Thoughts on culture, education, and having been a Canadian in the US
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The text in the machine: Writing, publishing, and the blogosphere

Here’s much of the content from my presentation today for the National Writing Project in Vermont’s Summer Institute. I’ve had a great month of July watching teachers from all over the state give great demos of lessons or projects they use in the classroom. I head back to classes this fall full of ideas as to how I might integrate more writing into my literature courses. Thanks everyone!

As I am not positive that the computer lab we’re in today has a projector where I can hook up my laptop, I decided simply to put all the links and resources we’ll be looking at up on my own blog. We’ve required everyone of the fellows from our Summer Institute to print out a packet of materials for each of their demos. As I’m going to mention today my thoughts on using blogs to help avoid using a lot of unnecessary paper in the classroom (handouts with the syllabus, essay topics, bibliographies etc.), it would be hypocritical of me to print out all that follows.

So, fellow fellows (and other interested parties), here’s your handout. Feel free to add to it by commenting on this post. I’d love to get your feedback online rather than on paper. You can also bookmark this page via its “permalink” so that you can come back to these resources whenever you like.

the text in the machine

One of the reasons I wanted to do my teacher demo on blogging in the classroom is that I’ve been using the Internet as a teaching tool since the first time I began teaching in 1993. At first, I used e-mail and listservs, but in 1994 I was the first instructor at the U of Alberta (that I know of) to create webpages for all of my courses and use the web as a crucial component of my teaching. Back then, I had to bring all of my students into a lab, arrange for them all to get an official U of A e-mail address (I don’t even recall any of that first bunch of students having one yet), and showing them on their computers the World Wide Web for the first time (“You may have heard reports on the news over the past little while about this thing called the World Wide Web. Here it is!”). It’s hard to believe how much things have changed in twelve years.

One of the things I don’t know that I would have predicted twelve years ago is the degree to which interacting text (and texts) is a fundamental part of lives today. Thanks in great part to e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and the extraordinary and sometimes suspect wealth of information available to us online, we are always transforming our ideas into the written word and finding ourselves having to interpret and act on the written words of others. More than we’ve ever been perhaps, we’re still a text-based culture. Students today at all levels are writing, texting, and chatting online ALL the time. Yet, they often don’t connect this with the work they’re doing in the classroom. What I think blogging has the power to do, is to connect these two parts of their lives, these two types of writing they are doing. Blogging can help them to think more critically about all the content they are producing and turns each student into a publisher, with an audience that might well exceed the walls of their classroom and school.

so what is blogging anyway? Or, “whose bright idea was it to put the Canadian in charge today?”



Coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, the term weblog, popularly shortened as “blog” is now immortalized in the Oxford English Dictionary and can be used as both a noun and a verb. There are lots of helpful definitions of the term “blog” online, but one of the best attempts to define it that I have seen is by Sébastien Paquet of the Université de Montréal (there go those Canadians again…). He argues that five defining characteristics of a blog are:

  • Personal editorship
  • Hyperlinked post structure
  • Frequent updates, displayed in reverse chronological order
  • Free, public access to the content
  • Archival

This definition from the quite good Encyclopedia of Educational Technology is also very helpful.

Let’s get blogging!

There are lots of different ways to create your own blog, some of which (typepad, for instance) cost a bit of money, and others, like blogger.com, that don’t. A great resource for teachers of every level is edublogs.org, which offers free blogs to teachers. To keep matters simple, though, today we’re going to try to create a blog via Blogger.

So, head over to http://www.blogger.com and follow the instructions at blogger on how to create an account and start your first blog!

Once you get your blog up and running, I’d like you to take ten minutes to write your first post. In it, I’d like you to reflect a bit on what you think some of the applications for blogging might be in your classroom.

Once your post is up, give your blog address to two of your classmates and ask them to post a comment on your blog.

Best practices

We’re going to take a bit of time now to visit some other blogs that I think will give you some great ideas as to the potential for using blogs in the k-12 classroom.

Will Richardon’s Weblogg-ed blog is a great place to start your exploration of the world of education blogs. He has a great list of reasons to use blogs as a teaching and learning tool, as well as a short but significant set of links to best practices from a variety of levels and areas of study.

