From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article titled Scholars Who Blog:
Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?
[link via Gallowglass]
Great lead. :-) But the story seems to focus on wannabe talking heads, the *pundits of the world, those scholarly few who salivate at the idea of being a guest commentator for CNN or FoxNews. Nary a mention of using weblogs for actual teaching and learning.
Education, Weblogs
Wow! I’ve been busy and missed a lot of activity over this discussion in the last couple of days. I wish I had time to respond in depth to all the good thoughts, but I don’t. So linkage and an exhortation to Go read these! will have to suffice.
UPDATE (05/29/03: 10:05AM): Corrected one of the attributions, based on Joe Luft’s comment to this post.
UPDATE (05/29/03, 10:20AM): for those of you coming from Online Learning Daily (thanks, Stephen), the list has been expanded to include the earlier posts in the conversation and is in roughly chronological order.
Will Richardson (who started all this!): Legal Issues of Student Publishing
Greg Ritter: Student Publishing and Privacy
Greg Ritter: Student Publishing and Privacy, Take Two
James Farmer: Student Publishing
James Farmer: More on Student Weblogging
Tom Hoffman Joe Luft: Publishing and Privacy
Ann Davis: Writing to Learn (Ann, I’ve seen this same reaction in college students, so it’s not limited to elementary school age!)
Tim Lauer: Student Publishing and Privacy
Tom Hoffman: Class Weblogs and Privacy
Will Richardson: Student Publishing Cont.
Trying to collect this list makes me realize that we still lack a good technology for tracking cross-blog discussions.
Education, Weblogs
It seems like Bonnie B. is implying that my dissatisfaction with the “everything’s a weblog and weblogs are everything” mentality means I want people to spend big money on enterprise software. Maybe she didn’t read my follow-up or the comments to that follow-up where I pointed Lindon at dozens of open source options, as well as the commercial ones?
Anyway, Bonnie asks “Why administer a half-dozen different systems if you can offer the same functionality with a single system?” Ah, but that’s a misleading question. It presumes the “same functionality” exists, and that ability to achieve the “same functionality” is precisely what I’m questioning.
Read more…
Education, Weblogs
James Farmer makes some good comments in my previous post on Student Publishing and Privacy. In particular he says, “Were you more mortified cos of possible legal consequences or the pressure on students? I don’t quite get your main concern.”
I’m all for using weblogs in education, particularly in the writing classroom or (probably more importantly) as a way to bring writing to non-writing classrooms. And there are many disciplines where assignments require public “performance” — dance, music, theater, journalism (writing for the school newspaper), etc. So no reason we can’t make writing a public performance as well — that’s a terrific idea because it can really change the concept of audience for the emerging writer.
However . . .
Read more…
Education, Weblogs
Amazing. If I’d had a laptop with wifi this morning I might have blogged from the coffee shop that I was thinking about privacy issues related to Will Richardson’s post last week of the online peer review his students are conducting in public on weblogs. But, no wifi, so you’ll just have to take my word that I was ruminating on this over latte an hour ago.
So what’s in my news aggregator this morning? Will ruminating over legal issues of student publishing!
I’m glad he’s thinking about it. Frankly, as a former writing instructor, I was mortified to see the student’s peer reviews publicly available. First, from a writing pedagogy perspective, I think you risk significantly increasing the pressure on the students, many of whom are already intimidated by sharing their work with a small group. Second, I would be concerned that it is treading dangerously close to a FERPA violation, since this is making a students work and, more importantly, the teacher’s evaluation of their work publicly availably. Thin ice!
Education, Weblogs
Absolutely nothing! Say it again!
James Farmer responds to my previous comments about weblog hype:
“[T]he reason I’m interested in Weblogs as VLEs actually comes out of a frustration with other tools and a weblog is a KM tool already, no? Also, and I’m probably quoting out of cotext here… ‘every professor wants to be (and, granted, sometimes has to be) the duke of their own little fiefdom.’ So… cool! In educational terms ego’s as important as it is anywhere else, isn’t that what weblogs are good for. OK, you get lots of reinventing the wheel going on… but that’s the same as everywhere else.
A weblog is a personal publishing tool, not a knowledge management tool. And, as D’Arcy Norman pointed out last week, knowledge management is “unpossible” anyway.
By definition, re-invention isn’t innovation. Instead, it’s usually wasted energy. That re-invention happens frequently doesn’t make it valuable.
I certainly don’t object to people cobbling their own solutions, particularly if they feel that existing solutions don’t meet their needs . . . or can’t be made to meet their own needs. However, I believe there are many existing commercial or open source solutions that are designed to meet (or could be used to meet) any of the needs people are attempting to force weblogs into solving.
Over the last several months, I consistently see people attempting to use weblogs to solve problems that have already been solved by other means or attributing wondrous innovation to weblogs that, had they researched the landscape a bit more, they would have found are neither that wondrous nor that innovative.
