We Think in Words

I love the emphasis on blogging as a reading activity–that seems to me to be an essential component of integrating it into educational applications.  We’ve all read blogs that are just forums for individuals to vent…and vent…and vent…We can encourage our kids and ourselves to get the most out of the phenomenon of blogging by emphasizing the process of read / think / respond as an equally important aspect of the forum.  Thanks for this simple and essential initial lesson!

I enjoyed all of the posts I read, and I will try to model the ideas put forth in Teaching Brevity as I respond (this modeling will serve as my comment on that wonderful post–I have long given my students maddeningly-tight limits within which to write, rather than lengths to reach, so Arthus and I are already on the same [web] page).  For the other four I read:

Sickle-Cell Anemia isn’t Half-bad!:  This class’s Extreme Biology blog in general, and this post and its responses in particular, blow away the idea that students might be at all complacent if left to their own devices to simply blog away on academic matters.  No “Nice post!” responses here–students responded to what they read by going out and doing further research on their own, prompted by their own curiosity generated by their classmate’s post.

Rationale for Educational Blogging:  This list provides some good ideas for educational applications of blogging; my lingering doubt arises from a wish that every list item contained the conditional form.  All of these ideas COULD produce the described results–but the simple fact that students are blogging, as opposed to some other activity, will not ensure that outcome; it still remains for the teacher to set up a well-designed situation in which that will happen.  In so much of what is written about web 2.0, one can receive the impression that using the tools guarantees the stratospheric outcomes.  I would love to hear how the biology teacher who designed Extreme Biology went about framing her parameters, which are now clearly the accepted norm of the activity.  Successful teachers have always shared the characteristic of being able to inspire students to reach for a very high bar and to accept stringent standards of excellence as standard operating procedures.  What I don’t know is how that translates into parameter-setting in this new environment and with these new tools.

Patrick’s Update:    This was wonderful to read.  It made me understand (perhaps for the first time) what is really meant by the many observations made about blogging’s providing of an external audience.  For all of the years that I taught upper school English my students kept journals (which were strictly private–no one else ever read them but me); from this raw material they produced projects at the end of the year which were not private, but public–the whole upper school was invited to come and view the projects, and most did.  This was a powerful learning experience–but what a change, and what bravery required, to make the raw material itself public, and not just public as in a password-protected portal to be read by the class, as in GoogleDocs, but PUBLIC!  I had under-estimated the amount of courage required by this, as well as the extent to which courage can be taught by the experience, and then reinforced by an outstanding community of commentors.  Great learning for me–thanks, Patrick.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?:  This was not what I expected from the title, and I loved every minute of it.  I agree with every single thing he said.  And I do see Web 2.0 as having some unique capabilities for addressing Sir Ken Robinson’s concerns.  The strip-mining metaphor was truly inspiring.