Let’s take some time to go through some of those great examples of K-12 blogging identified by Richardson:

Blogwrite: a class weblog from J.H. House Elementary School in Conyers, GA. If you look around, you’ll see that there’s lots of blogging going on all over the school, including in the principal’s office. Take a special look at the entries from August 2005 as teacher Hilary Meeler gets her class rolling with the blog. Clearly, at the end of the year, the fifth grade students were really taken by blogging. Look at what Derek had to say about having to leave his blog and his school behind upon leaving for Middle School. The school worked closely with Anne Davis at Georgia State University to get this project going. Davis’ blog EduBlog Insights also makes good reading for anyone interested in this field.

Here’s a site that features kindergarteners PODCASTING (!) and a good seventh grade (or Grade 7 as we call it in Canada) Math blog

I’ve long thought that this website from Mabry Middle School is a great example of how schools might use blogs and podcasts. The Principal, Dr. Tyson, is leading the way here at his school and also around the country, I’d imagine. There’s lots to learn from spending a bit of time at their school site.

One of the principal’s blog posts to the parents offers a great explanation of how blogs can be used effectively school-wide, and also gives a great explanation of something else I want to touch on today: RSS feeds.

Overview Information About Our New Website

MabryOnline is our new web presence. The site is really a collection of nearly 100 blogs designed with a front end that appears to be a web page. We have done this in the hope that our staff will more easily be able to keep information on the site current. Posting to a blog is substantially easier than having a web master who knows a lot about html, xhtml, css, asp, js, and blah, blah, blah. We don’t. And even if we did, then the webmaster has to track everyone down to get their information to post it.

So, what is a blog? The term is an abbreviation for weblog and can be most easily understood as an online journal. Teachers post journal entries (or posts) to their site (or blog). The teacher assigns each post to a category that s/he has already created. When the post is published on the site, it is automatically linked to the category (listed in the sidebar on the right), to the date it was posted (via a little calendar in the sidebar on the right), and also is placed in a monthly archive (which, you guessed it, is also listed by month in the sidebar on the right).

Finding information in a teachers site could not be any easier. To read everything that has been posted to this blog about the Film Festival, simply click on the name of that category in the sidebar on the right. To read everything related to the Beginning of the Year, click…you have the idea. You could also go to the archive links for July and August to read things that were posted in those months which might relate to the beginning of the year.

Aside from having a powerful organizational structure for content management, a blog also has a very powerful search feature. Each teacher’s site (or blog) has a “Search this site:” area in the sidebar on the right side. Simply type in the string for which you wish to search, and the script will bring up everything in the teacher’s site that matches your search parameter–powerful, fast access to content.

Every time the site is updated, the blogging system is programed to update the syndication files. You can setup an RSS/Atom feed reader to automatically notify you when new content has been posted to the site. Most feed readers provide you with a quick summary of the new information, which, if you find relevant to your need, can serve as a link to the entire post of new information.

We will find that RSS/Atom feed readers are going to have a huge impact on learning and research. Rather than going out to find current, relevant information, you can set up a RSS/Atom feed reader to have the most current information about a research topic come to you. Software is now coming available that will even automatically annotate in a bibliography the source from the major online libraries . This is cutting edge and very powerful! The digital divide between those who know information literacy skills and those who do not is going to grow exponentially in the next few years. And who thinks students do not need laptops?!

Conclusion

There is, of course, tons more that I could say on this topic. I hope you’ve had a chance to see some of the ways in which students and teachers might benefit from using blogs. We’ve talked a lot over the last two weeks about the students writing for others and publishing their work. Imagining an audience beyond their classmates makes a huge difference in their writing. Promoting blogging also might help to get some students writing outside of class. They will wind up connecting writing to their lives in a new way. Blogging makes them active producers instead of moderately passive consumers of culture (I think kids are the least passive of all consumers)

1 comment

1 Bruno Matle { 09.04.07 at 6:50 pm }

I think its a great blending of personal thoughts and the interaction of the world, this tool they call blogs.
I find it admirable for a teacher to go that far ahead of the times to have built a system on the web at its infancy. If more interaction like this is the return, then it is very valuable to society as a whole I believe to have these tools in place for all, especially students and those who would teach them.
The best part in many ways is in seeing just how creative so many people can actually be!
Thanks, Have A Great Day