As a former professor of rhetoric and composition, and someone committed to the value of writing across the curriculum, I see tremendous educational potential for weblogs. I’ve always believed that writing is one of the best paths to learning. I think some of the faux innovation is coming from people, particularly technologists, who never thought of using writing in their classes starting to see the potential. And, of course, that’s only a Good Thing™.
However, I believe the urge to turn personal publishing systems — weblogs — into something they’re not inflates the value of the technology and damages its credibility. I would rather see people focusing on the ways personal publishing makes a real difference in pedagogy rather than trying to use weblogs as a platform to re-invent every tool, but the kitchen sink . . . particularly since weblogs are a pretty lousy platform for doing that.
Education, Weblogs
David Carraher suggests ways shortcomings of education could be addressed through weblogging technologies.
Oops. Unintentionally posted the draft of this post before I finished writing. (Hence the first comment — no, it wasn’t a test. Edit notice: I have now deleted the first half-sentence of my comments to avoid further confusion.
Maybe I’ll get around to commenting in detail on Carraher’s post later, but here’s the short version: Another example (grrrr) of the frustrating “Everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything” mentality!! The benefits Carraher talks about in his first point are primarily benefits of writing, not weblogs, and don’t have to rely on technology any more complex than a pen and paper to achieve.
Education, Weblogs
James Farmer: Educational Weblogs: Whats & Whys
I realize that James’ four-page essay is a really bare bones kind of introduction to weblogs for getting The Currently Un-Bloggy Educator Types interested. Hence the list of all the things you can use a weblog for: a virtual learning environment, a professional publishing tool, a news ticker for you, a news ticker for your course, a knowledge management tool for your faculty, a filing cabinet, a course website, a project management tool, a coffee-maker. etc.
And all of it is (mostly) true…technically. The “news ticker” stuff applies to news aggregators, not weblogs. Radio Userland includes a news aggregator, but that doesn’t make the aggregator part of the weblog. Nit. Picked. Moving on. . .
While the rest is technically possible, it falls under the “everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything” mentality that continues to make me cranky.
Briefly, here’s why that mentality irks me: you can drive a nail with a saw, but you’ll get better results with a hammer.
There are already tools for virtual learning environments, course websites, professional publishing, knowledge management, file management, project managements, making coffee, etc.
Sure you can shoehorn a bootstrapped solution on the cheap with a weblog. (Two footwear metaphors in that sentence!) And the education field has a tendency to always want to bootstrap their own solution. I think part of the reason for that is the decentralized nature of academia — every professor wants to be (and, granted, sometimes has to be) the duke of their own little fiefdom.
My opinion is that the education field wastes a lot of time and effort bootstrapping half-assed solutions (driving nails with a saw) when resources could be better devoted to implementing a specific solution (use a hammer, ferpetesake!). I know, harnessing those resources in academia is never simple, but I wish people were less concerned with kludging together solutions with gum and chicken wire, and more concerned with fundamental change of the structures that lead them to the gum and baling wire in the first place.
Education, Weblogs
Sebastian Fiedler, in Seblogging: Paper Draft for BlogTalk 2003:
“We can observe almost in real-time how individuals use personal Webpublishing technologies to facilitate and feed their own change and learning processes. Watching this rich fabric of learning conversations unfold makes you wonder why people still believe that e-learning is all about content delivery and the production of polished instructional products. People in the personal Webpublishing realm successfully learn outside any institutionally organized system of instruction.”
Amen, brother.
I certainly don’t keep a weblog for your benefit, dear readers (although I hope at least a few of you enjoy it and get a wee bit of value from it). I keep a weblog because it provides an incentive for me to read and think about things that are of interest to me (like technology in education). It’s like a kick in the ass, except for my brain. :-)
However, I do revel in getting a comment or trackback or the unforeseen referrer in my logs. I recognize that feedback loop makes keeping a weblog more interesting than a keeping a journal that just sits on my desk (or my computer desktop). It keeps me motivated.
You may or may not know that I have an MFA in Creative Writing, although I don’t do much writing these days. I’ve often thought that I would like to experiment with writing fiction in public — not weblog-as-fiction a la Flight Risk, but just working on a novel out there in public, perhaps via a weblog. Why? To see if that feedback loop might jog my creative side as it does my intellectual side.
Harlan Ellison used to do this schtick (and may still) where he would set up a typewriter in a storefront window and crank out a short story while people stood around and watched. Fiction as a spectator sport! Except Harlan didn’t solicit feedback from the other side of the storefront window as he wrote; with the Web you could.
Sadly, though, my intellectual side is more courageous and secure than my creative side. ;-)
Books, Writing & Literature, Education, Personal, Weblogs
Jim McGee: Weblogs in learning settings and Weblogs and knowledge management are two good annotated compendiums of lots of recent links on these two topics.
(This post is an “outboard brain” moment, e.g. I’m really posting it for my benefit, not yours, dear reader, so that my soggy ol’ inboard brain doesn’t forget about these links.)
Education, Weblogs