale over the past couple of years. She opened the doors of her school and welcomed me to try out this new technology. Now we are ready to try to put it in the hands of teachers - busy teachers who do an incredible job under similar challenges that the principals face daily. Yet they still are interested in learning more and bringing new possibilities into focus for children.

It was so nice to be able to carve a slice of time out of the day during the summer, when things are not so hectic. We even squeezed in a nice lunch and had time to really explore weblog possibilities. I had the opportunity to take her on a journey of many quality elementary sites like Lewis Elementary, Butlerville Elementary, Magnolia Elementary, Awesome Readers & Writers, Blogheads, Idioms Are Fun, NewsQuest, Literature Circles, Thinking and Writing Wrinkles, The Adventures of Jefferson Bear , Mrs. Britton’s Class. Education/Technology and others. She used the Weblogs: The Possibilities Are Limitless! to browse through several other sites and plans to get back to it. She was so excited about the possibilities that she is ready to have a weblog herself. We have a good idea for a way to use her blog to really involve the students with it in an interactive way - more on all this later. She even sent me a story that she wants to incorporate into her first post next year

We talked about making writing and thinking the focus with some quick write and thinking type activities that can be fused with technology/weblogs to give students/teachers a voice and to “bump up the thinking.” Lots of activities from a normal school day can so easily be used on weblogs like Think/Pair/Share, Blooming Questions, vocabulary “use it or lose it” type activities, current events connections to classroom learning, and lots and lots of other writing/thinking/reading ideas. She will have a new instructional technology specialist next year and she wants me to work closely with her and we think we are going to start with a few teachers and try to do it well enough so others will be interested. I think I am going to try out TypePad for this go round. It has some features like unlimited blogs and being hosted by someone else is appealing to me. I love Manila but I need to try out some others, just to be able to make my own comparisons.

Back to the “thinking” board……  More updates down the road…

I’ve been waiting for the birthday surprise and it’s a whopper! I love the new look of Bloglines and they have added a lot of new features.  The clip blog feature is really cool!

From Bloglines:

Bloglines Clip Blogs
- The easiest way to create a blog
- Fully integrated with all your Bloglines news feeds
- One-click blogging from any Web page
- Subscribe to friends’ Clip Blogs and get notified of updates
- Simply click on the ‘My Blog’ tab to set up your Bloglines Clip Blog
- Best of all, your Clip Blog is completely free — just like the rest of Bloglines!

In addition, Saved Items have been renamed to Clippings, and you can easily move private, clipped items to your public blog and back again.

And oh how we’ve grown: Today Bloglines searches and indexes more than 80 million web articles and receives more than 5 million hits a day.

Then they say thank-you to us for making them a success. Well, I say a huge thank you to them for providing such a wonderful resource! Gotta go create my clip blog! Bloglines rocks!

I have a meeting this afternoon with the principal of the elementary school where I used to work. This will be a brainstorming session about the direction the school wants to take next year with the use of weblogs. This is the year we are going to try to get more teachers up and going. I’ve got so many thoughts spinning around in my head. I want to keep it simple but worthwhile, and steer them in a direction that will help them see the possibilities. I love working with this school. The administrative team is top-notch!
—–

Kairosnews has gone live with Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Culture, and Community of Weblogs

The site reports:

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. The collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others.

Lots to read here….I’ll get back to it.

I received an email back from Pat Street, the author of “THERE’S A FROG IN MY THROAT”.

Anne — Sure, I would be happy to comment on your kids’ site next year. Let me know when you have something up.

Woo-hoo! She was impressed with the students ABC blog blook and really liked the artwork, too. She especially liked the pictures for A, Q, S, and W.

She also said, “I don’t know very much about blogs, but now I’m going to try to learn about them. Maybe I’ll try making one of my own!”

She is working on another book which I will be sure to purchase!

This is yet again another example of the wonderful connections you can make for learning on weblogs for students.

—–

I may be ranging out of control again! Something exciting happened this morning. I opened up a comment on my Wrinkles site. It was a comment from Pat Street. She is the author of THERE’S A FROG IN MY THROAT. She had noticed that we had commented on her book in class. Oh how I wish my students were still in school. What a great learning opportunity this would have been. This is one of the absolutely best parts of weblogging. You get a comment. You are anticipating reading it and lo and behold - it is something you never expected but this one little comment can add so much to your learning environment. Having it come from an author of a book you read in class and discussed on your weblog makes it really awesome.

It took me back to the day I discovered her book. I was out at J.H. House on one of the Thursdays I would be working with my Wrinkles group. I had a few moments before class and noticed a book fair was being held in the library. Her book just jumped out at me. I knew I had to have it for the students. We had a great session exploring language and her book was delightful! The illustrations were great! The timing for the book was perfect because we already were knee-deep in learning idioms and other language expressions in our class. We also had been brainstorming words for our ABC Blook on Blogging and this just added to the joy of learning. I love books like this!

Pat Street had the expression “mouse potatoes” which led to Jennifer’s illustration for our book.

Traveling down a learning path with students is really exciting to share on weblogs- the comment feature opens up new learning paths for us and allows us to really think of tremendous opportunities for learning. I’m already thinking of some good ways to use weblogs to explore language and make it come alive for our students. It can really be simple like the Idioms Are Fun! site. I can come up with lots more ideas to use weblogs so students really get to use the language in a fun way. Use it or lose it! We’re going to use it! I can’t wait to get going!

Be sure to visit Pat Street’s website and if you love language and books like I do, consider adding her book to your teaching resources. It’s terrific!

I started the morning checking Bloglines and saw this neat little graphic on their site.The first year has been great! Wow! Wonder what the surprise will be! What a difference they have made in the learning possiblilites for educators!  Accolades to Bloglines!  Thank you for this incredible free service!

This blog, To Blog or Not to Blog, appears to be a group of educators exploring the use of blogs. The About reads as follows:

As part of CIT 768 we have learned about the online learning experience. Our group has taken that knowledge one step furthur by looking at the possibilities of Blogs as part of an online learning environment.

I think, of course, the decision definitely should be TO BLOG!